"Realism, taken seriously, entails a never-ending cognitive and emotional challenge. It involves a minute-by-minute struggle to understand a complex and constantly evolving world, in which we are ourselves immersed, a world that we can, to a degree, influence and change..."
but which constantly challenges our categories and the definitions of our interests. And in that struggle for realism – the never-ending task of sensibly defining interests and pursuing them as best we can – to resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is...
It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly."
@warkin@Newsweek "The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction."
@warkin@Newsweek The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them
@ashleyshoo This is the 4th episode of #STSshorts, a new video series in which we dialogue with a researcher, lecturer, writer, and eclectic human in the #STS discipline or related fields.
~30 mins in length.
The goal is to highlight and hopefully introduce a new audience to their work.
@ashleyshoo Ashley is an assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. (@sts_vt)
@anjalikdayal@AlexMStark@Megan_A_Stewart@WarOnTheRocks "A year on from the Jan. 6 insurrection, experts warn of catastrophic political violence, while political commentators invoke the specter of the 1860s and throw out sensationalist headlines about a second U.S. Civil War. “The unimaginable has become reality in the United States.
The emerging cottage industry of speculation and alarm specifically about a civil war in the United States worries us. The shape and content of this debate —
@LisaMargonelli@ISSUESinST "Today, our collective belief in the deus ex technologica seems tragically misguided. And our experience with COVID-19 should make us reexamine other problems that we’ve framed as technological—climate change being a prime example. Global warming has long been portrayed as a
@LisaMargonelli@ISSUESinST technological and financial dilemma—if only we invented enough low-carbon energy sources and had enough money to string the wires. But if we carefully pick apart our underlying assumptions, we may find lessons for future policymaking: Could more systematically incorporating the
Climate pledges from top companies crumble under scrutiny via @jefftollef
"Study (by @newclimateinst) reviewing commitments from 25 high-profile businesses highlights the urgent need for a thorough system to evaluate industry’s promises."
@jefftollef@newclimateinst "In the run-up to the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, UK, last year, many of the world’s most powerful businesses joined governments in pledging to reduce their carbon emissions to zero in the coming decades. But an analysis of publicly available corporate documents,
@jefftollef@newclimateinst such as annual sustainability reports, shows that 25 of those companies — which together are responsible for about 5% of global emissions — are actually making much less of a commitment.
Just 3 of the 25 companies — the Danish shipping giant Maersk, the UK communications firm
@uclmecheng@sciam "One object recovered from the site, a lump the size of a large dictionary, initially escaped notice amid more exciting finds. Months later, however, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the lump broke apart, revealing bronze precision gearwheels the size of coins.
@uclmecheng@sciam According to historical knowledge at the time, gears like these should not have appeared in ancient Greece, or anywhere else in the world, until many centuries after the shipwreck. The find generated huge controversy.
The lump is known as the Antikythera mechanism, an