Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
"After" Postmodernism is a little difficult, as can be inferred from the name (and the many gravestones with stuff like "postpostmodern", "metamodernism", "new sincerity", etc. written on them). A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being. I see the modern rise of intellectual religiosity as fitting in just fine with the Postmodern schema, in that none of these movements have any chance to take over society, but recreate grand narratives for individuals that give them real existential satisfaction (I like Justin Murphy's term for these movements: "Reality Entrepreneurs"). The key is that it doesn't change the wider narrative anarchy, and doesn't salve the pain for people who feel the need for a societally-shared grand narrative, but constructs a refuge within that anarchy. So I wouldn't call it truly post-Postmodern, more a way of living within Postmodern anarchy.
To address @FiveHourMarathon 's point about capitalism, I believe that this was all downstream of modern technology, and that whatever comes next will probably be determined by the development of technology - currently, it looks like AI will be the decisive change, if there is one coming. The only post-capitalist future which is not a return to 20th Century totalitarianism/hellwars is some kind of AI future. Intelligence begins in humans, leaps off into technocapital, and then discards that inefficient substrate to become truly disembodied. Once intelligence is autonomous and ahuman, and we no longer have the historical task of being its bootloader, what do we do? That's the sort of question that can reignite a grand narrative, perhaps.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I'll be honest, I skim a lot of their schizo stuff and art riffing to get to the paragraphs where they get back to more rigorous theorizing. Unlike some "theorists", they're capable of rigor, they just don't want to do it - rigor is a tree, rigor is the State, rigor is the Face of Bronze Age Gods, etc. - but they also include a lot of injunctions against mindlessly going schizo and tearing off in whatever direction you want.
The really really bad stuff is largely outside of capital-P Philosophy, anyway (though there's a lot of bad Continental philosophy). It's in social theory, psychoanalysis, media/identity studies, and other places where you're just supposed to sound wild and have the Correct Politics to get tenure.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Forest Passage is the late Junger's most straightforward work (not to say it is straightforward!), and the closest thing to an anarch's manifesto. Hope you will enjoy and always happy to discuss.
I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?
So think about the Professional Conversationalist scene at the start, and then the conversation between the Wraith and Gately at the end - JOI is desperate to communicate, but he can't get past Hal's interior walls and really speak to him. The postmodern novelist is in the same predicament, nothing he writes can cross the walls of detachment within himself and the reader. He creates the Entertainment as a way to communicate, but it only produces all-consuming obsession (n.b. we never truly know if the Entertainment is absolute bliss, or if it's simply that withdrawal from it is immeasurably painful). I think the Entertainment is both the capacity of media/Substance consumption to consume human life, and also a sincere attempt from JOI to escape that. And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.
This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek.
Yeah this is definitely a compelling reading. Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them. I'm not sure I buy that, but will be looking for that on the next read. The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.
If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?
I would say Stop All The Clocks is probably the most paradigmatic. It's set in New York, it's got questions about art and AI, it's got the conspiracy angle. It also tones down the annoying tics that other similar novels have (I read three that all did the same bit about iPad tips being set too high, and the cod-Pynchon maximalism of a lot of these books never lands with me). Alternatively, pick up a copy of The End and get a buffet - they are print-only (though I believe pdfs used to be on their website), but you can preorder the next issue in the link from their Instagram bio.
P.S. You may enjoy this cartoon
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Make sure to read the Stuart Hood translation.
I strongly disagree and much prefer the NYRB translation, but a sign of a strong novel that we can disagree on the translation but both love the book. Given the method, you may enjoy Junger's book on drugs, Approaches (not my favourite of his but has some interesting stuff).
Serious reading! Found your take on Junger interesting (fyi, his son was sent to a penal battalion for making anti-Nazi remarks, and killed in Italy either by partisans or the SS). After the war, his anti-authoritarian writings become less allegorical and more straightforward, I think in part because he wished he could have taught his son better in the arts of subterfuge. I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it - though the first time I read it I was too blown away by the prose to see anything but beauty. Likewise, my DMs are always open for questions/thoughts re: Junger, and my invitation to that reading group discord server continues to stand.
On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity. He sees his role as somewhere between as JOI (literally, Himself) trying to communicate to Hal, and an AA sponsor trying to demonstrate to a Newcomer why the steps and slogans and meetings and so on are so meaningful. As such, he tries all kinds of crazy stuff to get the reader to really hear him; I think even the difficulty of the book is an attempt to get you sucked in and caring about it in a way that you wouldn't for a traditional narrative.
