Archives for January 2009

Da Russophile, a Year On

This in about Blogging, and tagged , was written by on January 9, 2009 . 12 Comments

As of today, it’s been exactly one year since I started the Da Russophile blog. Although I have been aware of hostile or condescending Western attitudes towards Russia for a long time, reflected in its mass media, I was finally provoked into joining battle by a particularly annoying and dishonest ‘editorial’ on the La Russophobe hate-blog.

This was and remains its motto:

Their Thesis: the Western media tells us Russia is in a death spiral,
its economy is one giant oil bubble, suffers from endemic corruption,
inequality and lawlessness and is presided over by a KGB kleptocrat
dead-set on resurrecting the USSR and launching Cold War II.

Our Antithesis: Russia is a normal country with a booming non-hydrocarbons
economy underpinned by a well-educated and secular workforce.
The Putin administration has affirmed democratic values, worked to improve
human rights and pursued Russia’s national interests abroad.

Your Synthesis: ?

I started off by writing serious ‘core articles’ on Reading Russia Right and Towards a New Russian Century, to demolish some common bearish stereotypes and illustrate how its inherent strengths (natural resources, a well educated population, etc) stood it in good stead for a twenty-first century characterized by economic convergence, technological growth, climate change and resource depletion.

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Sublime Oblivion – What Might Be Is

This in about Philosophy, and tagged , , , was written by on January 9, 2009 . Leave a Comment

Here I outline one of the core philosophies of Sublime Oblivion. I demonstrate the indivisibility of the material and Platonic worlds and show that our universe is almost certainly a computer simulation nested within an abstract computer program or simulacrum, the truth that hides that there is none. The consequences of these results are explored.

Modern natural science has a lot to be proud of. Technology follows in its wake. The horizons of human consciousness retreat before its implacable incandescence. Its defining trait, reason, affirms freedom. Yet it is ultimately disappointing and dehumanizing. It heralds the death of God, of struggle and belief in good and evil, while in atonement for deicide, deigns to offer only models of reality that approach but never reach union with it. Thus we come to an impasse, the fatal double dilemma that drove Kierkegaard to despair, Nietzsche to madness and Camus to an ‘acceptance without resignation’ – though I personally can’t imagine Sisyphus happy.

All the arguments for God’s existence that I know of sink under one paradox or another – cosmology through infinite regression, ontology through elementary logic and teleology through evolution. Constructing an equivalence between Nature or reality, and God, is nothing more than an exercise in tautology dating from Spinoza and as such tantamount to atheism. Those who cite Darwinian evolution or Hegelian dialectics as the answer do not realize that they are nothing more than a Mechanism, as hopeless as traditional objects of belief at explaining the deepest metaphysical questions. In despair over the power of pure positivism to rationalize existence, let us make a bold conjecture and make the axiomatic assertion that all that might be, is.

According to Plato, there exists a separate world of ‘perfect forms’ or ‘universals’ that is the highest and most fundamental reality; our world contains but their imperfect imitations. This concept can be best explained through mathematics. Even if some global cataclysm were to wipe out humanity, the Theorem of Pythagoras will linger on unperturbed on some transcendent plane, ripe for the picking by the next species to evolve abstract reasoning skills. This is because the squares of the shorter sides of a right-angled triangle will always equal the square of the longer side under Euclidean geometry. I will call this Platonic realm the Void, for it is indeed void; it is an abstract, all-encompassing region of nothingness, zero and infinity. All possible mathematical objects and their unions exist in the Void.

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New Year Special: Year in Review and 2009 Predictions

This in about Futurism, and tagged , , was written by on January 2, 2009 . 2 Comments

Year in Review: 2008

Again, a very happy and successful New Year to Sublime Oblivion readers. It has certainly been a successful year for this blog, founded as Da Russophile on Jan 9th 2008. The original site at blogger has nearly 16,000 visitors, while Sublime Oblivion has been graced by nearly 2000 from the date of its inception on Nov 24th 2008. Readers and commentators, in other words you, have contributed to this every bit as much as the author.

The world itself was a rather more turbulent and mixed story in 2008. The cardinal event is probably the credit crisis and unfolding economic crisis, the magnitude of which is becoming increasingly clear since September. In its sheer depth and breadth, I suspect it reflects something deeper than the periodical housing bubbles and basketcase-country currency crises of history, or even the pricking of the maniacal optimism that saw such a destructive proliferation of the ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ that are CDO’s and other exotic, unstable financial constructs .

The immediate portent is the probable peaking of world oil extraction in 2008 – there might be another, even higher peak, in a few years, but not by much or for long. Since the prevailing growth-based model of development as it stands relies on cheap, high-density energy inputs to maintain itself, the post-peak oil historian may come to view 2008 as the year when industrial civilization experienced a fundamental discontinuity.

(Perhaps I’m being a bit premature, though. The bigger turning point may come when, in a few years, government-forced economic recoveries will collide with falling oil supplies due to secular geological trends and the price collapse of this year. On a poetic and  mystical whim, let’s set that year to be 2012).

A major tenet of this blog, that overall things are improving and will likely continue improving in Russia. Birth rates rose and overall population decline fell to the tiny level of -1.0/1000 a year. Prior to the global economic crisis, which hardly anyone could claim to have foreseen, Russia’s automobile production increased by 40%, GDP grew at a rate of 8% and the grain harvest finally recovered and exceeded typical Soviet levels. More attention was paid to the hi-tech sector, with the expansion of ambitious long-term programs in nanotechnology, big increases in academic salaries and better funding and equipping of research, as reflected in the regional supercomputer statistics.

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