Unfortunately, I’ve known several people who were virulent racists and conspiracy hounds about Obama to the point where any mild opposition met with screaming rants about how he was a Kenyan muslim usurper who was going to force us all to be gay muslims. Seriously. They never could answer my most basic questions about how that was supposed to happen.
For the record, and I think I said it above, my question is simple;
"So how do you think he’s going to do that? Do you think he’s just going to go on TV and declare that we’re all Muslims now and America is an Islamic nation and we’re all going to just throw up our hands and go “Well ok then, we’re muslims now!”?
Honestly, when people complain about Conservatives being driven off this board, the only thing that is driving them away is their inability to spew nonsense unchallenged and their inability to prove any of it. Well, that and their common behavioral pattern of being trollish assholes that gets them banned in the end.
Kind of in the same position. My Wife’s side of the family are all Trump supporters (except for my Wife and one nephew and a niece that seems to be on the fence).
BUT. They are all quite intelligent. Two teachers, a CEO of a small oil equipment manufacturing company and another that heads up the exploration department of a very large oil company. I suppose the Oil guys don’t need much explanation. I am afraid I might see some racism and anti LGBT. But hard to pin down. They are also very religious. What ever floats your boat for that. It’s not my gig.
I don’t see them but about every one or two years, my Wife talks to them more of course. But when we do get together, we have a great time. We rarely talk politics or religion though. It’s sort of impossible.
They believe the bullshit. And won’t watch anything but FOX. Last time I visited FOX was all I saw on TV. It’s just on ALL THE TIME. (except when they watched football). I changed the channel to CNN once when they had gone to church. Right back to FOX when they came home.
That’s always been an amusing thing to me - all those hard-righters and moral crusaders who confidently opine that if being gay is not met with social opprobrium, then all the kids and teens will become gay because it’s ok to be gay.
To which I always want to answer “sooo were it not for fear of the reaction from your peers, you’d go gay yourself ?”. This is compounded by the fact that they usually opine that homosexuality is a conscious choice. To me, the fear of “gay contagion” or gays “turning heteros” reveals a lot more about their own sexual identity & attractions than anything.
Similarly, those idiots who fear whites will become a minority in western countries SOON™ seem, to me, to implicitly agree that minorities are treated like shit, and what they’re *really *afraid of is to be treated the way they treat others right now. Which I admit is a scary thought, but somehow they never quite make the next logical step, i.e. “maybe… maybe we oughta shoulda not treat *anybody *like shit at all ? Wouldn’t that solve the issue ?”
I remember a ‘debate’ between William Buckley and Jerry Folwell about drugs back in the 1980’s.
Folwell said that if cocaine were legalized, everyone would be doing cocaine.
Buckley declared that he would not be doing it and asked Folwell if he would be.
Pretty much the same here. “If anyone can be gay, everyone will be gay!”
“Ok, so you’d be gay if you could?”
Trump voters don’t like Trump, but they like what he does. He has put a conservative on the Supreme Court bench. He has taken a hard line against illegal immigration. He has normalized bigotry and created a safe space for it. Of utmost importance, he has allowed white conservatives to feel like they have more control over their country again.
It’s great that they shout how godless, evil, etc. she is but the worst thing she’s ever done? She’s a far better Christian than they are.
The part I bolded is the most important thing for them. They simply do not want the United States to be the minorities’ country too. They want the country to be all for them. And I include religious minorities in that mix. I’m still peeved that any Latter-day Saint voted for the twerp occupying the White House. The bigoted majority do not want the Mormons to be part of the “real country” either.
You do realize that emails generally go from one person to another, right? So even if Clinton deleted them from her server, all it would take is one person coming forward and saying, “Hey, I got this email a while back from Clinton”. Out of over a hundred with classified information and 33,000 total.
…No, actually, they wouldn’t be, because this is one of those statutes that gets enforced inconsistently at best. Let’s take it from the FBI:
FBI Director James Comey said his agents found no evidence that Clinton knowingly broke the law. Only a “very small number” of the classified e-mails she sent or received were marked as classified, he noted.
[…]
On that question, Comey relied on precedent. He asked whether prosecutors typically file criminal charges in similar situations, and he found the answer was no:
“All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a away as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”
So, to put it bluntly, no, if that had been anyone else, they wouldn’t be in jail. At least, that’s what the FBI, and the republican head of the FBI, says.
Sure. It is claimed that they can last for “millennia”. But for the nastiest of nuclear by-products, this just isn’t long enough. Some of these materials remain a threat for orders of magnitude longer than the current total of recorded human history. Humanity may cease to exist and these things will still be laying around. Or humanity will forget about them. Some people may think that it is ok to poison a future in which we are long gone, but I find that to be irresponsible and even immoral.