Highlights of my reading this year:
- Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus. Extremely difficult, but has given me an entire new conceptual vocabulary and philosophical lense, which is an incredibly rare thing to find after an otherwise wide-ranging philosophical education.
- Plutarch's Lives: Perhaps the greatest historical work ever written? But also, not a true history - it's fundamentally a philosophical book about human character, human greatness, and human folly. Plutarch is concerned with what it is to be human, and what types of men make their mark on history, and his Lives are deeply-painted portraits of character.
- Paul Fussell: The Great War and Modern Memory. An artistic/literary history of WWI, which goes deep into the aesthetic and conceptual world of its combatants, both what they brought into the War and what emerged. Really excellent, though heavily focused on the Allies (German writers other than Junger are barely mentioned, and the Eastern and colonial fronts footnotes to the Western)
- Malcolm Cowley: The Exiles' Return. The same story from another perspective, Cowley is writing a retrospective of the Lost Generation of American writers, who often experienced the War as noncombatant volunteers and then bounced between Greenwich Village and interwar Europe.
- Michael Farrell: Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work. An academic book on how circles of artists and writers form, organize themselves, and find common patterns of social roles within the group. Mostly made up of case studies on particular circles, like the Inklings and Impressionists, and I found the author's theories mostly compelling. The Freud chapter doesn't really work, because it focuses on a dyad rather than a group, and the feminist chapter is clearly just there to be PC, but a good read for anyone in creative spaces looking to improve them.
- Contemporary alt-lit: I'll do a longer effortpost on this after a few more books, but I've been reading a lot of stuff from The Scene, Dimes Square, Based Publishing, etc. The ones worth reading so far are Noah Kumin's Stop All The Clocks (just a very good read. Even my boomer parents enjoyed it), Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers (emotionally powerful, ruined my weekend), Daniel Matthew's Pervertathon (sometimes not as funny as it wants to be, but the ending is the only time this year I've burst into uncontrollable laughter at a book), Calvin Westra's various short books (experimental stuff pulled off perfectly), Mike Ma (even if he now feels a little less contemporary), and The End magazine (short fiction). I can't speak for Passage Press's new authors, since my black friday bundle is still being shipped, but I've heard most of them read short stories/excerpts and am excited to - Justin Lee in particular.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
The video is of Destiny performing fellatio on an unknown man, which was claimed to be Fuentes when the video leaked.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Yeah, absolutely. Heidegger gets a lot of stick for writing in 'Heideggerese', particularly in Being and Time. But what he's doing is carefully building his own set of technical terminology, because he believes existing philosophical terminology has been corrupted by a misguided tradition, covered in layers of implicit association from previous philosophers. So, take the 'care structure' as a famous example. Heidegger writes:
"The being of Dasein means being-ahead-of-itself-already-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered). This being fills in the significance of the word care, which is used in a purely ontological and existential way. Any ontically intended tendency of being, such as worry or carefreeness, is ruled out."
Now, this can read like a mouthful of nonsense. But the way he gets there is by very precisely defining each atomic component of these terms, and then constructing logical relationships between them such that they all fit into place. In fact, the opening of Being and Time is dedicated to explaining why and how he intends to use this method, and going into further detail (e.g. he explains why he goes from logic to example and back, in a kind of spiral where each phase checks the assumptions of the other). Back in undergrad, I was forced to do the "fun" exercise of translating passages from Kant into formal logic, so for instance you replace objects and properties with letters, write the argument as a logical proof, and see if it checks out (it always did, after correcting my errors, it's Kant). If you did the same thing to Being and Time, Heidegger would be just as logically sound - he doesn't make leaps of logic, he doesn't posit arbitrary things in the middle of his arguments to make them fit together, and his terms always mean the same thing, though the definitions are deepened over the book. Even at the one point where he appeals to Greek myth, he does that to explain why he uses the particular word "care", not because Zeus revealed it to him. A contrast to this would be Deleuze and Guattari: I think they're amazing, but they actively make wild leaps of logic, appeal to Moby Dick and horror movies as philosophical authorities, and actively resist giving their terms a single, precise meaning. That's the sort of continental philosophy people love to hate - Heidegger is just good philosophy done in an alien language.
