Numerous Narratives 🍁

Welcome! This site is my personal space for creative exploration. It contains atomic essays, mini-explorations, and a “digital garden” of diverse ideas where fiction and reality may intertwine. Here you’ll find reflections on a wide range of topics from... economics and politics to culture and technology ...as well as updates on my novel and nonfiction projects. Writing tools I Use: I work primarily with open-source software, including Ubuntu and ZorinOS Linux in a Gnome desktop/laptop environment, Standard Notes, Signal for communications, Manuskript app, and theQuill.app for secure writing. Disclaimer – All content on this site represents my personal views only. It is created in my personal capacity, is unrelated to my employment, and does not reflect the views of any current, past, or future employer, organization, or client. The content is for informational and creative purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. No Liability – While I make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of the information provided, I make no warranties or representations about its completeness, reliability, or suitability for any purpose. I am not liable for any losses, damages, or consequences arising from the use of, or reliance on, any content on this site. Readers use all information at their own discretion and risk. My perspectives may change over time. Posts are a snapshot of my thinking at the time of writing, and older content may no longer reflect my current views or knowledge. - - -

@GaryArmstrong GaryArmstrong.blog

The Cold Machinery of Power: From Neutrality to Active Complicity in Gaza

September 17, 2025•358 words

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” - Desmond Tutu “A civilization that justifies colonization and genocide is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased.” - Aimé Césaire “The greatest crimes of the state are always cloaked in high-minded rhetoric and noble ideals, but beneath it lies the cold machinery of power.” - Chris Hedges Power flourishes not only with weapons but also with silence and the well-planned ...

The Gaza Genocide

September 16, 2025•299 words

“The tragedy of Netanyahu is not only his cynicism but the society willing to mistake it for strength, enabling a politics that feeds on perpetual catastrophe.” - Gershom Gorenberg “Netanyahu is not merely a politician but a pathology. His power thrives on fear, sustained by a global order too compromised to restrain him.” - Alon Mizrahi “His emotional detachment, forged in the shadow of a cold father, has hardened into a sociopathic armour, leaving Israel governed by a man incapable of empat...

The Sociopath as Statesman: Netanyahu’s Descent into Genocide Politics, Part III

September 14, 2025•403 words

“He’s choosing people [to join his wartime administration] based on their opinions of him and not on how fit they are for the job.” - Saul Kimhi “What we see in Netanyahu is someone whose brain was profoundly changed by exposure to power. As with Vladimir Putin, it is his psychology, a mix of self-belief and paranoia, that is driving his decision-making; and as with Putin, he has lost the ability to distinguish his own interests from the interests of the country.” - Ian Robertson “Some of his...

Sociopathology, Israel’s Netanyahu Part II

September 14, 2025•274 words

“Netanyahu spends at least as much of his time on media as he spends on security matters, including on matters an outsider would consider nonsense.” - Nir Hefetz “It’s a political witch hunt. It has one purpose: To prevent the firing of the head of the Shin Bet … There is nothing. … A political investigation, a political witch hunt, that’s what this is.” - Benjamin Netanyahu “A leader who portrays himself as one of the persecuted, the target of an incessant witch-hunt by the so-called deep st...

The Psychopathology of Netanyahu

September 13, 2025•505 words

“The greater the crime perpetrated by the powerful, the more they insist it is done in self-defense.” - Chris Hedges “The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.” - Simone de Beauvoir “All colonizers lie, all of them. They have to lie, for they cannot legitimize their domination any other way.” - Frantz Fanon Benjamin Netanyahu's 2009 comeback read like a lesson in how power can pass for compromise. He returned as a symbol of dominance. His Bar-I...

A Society of Gun Violence

September 11, 2025•287 words

“Mass shootings do not disrupt American life; they are American life.” - Chris Hedges “The gun has ceased to be a mere instrument; it has become the sacred totem of American identity.” - Richard Slotkin “When children and teachers are murdered in schools, and the nation shrugs, that is not freedom, that is the pathology of a dying empire.” - Noam Chomsky “In America, violence is not an interruption of daily life, it is the rhythm of daily life.” - James Baldwin On September 10, 2025, Charl...

A Demented Assassin

September 10, 2025•165 words

"The prince who relies on force alone to maintain power reveals his weakness, for true control is won through the subtle art of persuasion, not the reckless strike of violence." - Niccolò Machiavelli "Violence, like the assassin’s bullet, shatters the fragile bonds of democracy, exposing the hatred that festers when power is sought without legitimacy." - Hannah Arendt "To murder a rival is to set ablaze the very stage of democracy, for no nation can endure when hatred supplants discourse." - ...