In many forward looking alchemical communities, lead isn’t considered worthless, it is considered tomorrow’s gold. That statement is only a little more crazy, only a little less true. Sure, you may be right, we may figure out a way to reprocess all of this waste and have a great time with energy in the future. But I don’t like to make decisions like this based on wishful/hopeful thinking. The alternative is- nope, we didn’t, and now we have introduced into the world all of this eternal nuclear waste.
It has been awhile, but I did some reading on pebble bed reactors. The fuel starts out in a sort of glass, like pebbles. The reaction can be modulated by adding or removing uranium pebbles. It is rather accident-proof- take away the coolant and you just have a really hot pile of nuclear pebbles, apparently they won’t ‘melt down’. The plants themselves are almost like bunkers, so they would be difficult to terrorize. You’d pretty much have to blow one up from underneath to get to a Chernobyl type disaster, and maybe not even then.
So, there’s the waste, and there is the risk of an incredibly destructive accident. Fix both of those issues and nuclear isn’t so scary. As it stands, it seems like we get a major nuclear accident every decade or two. I’m not sure it is worth it at this point.
Could go either way. Could be like marijuana where R&D is unleashed and people’s lives get better. Or it could be lax regulation like in the oil industry, and we get the nuclear version of Deepwater Horizon. I am made uneasy by the intersection of the propagandistic one-liner “Regulations r bad!” and nuclear reactors.
Sure, but at least that is a human timescale. We can reasonably expect some places to stay stable for that long. 100,000 years? 500,000? Not so much. But currently, the waste is mostly kept on site, waiting for a better idea.
Ha. You’re seeing the decay of my writing there as I run out of time. I’m often absurdly busy and generally posting in haste. I can’t always check in even once a day. I had to wrap it up.
I read about the non-decaying dead things of Chernobyl in Harper’s years ago. I would not be able to produce a cite, so I didn’t want to present it as gospel. And I’m not sure what kind of disaster follows from the release of stored nuclear waste, and I sure as hell don’t want to find out the hard way. Nuclear reactors are Just Dangerous Enough to creep me out, given the chance that they will spew forth nuclear waste &etc. I do have a NIMBY attitude towards it all.
I did find out a little about these things- I have a college minor in physics, enough to follow these conversations and also enough to realize that a real nuclear scientist is on a whole other level of understanding about these things. I probably should not have the last word on questions of nuclear policy, but then again people who know less than me (think orange, gibbonish) Do think they should have the last word, and so I better speak up. Such is our world today.
postpic200, if you’re still reading this thread, I hope you’re willing to answer the question being posed:
It’s understood that HRC had serious shortcomings and I completely understand why someone would feel that she did not deserve their vote. That said, given Trump’s severe character flaws, many of them mentioned in this very thread, why do you feel that he was deserving of your vote? What specifically motivated you to come out to vote in the last election? Inquiring minds want to know.
My very religious grandma voted against Hillary because she doesn’t believe women should be in leadership roles. I’m told that she suspects Donald Trump is not a good person, but he is against abortion, so she voted for him.
My mother has been a die-hard Hillary-hater for years, I don’t know why. My other relatives are unrepentant racists.
I don’t wish any ill will towards your grandma, but if it does turn out to be true that he paid a woman 1.2 million to have an abortion, I suspect that she will blame the woman, as if Trump had nothing to do with it at all. That seems to be how Trump supporters roll.
What Donald Trump has done in his private or public life is of absolutely no concern to Trump’s voters. What matters is that, as an executive, he’s in a position to carry into effect the kinds of laws, rules, and regulations that have some sort of perceived benefit for themselves as voters. That benefit could be nothing more than feeling a little better feeling even just slightly more comfortable in their position at the top of the socioeconomic pecking order. Or that benefit could be living in a society that has fewer abortions. Or a society where police can rough people up and get away with it. They do not give a drop of ant piss about Trump the person – their vote isn’t about him. People do not vote for politicians simply because they respect them; they for politicians based on how they think they will personally benefit, whether the benefit is progressive-minded people taking satisfaction in an equal opportunity society or regressive-minded people living in society where they can stack the deck in their favor. That’s it - the alpha and the omega. And that’s all it ever was and all it ever will be about.
And yet, everything Democrats have done in their public or private lives is their concern, so the hypocrisy comes across clear and bright.
Trump cheating on his wife while she’s pregnant? Private matter, none of our concern.
However, the following apparently ARE public concerns;
What two people do in their bedroom.
Someone smoking weed.
A woman having an abortion.
What religion someone practices (if it isn’t the right flavor of Christianity)
Yeah, we notice the glaring hypocrisy in these things.