As for why I say more consistent, that's just because doing any good philosophy is really, really hard, and analytics are only human. Even when they're trying to be as logical as possible, and not all of them are, they slip up. And whereas Heidegger is building his terminology from the ground up, analytics are working in a tradition where their terms have all kinds of arguments, confusions, shades of meaning, etc. baked into them. They have certainly noticed the skulls; much of analytic philosophy is about being hyper-aware of this.
It's true that Heidegger takes a more mystical turn in his later writings. But I think that we need to read this as a man capable of doing some of the greatest logical philosophy of his age explicitly choosing to take a mystical direction. He believed the project of Being and Time had failed, that its approach was not sufficient to capture subjects so great. He was also more interested in speaking to non-academic audiences (partly, he was banned from teaching, but at that point he also saw outreach to non-academics as more important. His Bremen Lectures on technology were given to an audience of industrialists, engineers, scientists, etc., his Zollikon lectures on psychology were given to an audience of psychiatrists and psychiatry students).
In fact, if this has piqued anybody's interest, I would recommend starting with the essay version of the Bremen Lectures, collected and translated as a book titled The Question Concerning Technology (unfortunately, it does not include the first, most mystical lecture, The Thing, which is in a book titled Poetry, Language, Thought). William Lovitt's translation is the perfect introduction to reading Heidegger because, when Heidegger introduces a new term, Lovitt generally includes an extensive footnote breaking down the German words involved, their precise connotations, and explaining why Heidegger may have chosen that term. It both removes a lot of room for misinterpretation and trains you to see Heidegger's terms as specific units of meaning to hold in your head as you read. If you'd like some non-partisan testimony, at this point I have browbeaten pretty much all my physicist friends into reading the essays Science and Reflection/The Age of the World-Picture from that book - all of them enjoyed it and generally said that Heidegger really gets how physicists see science (you'd hope so, given Heidegger's long friendship and collaboration with Werner Heisenberg).
How exactly would you have no similarity to people who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste when YOU haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste?
You're not seeing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the essence of modern man is a commitment to moving forward, to striving for improvement, such that we can solve problems in the future we can't solve now. Without that, the only thing left for humanity is to stagnate, run out of energy, and eventually regress back into apes. I have sympathy for potential future descendants on the ape-path, but I wouldn't sacrifice even a cent of the next generation's prosperity to ease that benighted future.
The USA is currently stagnating and regressing right now.
We agree on this. I'm not happy about it at all. If nuclear, even financially unprofitable nuclear, would help, we should go all in on it. If it doesn't, we shouldn't.
Do you know what the climate of the western Nevada desert is going to look like in a thousand years? At current levels of global warming, there's a decent chance that the desert could actually be green in a thousand years.
I'm not a paleoclimatology expert, but my understanding is that it will never, ever be green, because the limiting factor isn't temperature, it's that it's a high desert where mountains on both sides intercept any humid air. A sort of double rain shadow effect. It doesn't matter. There are a lot of seismically inactive, human-worthless places we could bury waste, such that any one not working just means we find another. Put it in the Canadian Shield, far up enough that if climate change the area profitable for large-scale civilization most of the world is already screwed. Put it in Siberia. Get rid of the country of New Zealand - I never liked those hobbit bastards. Any of these options are trivial sacrifices compared to the promise of nuclear energy, if that promise is real.
If you want to disprove my argument, simply point to the successful nuclear program that is currently generating power at a profit healthy enough that it does not need any government subsidies. That's all you need to completely destroy my position!
I think this is where we disagree. Perhaps I haven't been clear at getting my position across, and so you see me as some generic opponent. What I want to do here is to disaggregate the arguments you're making. Here:
- Nuclear power is not cost-effective. This is the one I'm interested in. I've talked to a fair few experts in the field who are nuclear-skeptical without being anti-nuke fanatics, and this is the biggest one. The capex and maintenance of a nuke plant is far, far higher than comparable alternatives. We can argue whether that's necessity or regulation, and look at cost comparisons between the US, where it's illegal to build anything, France, Canada, China, etc., but this is a genuinely interesting question that deserves a lot of consideration. It would also explain why nuclear power needs subsidies in practice, if it does in fact need them due to inherent economics and not due to excessive regulation.
