D.M.J. Aurini's Blog, page 5

Harvesting the Corpse: When Conspiracy Theories are Unnecessary

There’s a concept I’d like to explore here, about the inevitability of our current decline, and why trying to fight the tide is not just useless but counterproductive. And to illustrate this concept I’ll start with a simpler version, one which everybody should be able to understand: the concept of the visionary film maker.

There seems to be this particular class of geniuses – your Stanley Kubricks, Christopher Nolans, and James Camerons – who manage to put together these profound cinematic ex...

The Fundamental Flaw with Technocratic Utopianism and the Rise of Parallel Networks

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

On the surface we appear to be living in dire times. Accelerating censorship, panicked pandemic lockdowns, the rush into authoritarian s...

Salmon Ribbons, Distributed: The Difference Between Fixing the World, and Pretending to Fix the World

I wanted to write a follow-up to my last post, elaborating on why I take issue with people taking issue with WE Charity being corrupt, when they signed up for corruption as soon as they bought into the hype. And from the title of this post, you can correctly guess that I’m referring to the excellent documentary on fake charities Pink Ribbons, Inc.

While I recommend watching the documentary for yourself, I’ll quickly sum up the story. In the 1970s a woman by the name of Charlotte Haley began a...

WE Charity, Trudeau, and the Narcissist in the Fun-House Mirror

“We partnered with Dow Chemical to bring some new exciting programs to YOUR SCHOOL!”
~Craig Kielburger, trying to win the “Most Alienating Corporate Slogan” award.

There was a recent episode of The Fifth Estate which was purported to be the ‘smoking gun’ of corruption in Canada’s Trudeau administration. It involved allegations of collusion and graft between the Trudeau family, members of his cabinet, and the WE Charity of Marc and Craig Kielburger. And it was a smoking gun, alright – just ...

Mask Police

In light of this recent news:

“This is fine.” pic.twitter.com/fDJErtyzfu

— Sophia (PICK ME) Narwitz (@SophNar0747) February 5, 2021

To be sung to the music of Jazz Police by Leonard Cohen.

Can you tell me why the stores aren’t open?
No-one’s died who’s less than 84
We’ve been locked down all of 2020
Two weeks somehow turned to 54

Mask police are sniffing ’round the airport
Mask police are hiding in mufti
Mask police operate their own court
Traveller, drop your bag, it’s mask police

Bid...

The Problem with Utilitarianism (Featuring Covid-19 Mass Psychosis)

Eliezer Yudkowsky once proposed an interesting through experiment. Imagine the most minor incidence of pain that a human being can experience, which is accretable over multiple people; that is to say, that it’s measurably worse for two people to experience it than just one person. He suggested a stinging dust mote in the eye. Now imagine the worst sort of pain somebody can experience – say, 50 years of torture. Then a hostile, God-like AI gives you a choice: either one person gets tortured f...

The Cultural Event Horizon: The Auto-Reflexive Story of the Silver Screen

This is the first part in a series I am working on about what is happening during the current inflection. Numerous social trends and technologies have reached a point where reality as we knew it has shifted. Just as the cannon destroyed the city-state, and the rifle destroyed the medieval knight, we’re reaching a point where the assumptions of the past no longer apply. In this first article I’ll be looking at how our new forms of storytelling are altering our perception of reality.

I am going...

The Purpose of Power

“A King, a priest, a rich man and a sellsword are in a room. Those three man tell the sellsword to kill the other two.
Who lives and who dies?”
~Varys, A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin

“You seem to have an interest in power, so let me educate you a little while I search for you. It’s sort of this thing I like to do sometimes, especially for learned wizards such as yourself. Power, it isn’t something that you put on or take off like a jacket. It’s something you just ARE.  If you can lo...

The Stupid Party and the Evil Party

We’ve all been reflecting on the state of political discourse in our nations of late, and this post by Bionic Mosquito about the Spanish Civil War seems particularly poignant. I’m hoping it doesn’t get that bad, but just in case it does, this post from Aidan MacLear is worth pondering.

As for me, what stands out about the past couple centuries is the left-right paradigm which seems to be at the heart of every political struggle. In previous centuries we saw plenty of civil wars and revolution...

2020 Year in Review: Wandering Above the Abyssal Fog

Now I’m going to warn you right off the bat, this is going to be a “silver lining on a dark cloud” kind of post. Normally I make a concerted effort to focus on the positive, because my innate disposition is to do the opposite: to identify all the problems that are likely to come up if we don’t do something about them. Past experience has taught me that focusing on the negative is unwise because a) it upsets most people, and b) the bulk of people whom it doesn’t upset are the sort of Negative Nel...