@Typo-MAGAshiv

I even agreed that this entire thing has been mismanaged by a bunch of crooks.

So you agree with me, but are reluctant to say so because the 5% you disagree with forms a core part of your ego support.

so many of you soft civilians completely don't understand how violence works

And there, right there, is the part where you have essentially confessed that your time in the military wasn't just something you did, but something that now forms a core part of your ego-support and your identity.

You are superior to those soft civilians because you are a hardened warrior who understands about violence in a way that nobody else can possibly get, regardless of who they are and what they know.

Of course being told that you were not a strong hero, but instead the victim of a scam, and a slave to the powerful and self-interested, would be a massive blow to your self-image.

This is not to say that you would otherwise definitely agree with me about foreign policy. You're still going to have your own take on things. But it does indicate why you are unable, or rather unwilling, to even follow the reasoning behind anything I say....

Because to share my worldview, even hypothetically, for long enough to understand it, is to contemplate a world where a major source of your self-image would instead be a source of shame.

The schoolyard taunt of "what's the matter, you skeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd?" is a very typical way that young, military-aged men can be practiced upon to do self-destructive things. And those who survive their self-destructive behaviour often bring that taunt to foreign policy discussions where it has no place, since such discussions typically do not occur on the elementary school playground.

In short, it requires no courage whatever on the part of geriatric millionaires to commit other, younger, men's bodies to battle. And thus it does not require any lack of courage to call them out for doing so, especially when they have done so only in service to their own corruption and greed.

It is, of course, true that deadly weapons are deadly, although you miss the fact that no one has said otherwise.

However, if you truly think that committing to a military occupation on the opposite side of the globe is the best way to defend against individual fanatics armed with low tech weapons, then you have experienced not only a failure of imagination, but a critical lack of understanding of the basic principles of asymmetric warfare.

When you are faced with an enemy who is vastly superior in military and economic resources, your primary goal is to provoke him to use those resources in inefficient and counterproductive ways.

The question becomes not how to defeat him on the battlefield (especially since anyone under forty just asked "what the hell is a battlefield?" when I said that), but "how many dollars can I get him to spend for every one that I spend?"

This is why I talk about Iraq and Afghanistan as one big line item price tag, despite the fact that, from a tactical and strategic perspective, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, neither did Afghanistan.

They were merely sold to the public as a package deal, using vague justifications. What they really had to do with each other was that 9/11 granted a certain branch of the republican party the political capital to dust off a bunch of plans they already had ready and waiting... much like democrats with crazed gunmen and the gun laws they have waiting and ready to go.

The way that 9/11 is related to Iraq, Afghanistan, and what they called "GWOT" isn't strategic at all. It's in the minds of the voting public. None of those projects would ever have happened without 9/11.

They were the American version of what we call "blowback" when the Allahu Ackbars do it.

Except, and here's the cunning part... that's what the Allahu Ackbars wanted, or at the smart ones. In asymmetric warfare, when you are the insurgent side, you want massive responses by the imperial side. You want them to spend lots of money. You want them to inflict lots of civilian casualties. You want them to go totally fucking nuts.

Yes, you're going to lose a lot of dudes, but if you're a third world Allahu Ackbar instead of a first-world liberal, you don't care. You don't calculate victory by counting your dead and subtracting the number of enemy dead. You look at results in every arena from logistics to macroeconomics to public relations.

In this case, the political leadership of the United States is effectively an ally of the Allahu Ackbars, not because they love or even tolerate each other, but because they share the same goal... bleeding the US taxpaying middle class until they are a dried husk.

@Desaint

What you need to understand is that the female sexual instinct is not to deny, but to gatekeep. To vet.

Women are not actually all that concerned with consent to each individual act, but rather with consent to a person. This is because their attitude towards sex is not motivated by the philosophical values of classical liberalism (individual value, autonomy, respect, rights, etc), but by the evolutionary imperatives brought on by investment in pregnancy.

Absent legally mandated paternal responsibilities, which haven't been around long enough to impact evolution, male investment in pregnancy is zero. We can literally shoot our load and fuck off into never-never land.

Female investment in pregnancy is huge. It's a metric fuckton of time and effort, there are considerable health risks to pushing out head that large through a pelvic girdle that small, and the whole system has been "engineered" to its limits to allow for those giant heads: www.trp.red/p/whisper/1058

So women have the instinctive, deep seated need to feel like they have vetted you and found you worthy. But once you cross that threshold, once they have that feeling, regardless of their grounds for having it, they're just as horny as we are.

