“this, for everyone watching”

my capacity to have a decent homelife is NOT going to be the issue here.

your capacity to upturn paradigms MUST be.

we don’t deserve another ukraine.

you’ll enable one by blaming my imperfections for not taking a decision on this.

#truth

oh, and i go with governments and their defence infrastructures, not governments and their security. not even governments and their “chosen” tech partners. i’ll vet the latter myself, too: now i will.

my rationale in all this?

1. security is more often than not reactive — responding to enemy actors as they act. it also gets completely engaged by the espionage of uncertainty. it may be right when it does; it often gets enchanted in terrible ways, however, which may mean it doesn’t know fiction from fact.

2. defence as a mindset when effective is ESSENTIALLY strategic. cleanly so. cleanly.

i want cleanly and geopolitically “strategic” for this: delivering the longitudinally robust measures that arc over relatively short democratic cycles in order to ensure that putinism and the like don’t prevent the ongoing flourishing of western democracy as we desire it.

and what that is i’m not going to be prescriptive about — it’s a matter for wider debate.

but what happened in the uk when security allowed the russian oligarchs (putin) to control the conservative party, perhaps over decades without taking a single measure against, and even when this party was in government, should not be able to happen anywhere in europe.

mi5 said around 2017 that it could ringfence high-level chinese tech at the heart of its new comms infrastructure. even the conservative backbenchers, who were friends of putin & co, couldn’t stomach such an idiotic assertion. it didn’t happen: not because security changed its mind, though; rather, because politicians just decided they wouldn’t allow.

my thesis is that defence, meanwhile (even — and maybe particularly — uk defence) would never have contemplated the foolishness in the first place.

so this is the “why” of my rationale: i want defence organisations clear about the enemy always, and operating under sophisticated democratic cultures more than laws, but laws of course as well, to protect our democracies longitudinally from putinism and the like, and from the chinese and others too.

that is, to arc over our democratic cycles and protect their integrity as deeply as possible. to make it possible for a ukraine, battled back fiercely and finally into europe’s core, to one day soon enjoy the same democratic cycles as the rest of us. and for russia et al NOT to buy their way into the heart of any western democracies ever again. neither overtly with football clubs and property to launder its dirty money, nor stealthily by the gaslighting of emerging social and political notables of any age, culture or belief system that complies minimally with our treasurable desires to deliver tolerance and acceptance of every human being we are.

not russia. not china. not uk security. but maybe, just maybe, democracy’s defence organisations everywhere.