Categories
history

Totalitarian Psychosis

The totalitarian enigma is that of a psychotic state. The threat of nuclear war is invoked because they have no intellectual or moral substance to and justication for their ideological arguments to support either internal political oppression or external imperalistic aggression. The argument from apocalypse is an act of insanity and even if it is […]

Categories
history

The Totalitarian Enigma

The enigma of the totalitarian state is that it must constantly invoke by provocation precisely those threats and fears that its ideology is founded upon to validate the brute-forced tyrannical exploitation and mobster-kleptocratic oppression of its own people. It is a cycle and spiral of sheer absurdity that would be fascinating to observe as the […]

Categories
humanity

The Spiral of F̶e̶a̶r Peace

The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]

Categories
environment

Anthropocene Environmental Disassembly

Context: Oceans are facing a mass extinction event comparable to the ‘Great Dying’ The oceans are dying and yes, friends, this is the kind of vast and unremitting catastrophe that, unlike global wars invoked by the pathological ideological autocratic states that are just not clever enough to understand how stupid and self-persecutory their actions are, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Conflict, Hope, Identity

Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]

Categories
politics

The Descent

Paraphrasing what Hemingway wrote on the topic of bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises”, it seems that the descent into totalitarianism occurs first gradually, then suddenly.

Categories
Philosophy

Autocracy is Addicted to Fear

We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Rank Psychological Absurdity of 21st Century European Imperialism

The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the drones of war…

Recently reading of airborne multiple-drone systems that, being once (and unsuccessfully) modelled on insect swarms, are now being modelled on wolf-pack behaviour, it got me thinking. Biomimetic systems are powerful but I do wonder if and when the analogies that compel them might at times become inadvertently inhibitory. Logic and technological (as much as biological) […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Strange Game of Self-Deception

The strange game of active measures is one in which the practise of deception invokes the erasure of facts in ways that can only ever offset, displace of delay their eventual broad acknowledgement and discovery by that long-suffering internal audience for whom misdirection and compliant fear under autocracy is normative to the point of cliché. […]

Categories
history

Culture as Error, History as Misunderstanding

We are so entrained to think in terms of cultural continuity as a measure of successful system self-replication that we might never perceive or understand that the most significant moments in any history are shaped more (or at least as much) by difference and dissonance than by continuity and predictability. These stochastic inflections points of […]

Categories
history

Tragedy

Persistent cycles of historical catastrophe suggest that the foolish gambits of the autocrats do not make history anywhere near so much as history makes them. Small consolation as it may be when witnessing the horrors and brutality currently being unleashed on the Western end of the Great Steppe, I find it helps a little to […]