The Algorithm

[Warning: Accidents and Horrible Death, not graphic]

After I’ve watched a bunch of videos on youtube of Russian tanks getting variously blown up and shot at, the algorithm appears to have decided I’m a nasty person and has started feeding me all kinds of things that blown up, crashed, and otherwise disastrously killed passengers. This one really caught my eye.

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Argument Clinic: Let’s Go, GerrardOfTitanServer

In my recent post about government’s manifest failure in the face of climate change, GerrardOfTitanServer naturally cropped up and started banging the “Nuclear is our only option” drum. I got so annoyed – he has pulled several comment threads into the weeds in the past – with him that I implied that maybe he could fuck off a little bit.

I regret that. The philosophical ideal would be to not be King Thag of This Blog, and fall back on my authority – which is real as far as bits in this corner of the internet go – I should have had the patience to engage, instead. So, I thought about GerrardOfTitanServer’s arguments for, oh, 5 minutes, and noticed a few gigantic, glaring holes in them. This posting is about that, and I welcome and invite anyone who wants to argue with GerrardOfTitanServer to go ahead.

This can be the GerrardOfTitanServer thread and, note to GerrardOfTitanServer: do not continue to drag other comment threads into endless text-walls of argumentation or I’ll shut you down. You’ve got your thread, now, here you go, this is it.

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The Use of Nuclear Weapons – 2

It was a dark and stormy night in Okinawa, 1962; the seas were beaten into foam by the wind that howled across the island.

No, that’s not right. But it seemed like a better setting for “almost the end of the world.” And there was a storm, but it was a storm of toxic, invisible, lies. Lies were the fuel of the cold war; their target was the population of the whole planet, who were not trusted with anything close to the truth.

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