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It is right to see dialectics in science, but it appears after the fact as a consequence of observation and theory rather than as an epistemological requirement. Certain scientific theories, such as relativity, do not admit a dialectical interpretation due to a lack of actors to play out the dialectical process, or of contradictions between them.

This is correct, but it’s not like there is ever a contradiction between mathematical and dialectical methods. Natural scientists only prefer to work with mathematics because their subject is benign enough to admit mathematical descriptions yielding precise, quantitative results, while social scientists need dialectics because their mathematical models suffer from crippling vagueness and complexity and are quickly outdated. Where mathematics can describe a system to which dialectics happen to also apply, e.g. phase transitions, it naturally produces models that mirror the dialectic because they both describe the same thing.

You are in the midst of committing a category error. Dialectics is the model that describes changing historical, social, and philosophical systems and processes. Analogies from physics are frequently used to explain how dialectics work, but that doesn’t mean dialectics govern physics, only that dialectical thinking has historically been inspired by physical processes.

The logical role that dialectics fulfills in social science is fulfilled in natural science by mathematics. So rather than taking the dialectical method and filling it with natural objects and laws at random, you should study the mathematical relationships between measurable quantities and interpret the dynamic expressed in the equations governing them. I know you might not want to hear this because mathematics is hard, but the only way to understand the inner workings of gravity is to sit your ass down with a book about general relativity and do the exercises.

Gas Gas Gas

The better a country becomes at using surveillance technology, the better it also becomes at hiding that it does. Until recently, China has had very little such experience, and thus everything it did was in plain sight. While in the West, intelligence agencies were already watching your moves, listening to your phone calls, and evaluating your metadata through your appliances, you could still see the massive security cameras from the past century on Chinese crosswalks. This is not a question of ideology or economics, every major country and organisation will inevitably try to keep pace as best it can with the evolution of vulnerabilities and threats. The perception of being a surveillance state, on the other hand, depends on the aesthetics of its technology, on the degree that you have the feeling of being stared at by it. Once China replaces the last of its last clunky old cams with more elegant models, citizens and tourists will eventually let go of that perception.

I sometimes read nothing for months and then binge a 2000-page novel over a single week

If they have something we don’t have, it’s theft; if they know something we don’t know, it’s fraud; and if they do something we don’t do, it’s sabotage

Maybe I’m not American enough to understand this, but how does this get bought? How do you store and cool this big-ass jar once you open it, how do you use it up without getting sick of the stuff, why wouldn’t you just buy it in a tube or a bottle, and why would anyone spend 20 bucks on a condiment?

Stock markets are to economics what bouncy castles are to architecture

I mean I suppose it is technically impressive but these morticians are still making a mockery of the trade

Don’t waste your fucking time arguing with a billionaire!! He’s in on it, they are all in on it, he’s trying to buy time

The main difference is that a chatbot is actually available to talk to you

Even if you ignore the unplastered brick wall with the trident hastily slapped on, the uncomfortably tiny glass table without a cloth, the main course being served on a saucer, and the fact that they brought the emissary of their most powerful ally water in plastic bottles and then just left it there, it really speaks to the post-Soviet rebirth of Ukraine’s cultural identity that senior diplomats on state visits are served Italian food

Lol they can’t even buy the bullets to shoot themselves in the foot

According to Elon Musk in 2016, Space X would have produced an unmanned Mars mission by 2018; and according to him in 2020 there should have been cargo trips in 2022

A statue of what though? I think this trident thing is exactly the right symbol to represent the anonymous historical void that is the source and the sink of this regime

Israel is already antisemitic in the modern meaning of the word because of its ongoing genocide of Palestinian Jews - among other Palestinian ethnic communities - in Gaza. We don’t need to bring up semantics from three centuries ago to refute the conspiracy theory that Israel is defending or accepting the entire international Jewish community

The only way to defuse kids’ timetables is to ensure that mandatory education must continue after you are 18. While the kids are away on summer break, we need to use the empty classrooms to put all the adults to the test, examine their blind spots rigorously and without mercy, and guide them towards fixing their problems. Too many grown adults cannot tell you how vaccines work, where nuclear power comes from, what Linux is, how kimchi tastes, who Henry Kissinger was, or how to read a pie chart. There are 50-year-olds out there right now who can’t read, and cars are being driven by them. The perils emanating from an uneducated working adult are much more vicious, insidious, and dangerous than from an uneducated kid, and it is high time we started paying attention to the threat they pose.

It isn’t even bizarre if you consider that every foreign notion that enters the general vicinity of the US is immediately ripped apart and absorbed by a churning maelstrom of confusion and misinformation explicitly designed to prevent the formation of anything resembling coherent political thought. If you want bizarre, look at a Qanon map