Ok then I did misunderstand you.

Yes I agree that processes of change in nature, such as erosion or rain or motion or whatever, any process is a dialect.

Sorry for strongly disagreeing with you when we meant the same thing.

I got caught up in the idea of the law itself as a dialect but yes you’re right and I was going into a knot.

There’s the inner dialog of concept in mathematics and science, and even formal logic mathematics and science are part of the ideological superstructure. Anti-Dühring was a great work.

And materialist dialectics obviously applies to motion and movement in the world. So you can have a dialect of erosion or a dialect of planetary motion, which are subject to gravity, although it’s some fine line drawing to separate the reality of nature from the idea of nature, it quickly becomes recursive but yeah sure any idea of nature is clearly dialectical and changes, natural processes, in nature can be have their idea expressed as a dialect. To hop from that to insisting the process of natural change is a dialect seems to be insisting that dialectics itself has physical reality as opposed to being an idea which becomes an entirely recursive navel gazing exercise as well as pointless. Expressing a dialect of nature is expressing an idea of nature which is expressing an ideal, not the reality itself even if the dialect is a materialist dialect. Or to put that another way, ideals are not reals and dialectics are an ideal even when they are dialectics of the real.

But if a law of nature is, in material fact, unchanging then how can it be a dialect? How can an unchanged and unchanging thing be a dialect? Virtually nothing is unchanged and unchanging, except for the law of gravity. I mean shit, even other fundamental forces are changeable with the breaking of certain symmetries in the extremely early universe so hell even the weak nuclear force can, at least for a few picoseconds, be considered a dialect but gravity?

You could have a dialect of physics. You could have a dialect of erosion. You could have a dialect of science. Of course. But to say the law of gravity itself is a dialect, the physical reality of it and not the idea of it, well for one what is the point of that when you could fruitfully have a dialect of the idea of gravity or dialects of the effects of gravity, and two; no it’s not.

The interactions of gravity can be expressed and understood within a dialectical framework but dialectics describe processes of change but are not the processes of change themselves.

An unchanging law of nature is an input into dialectics, a dialect of erosion for example which must consider the web of relationships between things and gravity being a rule that determines certain interactions, but to talk about a dialect of gravity itself… what is that a dialect of? What is interacting with what to change the law of gravity? It’s not a dialect.

A person climbing a tower, carrying a ball, dropping it, the ball falling due to gravity, and then bouncing. Yes this is a dialect. So is water evaporating from heat, forming a cloud, then raining. Yes.

That seems to externalise gravity as something beyond, as universal. As if gravity and the rest of physical matter are not internally related

It does not imply that gravity and physical matter are unrelated. Not at all.

It does separate the idea of gravity from the fact of gravity, but those things are absolutely and very clearly separate.

The notion that our understanding of nature is only an idea rather than our best approximation

“Understanding” and “idea” are synonyms here so yes they are equated.

Our idea of gravity, our concept of gravity, our understanding of gravity, our model of gravity, whatever… all these are directly synonyms here meaning exactly the same thing. Our idea of gravity is our understanding of gravity.

Dialectics doesn’t necessarily exclude unchanging laws; it posits that development happens according to such laws, which are dialectical.

Sure and if the laws themselves are unchanging then the laws themselves are precluded from being a dialectic.

The understanding of gravity is dialectical but the natural phenomenon of gravity isn’t.

Our explanations of it, understandings of it, our experience of it, those are dialectical.

Nature has only necessity and contingency obedient to unchanging laws and externalities but our idea of nature is what changes.

Specifically for the feeling of your feet against the ground being due to a repulsive electromagnetic force accelerating you outwards, that’s a repulsive force.

Gravity isn’t understood to be a force at all. Not attractive or repulsive.

You jump, fall down, you feet hit the ground.

You feel an impact.

Under the Newtonian understanding of gravity, the impact you felt was due to an attractive force.

Under the relativistic understanding, the force of impact was a repulsive one - electromagnetic repulsion of the earth. The earth is “exploding” constantly outwards due to electromagnetic repulsion, electromagnetic repulsion is accelerating every atom of the earth outwards from the center but this outward acceleration is in equilibrium with the flow of space time. Gravity is not understood to be a force at all under relativity, neither attractive or repulsive, but an apparent phenomenon due to the curvature of space time. The feeling of your feet against the ground is understood as electromagnetic repulsion.

If Newton were to measure the force of impact as the apple hit the ground, he would have understood himself to be measuring the force of gravity.

Think about it this way: a body in free fall experiences weightlessness. When you’re falling you feel no force of gravity at all. It’s only when your feet are on the ground that you feel “gravity”.

Korea and Vietnam are very close to China / USSR, and at the limit of US force projection range on the western pacific so if the US wanted to preserve its sphere of influence there they had to fight for it.

Cuba is well within the US sphere of influence even as a communist state because no other power can really challenge the US there - with the single exception of nuclear weapons hence why the US was willing to go to the wall on that issue since that’s the one thing the USSR could have done to make the Caribbean no longer a US province.

They will sanction and isolate Cuba because they’re ruled by psychopaths and the existence of Cuba challenges their ideological foundations, but they aren’t actually threatened by Cuba and their sphere of influence isn’t actually threatened by Cuba so it’s not worth the cost of invading.

Infinite growth economics meet the convergence of capital

Unofficial news mega thread?

Well gravity itself is not a dialectic since gravity itself remains unchanging.

But the concept of gravity, the understanding of gravity, is a dialectic.

You go from Newton where gravity is an attractive force, to relativistic physics where gravity is not a force at all.

For Newton, gravity was a force pulling us down.

For Einstein, the force we feel is actually the earth beneath us exploding as a result of electromagnetic repulsion, and we stay “in place” at the point where the acceleration of electromagnetic repulsion is balanced by the flow of space time.

Then the concept of space time is itself a dialectic with the dominant view of physics denying a fixed “now” and instead supposing some kind of block universe or perhaps some other understanding of time where there is no fixed now.

And this dominant view increasingly challenged as absurd and reliant on non-empirical assumptions about the 1-way speed of light derived from the 2-way speed of light which gives you a minority view of neo-etherists where a “now” is restored.

It’s an understanding in flux.

Gravity itself is what it is. A fact of nature. What we understand gravity to be, that’s a dialectic.

Engels wrote

Gravity as the most general determination of materiality is commonly accepted. That is to say, attraction is a necessary property of matter, but not repulsion. But attraction and repulsion are as inseparable as positive and negative, and hence from dialectics itself it can already be predicted that the true theory of matter must assign as important a place to repulsion as to attraction, and that a theory of matter based on mere attraction is false, inadequate, and one-sided. In fact sufficient phenomena occur that demonstrate this in advance. If only on account of light, the ether is not to be dispensed with. Is the ether of material nature? If it exists at all, it must be of material nature, it must come under the concept of matter. But it is not affected by gravity. The tail of a comet is granted to be of material nature. It shows a powerful repulsion. Heat in a gas produces repulsion, etc.

It would go too far to credit Engels as a physicist because he wasn’t one but his insight into how the understanding of gravity must evolve was incredible.

I wouldn’t turn to Engels to understand gravity but it’s shocking how prescient he was in foreseeing the shifting understanding of gravity, a dialectic of the scientific revolution, well before Einstein was even born.