Sanctions were reimposed recently. Like I said, go see what happened after the sanctions were lifted.

If you think the only one with power in Iran is Khomani, you don’t understand the basics of the Iranian power structure.

Sanctions were lifted in 2015. You can see for yourself what the effects were.

I think I saw them in concert before they got huge

I get that Dilbert’s tie is suppose to be an intentional phallic symbol, but AI got it all going extra today.

When did Greenland drop to B tier?

we define “science” as the aggregate consciousness of scientific researchers

This is something I wish I could preach convincingly to everyone. The activity of scientists, a social group, are arguing and trying to convince one another that their interpretation of the data acquired by using their tools and methods is what become a scientific consensus.

Forefronting the method (often a vaguely defined one rooted in a hypo-deductive model from about 150 years ago that most people learned in grade school) removes the relationships between people and other people and people and institutions.

I wish I could find the paper but there’s a wonderful enthographic study on how scientists interact with each other to transform the discourse.

Edit: Found it! Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry by Helen E. Longino

Reminded me of this.

You’ve described the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model which dates back to the 2nd century CE. This was part of, but not the extent of the mideval cosmography.

In the cosmography of the middle ages, there existed a realm outside the spheres where God and the angels dwelled. Each of the planets color the divine light of God and pour God’s beneficence upon the Earth. The earth was low and seemingly distant from the heavenly realms. And in the middle of the earth was hell.

A competing mideval theory put God at the center and the Earth at the most distant sphere. It borrowed from another tradition, the Neoplatonists. Here God is a a pure light and the sphere distort the light of God. Humans couldn’t handle the pure light of God, but all the distortions make the universe appear fractured and not unitary. We don’t see God in everything, just the many things.

There are no evil viruses. Some are just detrimental to us.

Why does this matter?

Trump’s dementia wasn’t having a good day. He said his normal amount of stupid and incoherent things. We had accepted this from him as the dumb, angry, incoherent candidate. But when the smart, mostly articulate candidate had a performance that blew Trump’s normal incoherence out of the water, it was too much to ignore.

Over, under, and misuse have resulted in adaptations by bacteria. Which is to say, life evolves. Its too bad, and there is still a role for antibiotics in our world, but we have to trim our use of it.

Course lengths for antibiotics isn’t well studied. From this article:

In fact, the optimal length of treatment in many common infections is not well studied and may be more than a little arbitrary. One infectious diseases doctor has suggested, somewhat satirically, that most of our current rules for antibiotic administration have more to do with the number of days in the week than they do with robust scientific evidence.

We have a growing and, frankly, terrifying issue of antibiotic resistant bacteria from over prescribing and longer than necessary courses.

Sweet corn is a mutation that was only really cultivated in the late 1700s. Before that dent and flint corn were the norm. These corns require nixtamalization to soft the corn and then need boiling, grinding, and cooking to make something like tortillas.

I can’t tell if this is in jest or ignorance.

I’m finding it difficult to continue because you’ve abandoned political analysis for moral truisms. We began by discussing the objective sources of legitimacy and statehood, but you’ve retreated into a ‘Gish Gallop’ of emotional appeals.

Whether or not you like a regime’s methods doesn’t change the reality of its statehood or its control over a territory. Since you’re no longer engaging with the central argument of how states actually function in reality, there’s nowhere left for this conversation to go.

What we as we want and what is real are two different things. We do business and perform politics with many authoritarians and will continue with no end in sight. Some of us live in reality.

Winning the civil war and controlling the land does.

I’m not denying that modern evolutionary theories use math and I think it’s important, but that in many sciences, math isn’t the focus like it is in physics. A lot of good science can be done without math. Darwin did good science without math.

To be very clear, science doesn’t need math. We use math as a tool to accurately describe phememona and relationships with math.

I don’t what you are saying about models being mathematical by definition eben if people can handle it. I don’t see how the model of the cell is mathematical. Models require relationships and not mathematics to describe those relationships.

Winning an election in Taiwan doesn’t give them a claim to mainland China. This isn’t relevant.