Comments on: Nuclear bombs are fucking retarded (I can’t think of a punchy title, and I’m trying to improve my Google search rank for “fucking retarded”)

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:57:13 +0000

Fucking retarded van der Walls potential
as I always say.

http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v6/i3/p1232_1

By: Kléber Raposadinho

Kléber Raposadinho — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:35:05 +0000

Prepare to have your analytics scrambled beyond comprehension when I link to your blog.

Yes! You did it! Drop the balloons!

By: Kléber Raposadinho

Kléber Raposadinho — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:33:16 +0000

Jesse, dude, you have a bitchn’ blog. Can I say that? Can I tell you that? I will. I don’t care. Jesse, you have a bitch’ blog. See I did it, and I feel better.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:08:59 +0000

Thanks for linking to my site but you totally effed up my analytics numbers…

By: desertscope

desertscope — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 04:15:31 +0000

kenmeer,

Thanks for the excellent reply, but I do have one paragraph I would like to chew on for a moment:

Jonestown and heaven’s Gate are poor comparisons, being decidedly fringe groups. We realistically worry about: mainstream Xtian fundies, mainstream Muslim fundies, and mainstream Jewish fundies. (Asians are blessedly spare on apocalyptic prophecies, it seems.)

1) It is true that these are fringe groups, but I would argue that they only differ from mainstream religions in degree.

2) While murdering abortion doctors, flying airplanes into buildings, and beating women for not sitting in the back of the bus may be extreme behaviors, each is applauded by the client religion in the form of “I don’t approve of the method, but…”

3) Aum Shinrikyo + Sarin gas + Tokyo subway = ?

BTW, I had to read that “Ain’t no use worrying about how things won’t work out because nothing won’t work out the way you thought it wouldn’t.” twice before I understood. Wise man, your old man.

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:27:06 +0000

True enough Kenmeer. It would seem to make ‘sense’ to prevent the kind of apocalyptic failures of social systems if we want to prevent apocalyptic leaders. But none of those calculations are sensible.
Anyhoo, it is not really the p[roliferation of Uranium bnmbs that shoudl worry us. Yeah, they hurt if they hit you. But no worse than a good ol fashion incendiary bomb attack (cf. Dresden). And nobody can make too many of them. The Plutonium weapons and esp the H-bomb (Three Orders of Magnitude more destructive) are the only real worries, and they are not so easy to procure, or detonate.
By the end of the century, maybe a lot of people will have sinple, gun design, Uranium weapons. If need be just using the Uranium obtained from desalination of sea water.
Then nobody will want to invade anybody. But everybody will go ‘guerilla’.

By: kenmeer livermaile

kenmeer livermaile — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:07:41 +0000

You gotta problem with rutabagas, you tuber bigot?

By: kenmeer livermaile

kenmeer livermaile — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:04:05 +0000

Oh, I know all that. I grew up expecting to die young in a nuke standoff. But our rational anticipation of how irrational people will behave is irrational.

Like my old man used to say:

“Ain’t no use worrying about how things won’t work out because nothing won’t work out the way you thought it wouldn’t.”

Here’s another worry: as we continue suppressing nuclear development, bootleg hackers may devise simpler, cheaper ways of devising nuclear weapons capacity.

My point, primarily, is that our current attempts to deter nuclear proliferation are only attempts to buy time to find a saner human population in generations to come, and meanwhile, the adversarial stress of suppressing nuke arms capacity creates unintended and unwanted consequences.

As for the argument that it only takes one nutcase to end the world: the same is theoretically true of the disease vaults in the CDC (and Russia, and who knows where else?).

The very knowledge that we now have the power whereby one nut can trigger Armageddon should tend to create ever more de facto safeguards in those areas where a nutcase could deliberately push the wrong button.

Jonestown and heaven’s Gate are poor comparisons, being decidedly fringe groups. We realistically worry about: mainstream Xtian fundies, mainstream Muslim fundies, and mainstream Jewish fundies. (Asians are blessedly spare on apocalyptic prophecies, it seems.)

Their very mainstreamdom tends to vet out from these coalitions the true psychotics who would take God’s Will into their own hands, and it is very difficult for a true fringe-freak to achieve such high office.

It happens, though. Hitler comes to mind. Such occurrences are born of extremely weird and difficult times (like the 1920s/30s).

Meanwhile, though, each generation, of children who grow up reading/viewing the library of now increasingly cliched apocalyptic books/movies, is more indoctrinated in the idea that nukes are necessary, alas, but only as a porcupine’s quills: not something you attack with but something that prevents other porcupines from attacking.

We are busily concocting more doomsday technologies every year, and cannot escape our need to develop a globally cooperative homo species or else we die.

Summary: ultimately, it’s all hand-wringing evasion of the major problem combined with some attempt to buy us time.

I worry FAR more about providing enough energy for the growing Terran population than Iran getting nukes. Insanely megalomaniacal behavior should intensify drastically under extreme survival stress, I think. But that again is irrationally using rationality to comprehend potential irrationality.

By: desertscope

desertscope — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:41:18 +0000

Ever hear of Jonestown? Heaven’s Gate? True believers can and do kill themselves on a large scale. How about 9/11, London, or Bali? True believers can and do kill others on a large scale. Most of the religious freaks we put into office are really just half-assed religious freaks. In the event that we get a serious true believer, we are literally doomed.

Not worried? A double-digit percentage of Americans believe the end of the world will occur within their lifetimes. All it takes is one in the right place to make it happen.

By: kenmeer livermaile

kenmeer livermaile — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:02:32 +0000

I suspect a nuke or three will be used again this century but will not trigger a massive pissing contest. My rationale (it is more or less also that of the dear departed FZappa) derives from this statement by Saul Alinsky (paraphrased from memory):

“I believe I could get a capitalist to sign a deal today that would make him filthy rich overnight even though he knew it meant it would kill him tomorrow.”

Don’t know that I agree with Saul completely but if we look at it, it implies that no businessman will tolerate so much death if it wipes out so much expensive real estate.

Not that I think we homo saps are particularly rational. The Cold War was such a balanced and massive dual psychotic sociopathy that we would have eventually gone full scale Armageddon if the balance hadn’t grossly imbalanced in the late ’80s.

Don’t know when we might achieve another enormous such mutual standoff. Anywho, the chances of us getting through this century without a major dieoff do seem slim.