Battling Archetypes

I was inspired by the show on Saturday. Andriy Bezsonov of the 18th Sloviansk Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine was talking to us. Then Wardoggo spoke about the history behind Sloviansk and, in particular, Soledar. So today I am taking a slightly different tack. I speak a lot about outflanking. I am gradually revealing my monograph, Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut , and many of you ask what I m...

Last week I spoke about the insight my linguistics research had given me. It was into the idea underlying our words for turning and for right : TR, and its reversal, RT. In the Indo-European world rightness became moralised. Not in the first Indo-European world, the Hittites. They moralised the fit. A good king was someone who behaved appropriately, did appropriate things, and was proper. That was...

Riot, and the surf One more word, then. Riot. The dictionaries send it to the Old French riote , a quarrel, and stop. Read it by its sound, and the straight sound, Rt-, sits on the face of the word for tumult. Keep that in mind too. Continued from here : Now imagine you wanted to hack minds today. Would you invent a sound-meaning bundle like M-N and N-M, or Tr- and Rt-? Would you then try to hardw...

I’m going to talk about turning, then righting. When I use the word righting I mean R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, not rioting as in France. But I am going to be talking about the rioting in France too. Turning, then righting. This is a fundamental movement in our mental models, in our lives and in our world. Movement is usually the beginning of philosophy and of religions. And there is a very simple dual movem...

This week brings a little more of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut , and a bit of the principles of Infolklore. It also brings the end of Future russia, Real Ukraine . Or, as I now call it, Real Ukraine, future russia, with a small r. President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder My view is that President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder, as the English would say. He has been dealt quite a bad hand over the l...

I thought we’d start off with a bit of plague. That’s a joke. We’re actually going to start with a bit of Disinfolklore about a plague. A non-existent plague, in my humble opinion. We’re going to look at the plague story as a story, as an item of Disinfolklore, which is what all this is about. A story, not a pathogen It’s been a very busy week. In the first week of October a story went around the...

A listener asked: “I’m definitely interested to hear more in detail about how you use AI.” This week’s work was precipitated by a new model, which Anthropic dropped last week. Opus 5.5 has, for reasons that will become clear, become a bit of a revolutionary model. By model I mean a neural network algorithm. I am describing the architecture and the algorithm behind what many of us see as a chatbot....

Principles of Infolklore (Ep 6) Let’s go back to the principles of Infolklore . Some of you will remember how I am deducing The principles of Infolklore . Previous episodes: Ep 1 - Aug 20 Ep 2 - Aug 27 Ep 3 - 3 Sept Ep 4 - 10 Sept Ep 5 - 17 Sept I use a combination of my own written work, what scholars would call a vocabulary. I use that as a lens to look at the transcripts of Volya Radio, of RIA...

Some of you will remember what I’m doing. I’m deducing, from transcripts, from millions of words of Volya Radio transcripts, what I call the principles of Infolklore. I have re-recorded this podcast, due to audio issues with the original recording of 16 September. I’ve posted it as two parts. This is the second part. The first part is here . Continued from : Infolklore, I remind you, is not just t...

So let’s start with the beginning of chapter three of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut . This is the sixth part of my show reveal of that monograph. That integrates the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method, applied to the Rashist state apparatus. I have re-recorded this podcast, due to audio issues with the original recording of 16 September. I’ll post it as two parts. This is the first...

AfD’s Don’t poke the bear troll - final part of Chapter Three of Outflank Dugin In 2024 Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, at that point the second largest party in the Bundestag, gave a parliamentary speech. Germany’s continued military support for Ukraine, she said, was poking the bear. The bear, Russia, had legitimate security interests in its near abroad. The West’s expansion of NATO since 19...

Part One. The Christening of the Sberbank Report Some of us might have seen last week a new character entered into our information space, and its Mana, its energy, doesn’t match its name. This is a core element in the Disinfolklore analytical method, so we can all learn how to do this . That when we see or perceive some piece of information warfare, we look for the Mana in the meme, and then we se...

Principles of Infolklore, Ep 2: Volya’s Nest The Most Valuable Position in the Room Two hours and forty minutes into my own show, this past February. Decoding Disinfolklore on Volya Radio, the Wednesday slot this station gives me. Ioana, who co-hosts the news shows with Will, had been put to work. She had been asked for her articles, and she delivered: “I posted the links to, I believe, seven of m...

The Poison and the Antidote The poison was never hard to find. The poison finds you. Turn on anything Russian and it arrives by the tanker load, free of charge, around the clock. What took months to find was the other thing: the antidote. Here is what I published on the 22nd of July this year, in a Substack piece called It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do. One challenge sits under everything:...

Putin’s Chef Problem: The Plight of the Sorcerer So on the 26th of May 2023, I published a piece called Putin’s Chef Problem , the plight of the sorcerer. And I posed the question: how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his sorcerer’s apprentice to take over? Th...

This week I’ve been doing a lot of work on linguistics, which is amazing. But I’m going to turn back to the first character, really, in this entire story. The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. I’m aware that for the first thirty episodes I mentioned this bridge a lot. I’m equally aware that for the past thirty episodes I haven’t mentioned it a lot. And it’s a really important character in the story. T...

It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do For six months now I have been training a neural network to build the training data for a local language model. The model’s job, when it is ready, will be to read wartime information and sort it the way I do: into Disinfolklore, Infolklore, and Neutral. I have been working extremely hard on this and the progress has been remarkable. One challenge sits under...

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I am going to start two new miniseries today. The first one goes back to what I call the Luhansk Corpus. That is the ten thousand propaganda items from Russia-occupied Luhansk 2015-2018 (the empirical grounding of the Disinfolklore analytical method). These are relatively pithy pieces, though each a part of an entire system of seeing, which can applied and mobilised against any Disinfolklore galax...

This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss. The first episode: For the past five episodes I’ve walked us all down into the dark where most of us live all day when we’re in Ukraine mode, and tonight, you’ll be happy to know, I’m going to walk you back up. This, of course, reflects the archetypal presence of the beast from the abyss that Larysa Yakubova...

It’s a reflecting pool. So we’re talking about accusation in a mirror which is Donald’s main tactic as well (just as we were talking about before) using an arch in the ceremonial axis of the Republic to install, archly, an archetype of right (which is in fact the opposite of right, an insurrection). So the structure of these - the magnetism of the - words reveal everything really. I marvel and fin...

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It...

I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsi...

The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter This week, the President of Ukraine did something a head of state almost never does. He sat down and wrote his enemy a letter — an open letter to Vladimir Putin, published in English on the official website, for the whole world and, more to the point, for all of Russia to read. Here on Decoding Trolls — I’m Decoding Trolls, I work mainly online at disinfolkl...

I’ve called this the Reasonable Man. This is about Putler’s Astana press conference on the 29th of May 2026. I watched it, and I was amazed by Putler’s reasonableness. I noticed this faintly weary man who really only wants the facts established and the books balanced, who lends money rather than gifting it, who speaks openly and honestly, who keeps saying “I say this without irony.” I caught mysel...