For the past few months I’ve been studying war propaganda on Telegram. One of the views I’ve hit upon is that what I called a few days ago subtleness is important. Although our heads are turned at more outrageous words and utterances, the everyday work of propaganda involves slight and…

We’re acutely aware at the moment that conflict is multipolar. In addition to the on-the-ground fighting, there is also fighting in the information sphere, from hacking to trolling and disinformation. …

“But [surely] people can’t go on recording their every crime for six years, ironically glancing at the last UN report? Or can they? In that sense Isolation — it’s what our world is.” Stanislav Aseev, The Torture Camp On Paradise Street, preface Yesterday, a video of a Russian soldier cutting…

In previous posts I’ve tried to use unsophisticated quantitative methods to understand the political rhetoric surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. …

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine passes its hundredth day the question as to why it started in the first place hasn’t really been settled. Putin gave two potential and not particularly consistent reasons in his speeches in February: he wanted to ‘denazify’ eastern Ukraine, the official line oft-repeated in…

Recent years have seen an increase in interest in propaganda and political rhetoric. In my field, philosophy of language, a change has occurred from the consideration of often technical and abstruse facts about how language works to how language is used to manipulate and subjugate. …

Last week I posted some things to quantitatively store, search, and present media, and in particular the output of the state news agencies of Russia and Ukraine. As I indicated in that post, I was a bit dissatisfied with how it turned out — it wasn’t as accessible (to journalist…

(Update, a few days later: don’t use this. I claim three benefits for it but i) the first is moot as Telegram — unbeknownst to me at the time of writing! — lets you export in a computer-readable format ii) the lemmatizer, as I note in the text, is imperfect…

I saw that there was a new book by DFW, to use the excessively chummy but concise abbreviation I’ll hereafter gravitate towards, last week. Having formerly been a big fan, I bought it without really looking much, only to learn it was in fact an excerpt from his posthumously published…