How do we resolve the central enigma of human existence? That problem is not that simple yet intractable fact of our own existence, mystifyingly beautiful and as ultimately puzzling as this may be. Nor is it that we invest such a vast amount of our limited individual and collective time blundering from one catastrophic, often […]
We might do better not to ask how, exactly, an entire country might become a kind of prison so much as to ask why it would be a large-scale governance framework that anyone would think was worthwhile pursuing. This is indeed a world in which such large-scale incarceration occurs and as such it is a […]
Context: The First into the dark (link to pdf) Fascism as acute and pathological fear of otherness is perhaps nowhere so clearly illustrated as an interrogation of these facts reveal. I do wonder if the identification of historical horrors at times causes us to distance ourselves from them, even as we warily unveil and as […]
Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
Context: Chinese jets invade Taiwan airspace Good ideas sell themselves, it is only bad ideas that require brute-forcing. The CCP have painted themselves into a corner. The constructive dissonance of insecurity upon which their core ideological self-validation rests obligates them to an expansionist adversarialism that might fit well with their symbolic abstractions of attainment and […]
It is worth noting that the pathological certainty with which tyrants assert their possession of singular truth and privileged certainty is really no less than the driving dissonance from which all human history endlessly retreats. This turbulent misanthropy compels us forward and endlessly regenerates precisely those forms of psychological and cultural insecurity which produce tyrants […]
The extent to which psychoanalysis is a successful or compelling theory is really a very interesting question in and of itself, even before considering its subject matter. This same dark thread was identified by Nietzsche as being a symptom of more distributed belief-system neuroses. Regardless of where, when or how anyone asserts the causal factors […]
It is because they are gullible, insecure and easily deceived. The expansionist empire-building of any nation is only ever an inverse function of the doubt and fragile uncertainty upon which they have been built. The proof of this is not difficult to determine – notice that every adversarial and belligerent gesture only ever serves to […]
It is not all but certainly many if not most men that seek to make little gods of themselves. In so doing, they seek to be praised and treasured but when this fails to occur they generally set about conquering their world, their families and (the extended family of) their nations as some immodest compensation […]
Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at […]
Context: Early humans were sheltered from worst effects of volcanic supereruption Human culture is in effect a shared memory and transient security blanket that rarely sees (or reflexively, defensively – chooses to see) very far past the half-mirrored, labyrinthine self-reflection that a dream-like consensus reality and the hyper-extended cognition of technology must always and ultimately […]
The Kessler Syndrome is a clear and stark reminder of just how intransigently daft the militarisation of space might eventually prove itself to be. One idiot with a missile and LEO indefinitely inaccessible for everyone. No less painful than the consequences of even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons (anywhere) but, if you noticed, the […]
Daedelus Kite 