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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 24th, 2023

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  • Brian Klass is a political scientist who recently put out his own philosophy of chaos theory. I think it’s a pretty useful tool to look at contemporary movements and really refutes the “it couldn’t possibly happen here” message.

    Pre-2011 there was a paper published on why middle eastern dictatorships were so stable. The next year almost all of them fell. Klass argues that the author wasn’t wrong, they just were working with the rules and tools we knew at the time, but didn’t know the rules had changed with the invention of social media.

    In his perspective, the idea of a “fluke” is not a fluke at all, it’s a data point showing that things are changing and changing fast. Things just feel like flukes when our assumptions of the way things work become outdated.







  • Idk if you’re a nerd, but Brian Klass is a contemporary political scientist who actually challenges this, and yet still affirms a determinist lense. His latest book is on his chaos theory that I think can be helpful navigating our current world.

    Here’s his big think interview if you’re interested!

    One way to think of this is that we can’t predict the future with what we know of the past because the “rules” are constantly changing. One example is an academic paper that was written that said middle eastern dictatorships were especially stable in comparison to others, but then a year later the Arab Spring occurs. His take is that the author wasn’t wrong- based on all the information of the past it made sense that these dictatorships were not going away anytime soon, but what happened was the world changed making those assumptions moot.

    So the idea that European democracies are inherently stable isn’t necessarily a given, and as our world is drastically changing, our tools to gauge the health of a democracy are becoming less and less relevant.



  • It’s not a contest. Look at the contouring, elegant. Look at the polish, shining as bright as Versailles. The tong length has the perfection of a Swiss watch.

    Then the functionality- the flared handle provides the user with the comfort usually reserved for oil barons in hospice. The longer tongs serve as an homage to the engineers who brought humanity to the moon.

    Every other fork is merely a blight on the earth in comparison to this Adonis of cutlerian perfection.