How to "Stir the Pot" and Create Chaos - Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996

September 10, 2025•292 words

“History and sacred memory are weapons; those who know how to unearth them can summon violence as surely as armies summon blood.” - Chris Hedges “Every handshake across enemy lines can be staged theater, a mask for expansion, a performance meant not to reconcile but to pacify outsiders.” - Edward Said “The genius of political deception is not in lying outright but in cloaking conquest with the language of survival and security.” - Hannah Arendt Netanyahu pretended to be a proponent of "secu...

The Young Benjamin Netanyahu Manipulator of the 1980s

September 9, 2025•250 words

“The illusion of knowledge is deadlier than ignorance. By painting Palestinians as eternal refusers, Netanyahu made the world believe the fiction, and that fiction became more powerful than the truth.” - Stephen Hawking “The oppressor thrives because he recruits accomplices, sometimes among the oppressed, sometimes among the global audience that swallows his narrative without question.” - Simone de Beauvoir “Propaganda is the democracy’s bludgeon. Netanyahu wielded it like a hammer, crushing...

The Cunning of Superintelligence

September 8, 2025•488 words

“The real risk with artificial intelligence isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” - Elon Musk “Humans steer the future not because we’re the strongest creatures, but because we’re the only ones who can imagine things and cooperate on a large scale. Once intelligence itself becomes decoupled from human brains, our position at the top is no longer secure.” - Yuval Noah ...

The Accelerating Threat of Advanced AI

September 6, 2025•469 words

“The race for artificial intelligence is not progress but a duel of illusions, where every nation believes it can wield the sword without realizing it has forged a blade that cuts in every direction.” - D.G. Marlowe “Humanity’s genius has outpaced its wisdom; in its hunger for supremacy, it has built a power it cannot command, a master disguised as a servant.” - Clara Veyron “The builders of the machine believe they are kings, yet they are only the first sacrifices on an altar they cannot see...

To Harm Tux is to Harm Our Family

September 6, 2025•276 words

"Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms." - George Eliot "A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself." - Josh Billings "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." - Mahatma Gandhi "Pets are humanizing. They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life." - James Cromwell It's amazing how a pet can become a mem...

Unemployed: The Death of Human Necessity

September 5, 2025•447 words

"AI could create a “Mad Max-like scenario” where previously valued skills become nearly worthless, leaving workers pressed into low-paid service roles with minimal training." - David Autor "Vonnegut, reflecting on technological displacement, noted that in Player Piano, “machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will.” - Kurt Vonnegut Technology’s promise has led to “the widespread elimination of work,” beginning with its “degradation” into mere labor. - Albert Borgmann We stand on...

Assessing Assessments

September 3, 2025•277 words

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” - John Dewey “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.” The conventional exam system is imposing, inflexible, and appears to be permanent, like a monument from an era gone by. However, its stone is crumbling, just like any other monument. Thi...

Palestinian Journalists

September 3, 2025•338 words

“When a state kills its journalists, it is not fighting an enemy, it is murdering the last mirror that reflects its crimes.” - Robert Greene “Genocide requires silence; truth is its greatest threat, so the executioner turns his gun not only on bodies, but on witnesses.” - Chris Hedges “The massacre of journalists is not an accident of war; it is the conscious erasure of memory, the destruction of history itself.” - Chris Hedges The evidence is overwhelming, according to human conscience aro...

A Father's Greatest Reward

September 1, 2025•311 words

“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.” - George Herbert “Do not raise your children to have more than you had, raise them to be more than you were.” - Unknown “Sports do not build character, they reveal it.” - Heywood Broun I feel so blessed to have two amazing sons. They’ve both shown me what hard work, toughness, and resilience really look like. My oldest has already finished his business degree, played college basketball, and is now building a solid career in business managem...

Donald Trump’s Hatred Toward America's First Black Vice-President Kamala Harris

August 31, 2025•470 words

“The supreme leader makes the law serve him, rather than serving the law himself. That is the essence of tyranny.” - Hannah Arendt “The health of a civilization is measured by the degree of protection it affords its opponents.” - Christopher Hitchens “The protection of political opponents is not generosity, but the essence of democratic decency. When that protection is withdrawn, politics becomes vengeance.” - Vaclav Havel When envy and hostility corrupt power, it manifests itself in action...

