Kim Jong Un Opens China Bridge, Frames Alliance Against US
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in China on his first visit in a year, inaugurating a new bridge linking the two countries across their shared border. The rare trip abroad shows how completely Pyongyang's diplomacy has reoriented toward Beijing and Moscow. Kim cast the cooperation with China and Russia as a response to what he called a "new Cold War" waged by the United States.
The bridge is the most tangible product of a warming that accelerated after North Korean troops fought alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, a deployment that bought Kim new standing in Moscow. China remains his country's economic lifeline, and a modern crossing could ease trade long constrained by dated border infrastructure. For Xi Jinping, the project anchors a volatile neighbour more firmly in China's orbit at modest cost.
The visit lands at an awkward moment for the United States, days before its midterms and amid a stalled approach to Pyongyang. Sanctions enforcement grows harder when a permanent Security Council member builds new infrastructure into its relationship with the state being sanctioned. South Korea and Japan will read the ceremony as proof that coordination among the three authoritarian powers is deepening, not fragmenting. The borrowed "new Cold War" vocabulary, echoing
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When a doctor treats depression with a pill rather than, say, an exorcism, she is quietly taking a side in one of philosophy's oldest disputes. The bet is that moods, memories and decisions are physical events — chemistry and circuitry, not the stirrings of an immaterial soul. That bet has a name: physicalism.
Physicalism is the view that everything that exists is physical, or depends entirely on the physical. Your headache is a pattern of neural firing; your love of a song is a configuration of neurons shaped by genes and experience. No ghostly ingredient hovers above the body, and nothing in the universe — from galaxies to governments — escapes the reach of physics. Philosophers often sharpen the claim with the term "supervenience": once all the physical facts are fixed, all the facts are fixed. Two worlds could not be physically identical yet differ in what people feel or believe. Hold the matter constant, and the mind comes with it.
The label has a curious history. "Materialism" entered English in the late seventeenth century and held that reality is nothing but matter — inert stuff with shape, size and motion. Two problems intervened. Physics itself turned up things that don't fit that picture, such as gravity, electromagnetic fields and spacetime. And in the 1930s, a group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians called the Vienna Circle — notably Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap — introduced "physicalism" as a linguistic thesis: every meaningful statement, they claimed, could be translated into the language of physics. Because their logical positivism branded metaphysics as nonsense, they could not cast it as a claim about the world's nature. Positivism has since collapsed, and most physicalists now use the term for exactly the metaphysical claim the positivists refused to make. "Physicalism" and "materialism" have become, for many philosophers, interchangeable.
Within this broad church, disagreement flourishes. Reductive physicalists such as the Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart argued in the 1950s that sensations simply are brain processes, just as water is H2O — one thing under two descriptions. Non-reductive physicalists, following Donald Davidson, accept that minds depend on brains yet resist flattening the mental into the physical; talk of reasons, beliefs and values keeps its own vocabulary without describing a separate realm. Either way, the mental world rides on the physical one.
Consciousness remains the deepest thorn in physicalism's side. Imagine Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist who knows every physical fact about colour vision but has spent her life in a black-and-white room. One day she steps outside and sees red for the first time. Does she learn something new? If she does, then facts about experience outrun the physical facts — a challenge Frank Jackson devised precisely to rattle the doctrine. David Chalmers presses the point harder: physical science can explain what the brain does, but why any of it feels like something from the inside remains stubbornly unexplained. Whether that gap signals the unfinished business of neuroscience or a fatal flaw in the physicalist worldview is a question nobody has yet closed — and it may decide whether your morning mood, and everything else about your inner life, is ultimately just physics.
Want to go deeper? Read the full Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Physicalism →
| Habit | Target | Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Done |
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| 1. Pushup routine | 7 | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | 0/7 |
| 2. Workout | 2 | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | 0/2 |
| 3. Cardio 30 mins | 2 | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | 0/2 |
| 4. Meditate | 7 | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | 0/7 |
| 5. No sugars | 5 | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | 0/5 |