Kali Tribune

Category: Analysis

2

Analysis / Podcast / Politics

Hard to be a God

We all heard so much about infantile masses, of an ability to hide in the anonymous mass – in a word: the first association we tend to get when we think in terms of mass man is irresponsibility. However, rarely do we hear anything about equally deprived mass responsibility; rarely, of course, except on Kali Tribune. 

In this podcast we’ll address the subject of the flip side of popular power – popular responsibility as exemplified by idea, prevalent among the masses, that every problem and indeed everything occurring in this world is due to man or, more precisely, average man.

To demonstrate the absurdity of this notion and some of its possible roots, we’ll employ the help Joseph de Maistre, with the special focus on ideas from his essay On the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, most eminently his insight into impossibility of creating the a priori legislature and the inferiority of written, i.e. systematized, laws and the impossibility of sovereignty coming from below.

8

Analysis / Podcast

Atheism, Old and New

Atheism seems to be quite self explanatory term. Granted, we do live in atheistic societies, in the sense that religion in the proper sense of the word is almost completely ejected from political and cultural deliberations. Even more so, this applies to academia. Finally, at least half of the peoples which we could still, at least by their geographical situation or ancestry, call Europeans are actually shedding the residues of their religious past.

Yet, are we to blame this on atheists of our age, especially the so called “new atheists”?

In this podcast we’ll answer this question in the firm negative.

 

 

1

Analysis

Rule of the Unruly

One noticeable characteristics of various kinds of “new normal” measures implemented in developed Western democracies in response to COVID19 is that they seem to be the more harsher and radical the more the country in question is developed. One could say that, in contrast to more autocratic polities, Western democracies begin to display an eerie signs of openly totalitarian policing of their citizenry. In this podcast we’ll try to analyze how underlying metaphysics of individualistic freedom could just be the cause of that and how we could end up with the seeming paradox: totally collectivized politics based on totally individualized principles.

3

Analysis / Podcast

Truth, Post-Truth and Nothing but the Truth

Can there be anything true if there’s no truth? Apparently, public opinion is being swayed towards the resounding – and consequently absurd – ‘yes’. In this podcast we’ll address the notion of “post-truth” and its validity in the context of our times, i.e. corrosion of modern age and its concepts, as well as the fact that the very act of admitting its validity immediately annihilates it and sends us back before the notion of truth that can admit no ‘post-‘ prefix. In the process we point out the necessity of ‘system’ as crypto-anthropomorphic principle of modern knowledge and its utter instability as displayed by impotence of “logic and facts” approach in combating identity politics and claim that it is a shadow of the original, transcendental and theomorphic, notion of truth; one that seems to come back to the fore in our day precisely in consequence of the annihilation of truth as it was understood in modernity.

9

Analysis / Podcast / Politics

Nihilism Forecast: Monument Bashing and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

“Prevalently destructive with periods of tedium”. That’s the the standard forecast of Kali Tribune’s Nihilism, Genocide and Bad Language Forecast Authority. Yet, if we observe the mania of erasing the past by means of sledge hammer in USA and UK, that is: of erasing every possible moral wart from the face of the past, we have to speculate on possibility of radical nihilism change in future; the one nominally coming from the political right. To this effect we employ the most radical modern idea of affirming the past to an extent that absolutely no conceivable cruelty is to be rejected but embraced as one’s own most intimate possession. To this effect we employ the most radical modern idea of affirming the past to an extent that absolutely no conceivable cruelty is to be rejected but embraced as one’s own most intimate possession. We are talking about the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same as envisioned by Friedrich Nietzsche; in some sense the polar, yet strangely congenial, opposite of the principle that’s driving the destructive movements from the radical left. If anyone is posing a question how radical could be reaction from the Right to the amok of the Left in the USA and Western Europe, in this podcast we provide you, via Nietzsche, with an image of The Radical.

3

Analysis / Podcast

Righteous Beyond Redemption

The specter is haunting the world, the specter of self righteousness. In this podcast we address three forms of self-deceit by which masses succeed at inducing and maintaining the psychotic illusion of “righteous indignation” in themselves. We treat the primacy of negative freedom, violent dissolution of historical origins and secularized idea of divine justice as congenial underlying principles that play out in partly virtual, partly real theater of the riots shaking American and British cities and try to answer the only really important question:

how masses of humanity can progressively melt into a pile of moral excrement and simultaneously attempt to turn the world into their own mirror without causing single individual among their number to vomit.

5

Analysis / Podcast / Politics

Lost in the Supermarket

In this podcast we take an opportunity to introduce a new term in the vocabulary – technodoulia. While it is customary to talk about technocracy, blaming it – even more customarily – on “the powerful”, with technodoulia or “reverence/service given to technology” we are taking into focus complicity of the masses, not to “technocrats”, but to their own, customarily perverse, desires.

The discussion is based on observing the nature of the riots in the wake of the ending of the lockdown in USA, by observing how “observing” more and more becomes the necessary element of any given event.

Also, in response to questions by readership, we explain why KT is keeping a distance from COVID19 and US riots conspiracy theories.

 

1

Analysis / Podcast

Coronation of Democracy pt.2

In the second part of his take on current crisis, which is now apparently fading out into something repeatedly named “new normalcy”, Mihai addresses the wider issue at stake: the technocratic, automatic, reaction it provoked and its implications for every day life. Technical approach is conditioned by its inherently limiting nature which necessarily produces a reduction of plentitude of the real to isolated aspects of it, that can ultimately be controlled or, at least, be confined into controllable context. While this may be a sound approach for the specialist, dealing with special problem, it certainly becomes ominous when it takes on metaphysical reach. The ensuing result can be understood in terms of the rejection of hierarchy of reality, which Mihai exemplifies with examples from everyday life both of individual and the society at large.

Also, as a bonus you get some weight loss advice (no fat shaming implied).

 

2

Analysis / Podcast

Coronation of Democracy pt.1

It had to happen. Until now we managed to avoid giving our account on global pandemic, without giving away the depth of our heresy at the same time; to wit, that we actually do not belong to overwhelming majority that knows absolutely everything there is to know about it. Yet as not knowing anything is as impossible as knowing everything, Mihai Marinescu volunteered to give his survey of the social effect of the lockdown in his country and to point out some rather ominous symptoms of the political and social shifts it could produce in the future.