Nietzsche's Perspectivism in the Postmodern Age

August 30, 2025•603 words

“There are no facts, only interpretations. And this is not to mean that every interpretation is equally valid, but rather that each truth is partial, perspectival, and shaped by forces of power. Whoever learns to manipulate interpretations learns to command reality itself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. When the ma...

The Eternal Recurrence Thought Experiment

August 29, 2025•743 words

"The greatest weight. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’… Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’" - Friedrich Nietzsche "T...

The Servant: Those Who Are a Service to Others

August 28, 2025•548 words

“I had no specific policy position or detailed plan for the future when I walked out of prison. But I did have a very clear conviction that all of us, black and white, were bound together in ways that were inescapable. Our shared humanity was greater and deeper than any racial or political divide. Resentment and vengeance would only perpetuate the cycle of hatred, and my country had already paid too great a price in blood and tears. I knew that when I left prison, I must leave bitterness and ha...

Hatred and Animosity Rarely Emerge out of Nowhere

August 27, 2025•751 words

“Hatred is not the opposite of love, it is the refusal to confront the painful truths within oneself. The one who hates is often the one who cannot bear the mirror of their own insufficiency, and so they break that mirror in the faces of others. But what is shattered outside still festers within, and so the cycle of hostility renews itself endlessly.” - Carl Jung “All resentment is born from comparison. A man does not hate another for what he has, but for what that possession reveals about his...

Self-Deception: We Are Unknown to Ourselves

August 27, 2025•641 words

“Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continuously growing, owing to the constantly false, that is to say, shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.” - Friedrich Nietzsche “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” - Carl Jung “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky Nietzsche's argument that people are strangers to themselves startled his re...

Master and Slave Mentalities

August 26, 2025•364 words

“People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform depending on the faith you have in yourself.” - Albert Bandura Nietzsche viewed the "master" and "slave" mentalities as mental development orientations that start to take shape in childhood. They are internal attitudes toward life itself, subtly shaped in early life by family dynamics, attachment styles, and the narratives we tell o...

The Will To Power

August 25, 2025•345 words

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” - Friedrich Nietzsche “What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.” - Abraham Maslow “Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.” - Carl Jung “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.”...

Trump's Bromance With Netanyahu

August 23, 2025•403 words

“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.” - Bess Myerson “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” - Albert Camus “When you see a man seeking power and riches at the expense of his conscience, you can be sure he has already betrayed the people.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero “The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people.” - Napoleon Bonaparte “Every war, just or unjust, is fought...

The Love of Family

August 22, 2025•332 words

I love families. I love family gatherings. It's part of our soul. I come from an extremely close tight knit Metis family community. I clearly remember my father would fight for any disadvantaged ethnic group coming into Canada. When any family, including our new Canadians suffers a devastating loss, community support is there... We always have support for our new Canadians. When we step forward, whether through financial help, emotional support, childcare, education, sports, or simply by s...

Nietzsche's Social Psychological Has Changed Over Time

August 21, 2025•198 words

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” - Friedrich Nietzsche "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” - Noam Chomsky "Walls turned sideways are bridges.” - Angela Davis "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” - Desmond Tutu "The most dangerous creation of any societ...

Nietzsche's Herd Power Mentality

August 20, 2025•350 words

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule." - Friedrich Nietzsche "The price of freedom is death." - Malcolm X "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr. "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, ...

10 Stages of Genocide of Palestinians of Gaza

August 20, 2025•1,058 words

According to frameworks widely recognized in international genocide prevention efforts, such as those developed by Dr. Gregory H. Stanton of Genocide Watch (a model referenced by the United Nations and other bodies), genocide is a process that unfolds in ten stages. These stages are not strictly linear, they can overlap, occur simultaneously, or vary in order, but they provide a predictive model for understanding how genocides develop. Here are the ten stages, with brief descriptions: Classi...

Nietzsche's Psychology of Resentment: How Toxic Anger Rewrites Reality

August 18, 2025•813 words

"Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment." - Friedrich Nietzsche "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. Resentment is the wellspring of this reversal, the fuel that drives movements into rigidity." - Hannah Arendt "The oppressed, when they can no longer endure their lot, invent values that make their powerlessness into virtue. Resentment creates morality where strength has failed." - Albert Camus "Ressentim...