defmacr0
1d ago
First person that comes to mind is Thomas Massie. The guy resonates with me on many levels and I do see him as a role model. His life story of making it as a successful electrical engineer, going back to homesteading a piece of land with an off-grid house he built himself and being one of the few politicians that I know of that seems to genuinely not have sacrificed his personal integrity.
Beyond that I would say Terence Tao absolutely deserves any and all recognition. But honestly, picking a celebrity, I have a bit of trouble. I guess gut feeling I'll also pick Whitney Webb as one of the best reporters on Epstein and his networks.
defmacr0
5d ago
I have a friend who pretty closely fits the description. I don't know if he fully deserves the conservative label I suppose, but he's an atheist and strict vegan. He's pretty well read in Western philosophy, though he seems to gravitate towards thinkers that I'm personally skeptical of, especially Hegel, though I don't really care enough to study him and other historicist philosophers to really have a substantive debate with him, beyond the bad vibes i suppose. Relatedly, he seems to occasionally be sympathetic towards some socialist economic theories, where we have the opposite situation in terms of how well-informed I consider myself vs. him. However, on all the other culture war issues he's way in the conservative camp.
On the dating thing, I think he should realize that if a woman likes and respects her man, she will adopt his values or at least change to become more compatible with them. Speaking also from personal experience, having impossibly high standards like this is also a way to rationalize avoidant behavior, stemming from anxiety about interacting with the opposite gender.
The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.
I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.
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