- Nuclear power isn't cost-effective because uranium is expensive. I think this is nonsense. Per wiki, raw uranium amounted to 14% of average operating costs in 2014. To be fair, the uranium price has risen mildly since then, mostly on speculative moves related to China's buildout (at least, according to the commodity traders involved). This margin simply cannot explain nuclear's profitability (if the French are getting it for free) or lack of profitability (if we aren't) compared to other sources. Oil/gas regularly skyrocket above/below that 14% margin. It has to be capex or non-fuel opex, the fuel cost argument makes no sense.
- Nuclear power isn't cost-effective because of waste disposal. This is purely political. We can't dispose of nuclear waste cheaply in a "good enough" way because boomers are scared because communists can't even boil water right. As for disposing of nuclear waste in a way that we won't poison some mad max caveman in a thousand years - you've seen my argument.
- Nuclear is not cost-competitive with renewables. This makes sense to me in the long run. But we have to get there, and we need baseload power until then. Nuclear, in an ideal world where we can just wave away the regulators killing it, is a way to bootstrap ourselves into that renewable future, over the course of a hundred years or so.
1 is interesting and really makes me chew on my own thinking. 2 and 3, to me, do not hold up, and I haven't heard a single argument from you that adequately reinforces them. 4 is a question of strategy that depends on 1 (but isn't entirely dependent - if nuclear power is only somewhat unprofitable, it makes more sense to subsidize it than it does solar panels). The sense I get is that you are just motivated to believe every negative thing you can find about nuclear power at once, and don't really care whether or not they fit together, and so you're not able to make a strong and focused case against it. If I'm wrong, I hope you stick around and provide an alternative perspective to the forum.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Your "lived experience" of the UK is also a tremendously narrow sliver, and trying to style on the burgers with it is unimpressive.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Far right guy here: I get whiskey dick real bad. For instance, 2am on Halloween night I was fingering a happy blonde mermaid in the alley behind a bar, but when the time came to push her up against the dumpster, I was a gummy worm. Shriveled and timid as a leftist's soul. The cold, too. I kept turning her around and shoving her on her knees just so I could feel some, any warmth on those sensitive bits of the inner thigh. She might have choked a little but I needed thermal energy more than she needed air. In the morning I was smashed into bed by my hangover and my chest hair was full of mermaid glitter, but my dick remained a proud incel. Hitler would never have let this happen to me; Donald Trump will make sure it never happens again. Donald Trump will deport whiskey dick.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Good story - I imagine TLP went through similar ones on the way to forming his theories. Now, as the resident Heidegger guy, I have to comment: Heidegger fucked the 18-year-old Hannah Arendt, and well enough that she defended him before a denazification tribunal twenty years later. I don't think he needed dating apps to know this stuff. And, of course, Heidegger is far more thorough, autistic, and consistent than analytic philosophers, probably one reason why they seethe about him.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
The funny thing is I'm pretty sure it's not about the money, it's about the hassle of putting your credit card in. You could charge 1c/yr for your forum and your conversion rate would still be single digit because people just don't like paying for stuff.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
To be fair, that was the main reason to become a literature professor up until the current year (which may have something to do with the current state of literature professors).
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Ask the Macedonian Phalanx - or for a modern example, it's worth studying elite theory.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I agree. But note that nothing you have said has anything to do with UK elites (who all hate and fear the free market except insofar as it brings foreign capital into London).
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.
I get that. But, as a modern man, I would have no similarity to descendants a thousand years in the future who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste. Maybe they've regressed to feudal peasantry, maybe they're killing each other over the last hydrocarbons - it doesn't matter. They might as well be animals. To share values with us as modern men is to move forward and overcome problems, not to stagnate and regress. I would have nothing but contempt for my descendants if they're mindlessly drinking the runoff from a nuclear waste dump, dressed in furs and oxhide; let the dying sun swallow them.
What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future.
Please, tell me what dreadfully important ecosystems draw on the western Nevada desert for water? It's a desert for a reason. We have an awful lot of waste land going, and we could easily find the most useless parts of it and drill deep holes, if it wasn't for the eternal whining of the native bitter-enders still living out there. We can also just bury it in the Canadian Shield in some area where the watershed drains north, I'd assume the post-apocalyptic Inuit would be happy to hunt walruses that glow in the dark.
That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain.
