Categories
culture

Please, give peace a chance…

I can not lie, this European war is already a monumental catastrophe but it does not have to get worse. Please stop this war. No one can win. No one ever truly wins wars and even if this a truth we are all still yet to fully acknowledge, please reflect deeply upon it because it […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Percolating Fools

It may be an inevitable consequence of the ways in which our social, political and technological progress is (perhaps intractably) built upon and around difference and conflict but I am still left flabbergasted by the endless stream of selfish morons into positions of power. Why is it that such brutally unrepentant misanthropes perennially percolate to […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Ukraine Gambit

Having played the game of imperialist anachronism for so very long, I wonder if they might be blind to the extent to which each and every pathological assertion of expansionist control only ever guarantees the eventual and inevitable, plausibly accelerated downstream dissolution of their own state power apparatus. I acknowledge that their political and strategic […]

Categories
Philosophy

History

Have you noticed that those who make the grandest historical and global assertions of identity and imperialistic might are generally (and self-evidently) driven by the most pitifully base and selfish motivations? In one sense, this is a function of the vast and sprawling networked information and communications systems we inhabit quite naturally and necessarily drifting […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology technology

Technological Competition

That our failures and our successes are intimately entangled applies as much at nascent planetary technological civilisation level as at any other. Interesting, also, to conjecture that our greatest failures (in microcosm and at scale) are generally in and of a partisan adversarialism that as reflexive psychological and existential compulsion cycles and oscillates through this […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology history Philosophy politics Psychology

Making Monsters

As an authoritarian regime always and implicitly depends for self-validation upon the presence of external and internal threats, where it does not find them it will manufacture them. This is a narcissistic pathology, writ large. The essential and interior psychological surface as self-definition of an individual (or organisational system as political abstraction of nation) is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Transcending Conflict

Why does conflict still happen? Beyond the futile narcissism of authoritarian states eager to mask the logical fallacy of equating ideology with the existential fact that their long-suffering peoples represent, far outside the orbits of perennial psychological insecurities of a human animal that finds itself swept away upon a tide of sociotechnical complexity and interpersonal […]

Categories
Philosophy

Remembrance (Against the Tyrants)

So many have suffered so terribly in war. I wonder at times if the greatest act of compassionate remembrance might be to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure that such horrors are never revisited up anyone, anywhere, ever again. Even while those distant autocrats (alongside motley tinpot tyrants) everywhere beat the drums of […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Rudderless Vessel

Beyond a very limited range of skill or intuition, no one really knows what they are doing or how best to organise our world. Systems of belief asserting closure and certainty emerge as an inverse function of a growing doubt and uncertainty that they mask with spectacles of bravado or deception. Stupidity as simplistic systems […]

Categories
politics

Political Illusions

A magician is someone pretends not to have what they have: a trick, a method, a sleight of hand or some sophisticated logical ploy intended to deceive an audience. A charlatan is someone who pretends to have what they do not: competency, knowledge, skill, authority or substantive and sufficient intellect for whatever masquerade they seek […]

Categories
Philosophy

No Bravery Without Fear

Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to act in spite of fear. Only a fool knows no fear and were it not that we demonise emotional experience in the ways we all do and as a function of the constructive paranoia that binds us all into one writhing mass of […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Triumph of Human Stupidity

There really is very little doubt that for all the magnificent intellectual achievements of science and culture, it is human stupidity that most forcefully compels history forwards and with which even our greatest accomplishments find themselves inextricably intertwined. From brutally selfish autocratic intransigence to unmanageably complex democratic dissonance, politics is not so much a comedy […]