As you start to make a deliberate practice of attracting women, which you consciously work at, you're going to find that there is a certain moment where there's a metaphorical clicking sound... a key turning in a lock.

And when that lock is open, there are very few boundaries, and very little resistance to be found. Sure, she might refuse anal if you're hung like a rhino... but this sort of thing has nothing to do with the sort of resistance you face before she decides you are "sex-worthy".

The trick, of course, to producing that "click" sound is to know and practice what commonly works, but also to understand that some women are a little different than others, and that sometimes you have to read them, and wiggle the lockpick around a bit, and that some of them won't be into your particular presentation no matter what you do.

@Whisper

I'm not going to play whack-a-mole with you,

Meaning you're going to ignore 90% of my detailed response which is difficult to refute on its merits and facts.

because I'm perfectly capable of recognizing a Gish Gallop when I see one.

A Gish Gallop is when someone responds with an overwhelming volume of arguments without regard to their quality or relevance. You then proceed to focus on an irrelevant metric of dubious factuality.

And your answer was that any amount of meltdown is by definition severe

Incorrect. My answer was that this particular meltdown was severe, in that half the reactor core melted down into an 18 ton mass of corium.

The essential information is that amount of "down" that meltdown melted was 15 millimeters, or .59 inches.

That is essential to your thesis of "as close to nothing as possible," but it's a metric that nobody cares about, and I frankly doubt it's anywhere close to accurate even if we were even evaluating the event in terms of how far the meltdown literally moved downward.

You'd have been far better off pointing out that unlike Chernobyl, the containment structure was not even slightly damaged, and that the "only (measurable in peta- and terabequerels)" radioactive substances that escaped hitched a ride through necessary steam and gas venting.

Since the incident itself caused no deaths, and no injuries, it is hard to imagine how a nuclear accident could have a lesser cost in human lives.

That's not the only legitimate metric by which the severity can, and indeed has, gotten judged by nuclear power critics. If the reactor didn't automatically scram when the systems detected no secondary coolant supply, it would have DEFINITELY resulted in a far worse disaster. Fact was, the ENTIRE CREW on duty didn't even recognize that they were dealing with a loss of coolant incident, and the entire crew of the next shift after that took a good hour before they appeared to start responding accordingly.

THAT is why people don't trust the nuclear industry as it actually existed at the time, and rightfully so. Trying to "fix" this perception by cherry picking the metrics serves to multiply the distrust factor.

Now, one way that I could try to fix ("steel man") your argument is to interpret it as "while TMI-1 itself"

You're not even arguing the correct facts, much less my actual arguments about them. The meltdown happened in TMI-2. TMI-1 was shut down for refueling at the time, and remained in operation until an abundance of "cheap" (when discounting safety and environmental costs) petroleum made it economically uncompetitive to continue using and got decommissioned in 2019.

stuff about petroleum based energy by comparison to nuclear

The main reasons for petroleum getting used instead are political lobbying and corruption using a portion of the huge money at stake. I'm not a fan of petroleum and would far rather have seen petrowar money go toward developing advanced technologies as much as you would.

Fact is, I'm a fan of you personally and advanced nuclear technologies, as well as much safer implementation of "traditional" nuclear power than what was built and operated at TMI. Consider your difficulty "selling" ME on these points as feedback on why the much more skeptical and less technically savvy general public fails to get sold on the idea of moving toward nice things like breeder reactors and thorium power.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

You don't really get why I do anything.

I don't write articles like that to "win" arguments. There is no winning an internet argument. Research shows that deeply held beliefs tend to grow stronger when rhetoric that contradicts them is presented.

You are not going to persuade me that multiple trillions of dollars is a reasonable expenditure to "protect us" from fifteen dudes with box cutters.

I am not going to persuade you that you invested years of your life in a big lie.

So, why do I argue these points? In order to write articles like that.

It's how my brain works. I'll be arguing with someone who thinks men and women are biologically identical, and sex is a cultural construct, and then something in my brain goes "click" and I say to myself "Hey, every single thing about human mating dynamics can be traced back to the way that we have to push out these infants with giant heads!".

That's the part I value.

So something went "click" in this argument, and I went "Hey, wait a minute. People aren't chronic fuckups and losers because they make bad decisions. Everyone makes bad decisions. The people who ruin their lives are the ones who won't admit a mistake, and they keep investing in bad decisions they have already made."

