Term
Borrowed Shrapnel
A blame-shifting tactic that pushes guilt onto an enemy or proxy when harm is tied to your own side.
Glossary
Glossary
Plain definitions for recurring TWIS language patterns, sorted alphabetically.
Field guide
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The glossary gives short definitions. The longer field guide shows political gestures, frames, tricks, and public-language moves in more detail.
Term
Cartographic Arrogance
The belief that because power can map, name, divide, and measure a place, it therefore understands it and has the right to rule it.
Term
Crisis Dividend
A framing move where war, shock, sanctions, blockades, or panic are described as a financial upside for another actor.
Term
Headline Asymmetry
The use of sentence structure to make some deaths feel human and others feel like background.
Term
Imperial Afterlife
The way empire survives the loss of formal rule by preserving its logic inside institutions, law, language, trade, and moral authority.
Term
Managed Complexity
A defence tactic that uses procedural sprawl, expert language, and information overload to make accountability harder to hold.
Term
Paradox of Tolerance
The rule that a tolerant society cannot survive if it protects organised intolerance without limit.
Term
Procedural Innocence
A tactic that treats formal compliance with process as proof that no moral wrongdoing has occurred.
Term
Propaganda
Communication designed to shape belief or behaviour, often by selecting, framing, or hiding facts.
Term
Protective Escalation
The trick of making a widening military, policing, or state-control posture look like basic care.
Term
Sphere of Influence
The claim that a powerful state has special rights over the political, military, economic, or diplomatic choices of weaker states around it.
Term
Streetlight Effect
The habit of looking for answers where the light is better, not where the truth is.
Term
The Narrower Question
A framing tactic that shrinks the argument to a safer question so the more dangerous truth is not examined.