“Hey everyone, we found an upgrade to planned obsolescence: we call it planned obsolescence 2.0. Instead of designing hardware to break and require replacing after a few years, we’ll design the software to break every month! We’ll say it’s an upgrade. It’ll reduce our material costs and we can pass those savings on to the shareholder.”

I love using Socratic Dialogue during lessons. When students are grasping the material well, you get very palpable feedback that they are, and it lights a fire in their enthusiasm when students understand that they have so much agency in the student-teacher interaction. On the flip side, when they’re distracted or disinterested it slows your lesson down to a crawl, and time is the most scarce resource you have as a school teacher. Essentially you can get wildly mixed results because you’re entrusting your students with a great deal of influence over the flow of your lesson time.

Always have an alternate plan if you plan to engage in dialectics with students. A good educator can present the initial ideas and concepts, and then gauge the responsiveness of the classroom and know whether to prompt dialogue or just lead. When you can get students really grasping a topic just from talking to them about it, it’s the best feeling. And when you tell students that homework is to read the textbook pages that were planned for that lesson but that they didn’t need, it’s a huge confidence booster for them, too.

The unfortunate reality is that most schools are curriculum based. There’s assessments with set criteria at regular intervals, and between those assessments you have finite lesson time to prepare your students for the assessment criteria. So truly open-ended dialogues are rare; they’re a luxury you can afford after you’ve squared away the closed-ended lesson objectives.

Is Wang Yi thorium-powered or something? Comrade doesn’t seem to sleep

https://youtu.be/PkqftJRoSXo

They should start calling them seasons, and produce teaser/release trailers and behind-the-scenes interviews with the sanctions architects to build up more hype and anticipation for each season’s package drop. Maybe that way, the Russian economy might actually be interested. Or affected.

The US has already done so much harm to my family in the Philippines by propping up Marcos Sr., and now this.

They are monsters.

If anyone watching that decides to check out the books or the Tencent version then it’s a win.

Everything the Netflix show does to reinforce inherent Sinophobia is just a drop in the bucket compared to what Westerners get in their daily diet already. If libs choose between 100 different kinds of garbage when they watch Netflix I’d prefer them watching the kind that will see some of them picking up a Liu Cixin book.

Honestly it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m pretty sure Washington’s current string of geopolitical strategic blunders and failures is a result of their fellating themselves with their echo chamber media so much that they started swallowing their own bullshit.

Yeah, this is another thing that liberals struggle to wrap their heads around.

Also it’s not just about building consensus, it’s about arriving at a compromise.

Take a situation where 52% of the country says “Let’s do plan X because it would benefit us in many ways”, and 48% says “if you do X that will harm us, we want to continue current implementation Y”:

Liberal democracies divide the nation over the issue and attach X and Y to parties A and B. Then you vote for A or B, and whoever wins gets to have their way and whoever loses gets a big fat bowl of “too bad, so sad.” The result? A nation divided, compatriots wishing death upon one another, partisan private media dehumanizing ‘the opposition,’ and oftentimes actual harm done to some of your people.

It gets to the point where it isn’t just about getting things your way, but people in your nation take actual pleasure in seeing other groups in their nation denied. This 👏 is 👏 by 👏 design. A brave and noble land of “Fuck you, got mine,” divided and easily ruled.

In whole-process democracy, taking an action that leaves 48% of your people completely disenfranchised (or even harmed) is completely unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to the 48%, it’s unacceptable to the government, and if it’s not also unacceptable to the 52% then you’ve failed to educate them. Instead of exacerbating any decision, a group like the National People’s Congress either tackles the issue directly or forms a committee for it. Instead of going straight to a vote they ask questions like “How is X harmful? Can we make it not harmful?” They’ll either synthesize a new plan Z at best or they’ll not change anything at worse. And then there’s a vote.

Everyone involved knows that genuine effort has been made, consulting with the best expertise the nation has available, to create plan Z. Citizens know that if they’re asked to compromise, whatever they’re asked to give up is giving to their compatriots more than it’s taking from them. If a proposal polls at a 60-40 split that doesn’t mean you push it through, it means you go back and find out how to bring more of that 40 on side. The vote is an official record of consensus; a formality in a successful and functioning government and a constitutional protection in one that has failed and become disunited.

No sentient, compassion-capable mind would choose the immediate line in the sand over the process of consensus. But that’s how fucked Western culture is, that protagonist, antagonist, conflict is seen as a better expression of government for and by the people than thesis, antithesis, synthesis.