In the late seventies, we collectively made a very, very bad decision... to keep burning petrochemical fossil fuels instead of advancing to nuclear technology.

This leds us, in turn, to a long series of bad decisions, each one appearing superficially necessary because they were based on the assumption that we had to salvage the previous bad decision, like a gambler who continuously loses and continuously goes double or nothing to try to get out of the hole he has dug.

But that's self-destructive. When an investment you make crashes, you take the L and sell it. What you don't do is buy more and more in the hopes that you are "buying the dip". You're just going to lose more money.

@MentORPHEUS

I'm not going to play whack-a-mole with you, because I'm perfectly capable of recognizing a Gish Gallop when I see one.

My thesis was that the partial meltdown of TMI-1 was "as close to nothing as you could reasonably get without actually being nothing".

And your answer was that any amount of meltdown is by definition severe. This is your central point, which was why I chose that quote.

The essential information is that amount of "down" that meltdown melted was 15 millimeters, or .59 inches. If you think about that measurement, even those who do not agree with my statement can readily understand why I described it as "as close to nothing as you could reasonably get without actually being nothing"... because the only meltdowns that would be closer to nothing would be those of .5899999 inches or less.

Since the incident itself caused no deaths, and no injuries, it is hard to imagine how a nuclear accident could have a lesser cost in human lives. There's no such thing as a negative death toll.

Now, one way that I could try to fix ("steel man") your argument is to interpret it as "while TMI-1 itself did little to no human damage, and little financial damage compared to petrochemical accidents, it INDICATES the presence of certain risks, telling us that accidents can happen, and the next one might not be so mild".

However, this possibility was understood already by nuclear engineers, and to believe that a mild nuclear accident makes the next one more likely to be severe would be the gambler's fallacy in action.

In short, you are trying to make a common-sense argument that nuclear power is dangerous. But I do not believe in common sense. I believe in data.

If we examine the all-inclusive death toll per kilowatt-hour of various power generation schemes, we get this:

ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh.svg

As you can see, nuclear power is slightly more dangerous than solar panels, but less dangerous than a wind turbine.

Now, you could object to this chart by saying that past behaviour doesn't perfectly predict future behaviour, and perhaps there is some sort of nuclear "black swan" event waiting in the wings to exterminate the human species.

But this would miss the point that past behaviour, while imperfect, is the ONLY predictor of future behaviour, and it is how we do forecasting in every other field which you are totally fine with. It's how we know planes are safer than cars despite being subjectively scarier.

Nuclear power is subjectively scary because the way it might kill you is terrifying to contemplate. But this has no bearing on its likelihood of killing you.

Human beings are very, very bad at assessing risk with our built-in thinking hardware, because that hardware is hard-wired to assume that we live in plains-ape tribes of about Dunbar's number.

We overestimate the risk of usual, unfamiliar, or unknown things, and underestimate the risk of familiar causes of death. But when we have data, we can read it, and correct our intuitions, which are often wrong.

Resistance to new ideas in the absence of data is skepticism. Resistance to data is not.

@Whisper

You are not entitled to your own facts.

Says the guy who responds to two posts discussing in detail numerous facts he left out when discussing the event, with a cut and paste that mostly debunks a claim I never made using a scene from a fictional movie.

As for the c/p claim that there was no evacuation, it is only true that there was no MANDATORY evacuation, and at the time the NRC didn't even have the authority to mandate evacuations. The Governor, on the advice of the NRC chairman, recommended that pregnant women and preschool age children within 5, then soon 20 miles of the plant, evacuate the area. About 140,000 people ended up voluntarily evacuating. THAT is what actually happened, that you are characterizing as no evacuation, miscommunication, and public confusion.

IDK why you're so committed to presenting the most #licktheshaft interpretation of this event and downplaying its actual severity, as if half the reactor core melting can reasonably get characterized as no big deal, since after all the outcome was way less bad than Chernobyl. I've seen you express dismay over public resistance to nuclear power, yet here you are perpetuating the exact kind of dismissal and hand-waving that causes and justifies that very resistance, and makes skepticism the rational position for people to hold. Overcoming that skepticism after hearing obvious lies and doublespeak requires members of the general public to gain a greater understanding of the inner workings of various types of nuclear power plants than they normally reach of their own cars, microwave ovens, and computers. That, not irrational and abstract leftist environmentalist ideology as often gets blamed, is why we don't have nice things like breeder reactors and thorium power on the funding table today.