More than millenia. I’ve been to places where the rock is several billion years old, and vitrified glass is more durable than that. If we really want to dispose of it, we can toss it into oceanic trenches, and let it get recycled with all the other stuff in the mantle. Otherwise, it will sit around and be even more eternal than the mountains.
This is more than a little unfair of a comparison. During the times when alchemy was going, people didn’t know anything about what they were doing, and were just trying things more or less at random. There is no equivalence whatsoever between alchemy and modern nuclear physics.
With nuclear, we know exactly what is going on with the reactions and everything about the physics, it is just a matter of engineering. There are several ways of ensuring that no actinides get into the waste, and how to best recycle them to get the most fuel out of them. What the best way is is still up for debate, but whether or not it is possible is not, very much unlike alchemical ideas from when we were ignorant about even molecular structure, much less the mastery of the atomic and even subatomic scales we have now.
It is not wishful/hopeful thinking. It is thinking that is grounded in very real and very well understood physics. Basing decisions on very well understood principles is how you should like to make decisions. That you would consider an alchemical claim to be almost as true as a claim based on extremely well grounded science is not a reflection on the science, but only of your understanding of it.
Pebble beds are one of the platforms that is being looked at, I prefer Molten Salt, but there are a number of methods of safely operating a fission plant to produce power with no long lived waste products.
Nice thing about molten salt, they are already melted down, so you don’t need to worry about that.
Far more people are killed in every other form of electricity generation than in nuclear. Even the current generation plants are safer than the ones like chernobyl, and we have even safer on the way. Coal plants release more radiation in their normal operation than nuclear plants release in a crisis. Fukushima wasn’t an isolated event, it was caused by a tsunami that killed lots of people, cause massive destruction, and the only reason that there was a problem was because they didn’t have power. The reactor was fine. Had they put the backup generators where they weren’t flooded, or not use a protocol that is made specifically to make people feel safe, rather than to make them safe, where with the slightest tremor, the reactor is shut down, then nothing at all noticeable would have happened. 3 mile was nothing. It was a small industrial accident that released negligible amounts of radiation to the atmosphere. Chernobyl was bad, sure, but that was a poorly designed reactor that was being poorly run, and is a good example of why managers should listen to their engineers, rather than the other way around.
The only reason that they are “major” is because they make the news because people are scared of nuclear. You have incidents like this one, and it doesn’t make the news very much, even though it caused far more damage.
The nuclear industry has been stagnating under a regime of regulations that do stifle improvements in technology. Get rid of all of 'em , hell no. But modify and change them in such ways that companies can actually do research and development, yes. I did not consider my post to be propaganda, and certainly not of the “one-liner” sort.
One of the things that annoys me most about the trump admin, and conservatives in general is when they talk about regulations. They say “we need to get rid of regulations! They are stifling our economy!” Or some such. Well, that’s not entirely untrue, regulations, by their nature, do mean that a less efficient process needs to be taken. It is cheaper to simply burn coal and let all the pollutants go into the atmosphere, and regulations that lower the sulfur and nitrogen compounds cost money to implement. So, you do have to look at regulations, and be sure that they are performing their intended purpose with as little collateral damage as possible.
Some regulations, however, are counterproductive. And the nuclear industry is full of them. They are written by people who are not nuclear engineers to assuage the fears of the public who have little information, but are scared of nuclear. So, they add in regulations that don’t make the plants any safer, and in some cases may compromise the safety to some extent, but they do add substantially to the cost of building, and prevent research into new designs. For instance, you have to have a primary, a back up, and a third redundant coolant loop system for your reactor. If you are building a molten salt reactor, you don’t need, nor want any of those things. Yet, they are required anyway by the regulations.
There is a phenonenom that I see time and time again. When you levy criticism of Trump towards a supporter, they reflexively make a Hillary reference. It’s so common it should have a term to describe it (…I got nothin’).
So, I don’t think it is possible to discuss the Trump vote without referencing Hillary; some serious plurality of his votes were “hell no!” votes against her.
And, I suspect, once having taken that position, many, many people (who are simply not into “politics” except during the election season) feel compelled to stand by their choice, lest they admit a mistake.
That really is a sad commentary on knowledge and information in this country. I strongly believe (and I’m sure I’m not alone) that it is managed and refined for maximum manipulation, so when people rely on “authority figures” to tell them things they are too busy, or too inept, to figure out on their own, they are at the mercy of liars.
Couple that with the fact that, in a democracy, everybody seems to think they are justified in being an “expert” on the government every 4 years, and you have an easy recipe for a lot of people making really stupid and self-destructive choices, over and over again, and then defending them to their last breath.