At this point I'm starting to take you less seriously. Do you actually believe that the storage of depleted nuclear waste deep underground, leaching through the groundwater to aquifers over the centuries, and then to the ocean, diluted in billions of gallons of water, is going to turn into radioactive rain?
having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium
Raw Uranium is currently $75/lb after China's big buildout has been priced in. Double or triple that to get it in the reactor, and it's still not a major cost in nuclear's economics. It's all capital costs for building and decommissioning, running costs are a rounding error. I'm very open to the argument that the cost of building nuclear power isn't due to excessive regulation, but due to the inherent difficulty of containing a nuclear reaction in a safe vessel. But if your argument for why France's program is cheaper is because the least economically important input is slightly cheaper than getting it from Australia, I think you need better arguments.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Yeah, I'm biased, as someone deeply attracted to a will to power in women, but that's the next level up of concern. I can't imagine settling for a femoid whose dream in life is to trade in wall-to-wall beige carpets for grey walls and lighter-grey floorboards.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
So, I never liked the Social Contract, I think it's largely motivated by Rousseau coping about getting kicked out of Geneva, but the "General Will" was wildly misinterpreted by his revolutionary followers. The General Will can only legislate general laws, based on the idea that the population as a whole will come to the best solutions if it isn't tempted by faction, but is forced to consider full collective self-interest. In that respect, the General Will is entirely compatible with the American idea that the Constitution and Constitutional procedure is the essence of legitimate governance, in that, even with full popular sovereignty, whatever is done under the Constitution must be done according to general laws (e.g. the Amendments clause). The General Will is not a blank check for elites, but something closer to Kant's Categorical Imperative, that one should "act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law".
More generally, scholars of both the left and right radically overstate how much Rousseau broke with previous traditions. The Emile is an extraordinarily Classicizing, even reactionary text; he says that man in the state of nature is little different from an ape; amour-propre is a prototype of the Anglo concept of enlightened self-interest. Both leftist and conservative modern readings of Rousseau are understandable, given the abuse of Rousseau in the Revolution, but about as accurate as talking about Nietzsche endorsing the Aryan Race.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
It's pure paranoia. The writing is a little clunky, but it's a distinctly human clunkiness of someone trying to write in a formal register because they believe what they're saying is important and should be stated in prose appropriate to important things. An AI would be polished but soulless, this is soulful but unpolished.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Oh no, the United States has earned the contempt of David Aaronovitch, Anatole Kaletsky, Caitlin Moran, your friends, maybe even Zanny or Xanny or whatever her name is. The Brit chattering classes are talking tough because their pride, what's left of it, has been deeply wounded, but more in the manner of a scrawny kid who just got wedgied/swirlied/etc. by the jock twice his size. Oh he's gonna kick his ass someday, he's gonna go all out, he did karate lessons! The reality is, there is no pares going on. There's a financial sector that could always evaporate overnight, hooked up to an economy about as dynamic as East Germany, with an ever-shrinking military who, by the way, are starting to despise the London types. The French have a claim to freedom of action, Germany had one until recently, but the only way the UK can stay relevant is clinging to America. Hence the equivocation between "Brits are malding" and "the EU should do something".
If you are in the UK, and want to do something that matters to thumb your nose at the US, volunteer for Democrats Abroad or donate to some outlet like the Guardian that Democratic voters read. Seething from the cuck chair of history isn't going to get you anywhere.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Hobbes talks about this, and it's one of the basic foundations of Enlightenment republican thought, that no man knows the business of another so well that he can reliably claim the right of rule over him just by superior knowledge. It was only in the 20th Century that intellectuals became so detached and naïve that they thought, for instance, that they knew farming better than farmers, and, to be fair, only a few million had to die before experts settled on "let's give them better technology, educate them on techniques, and let them make the decisions on how to implement it." But the generations rotate, the lessons of common sense are forgotten, and now the experts are sure that they know best again.
I accept the point against democracy in general, but, if we are to have a democracy, better the ordinary people than the official class that democracy creates.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Submission is a good book, but just as horny as Platform (as is almost all of Houellebecq's work).
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025. Yeah, I care somewhat about these hypothetical people, but not so much that I would sacrifice real gains for my children and grandchildren because someday, in a scenario of civilizational collapse where they're all fucked anyway, one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it. The reality is, either we keep going along the trajectory of technological progress, or life for our descendants will be so much worse that nuclear waste will be the least of their troubles, and I'm happy to judge them for failing the project of human civilization.
What snark?
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants. Come on, man, you knew exactly what you were saying when you wrote that sentence.
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters - even if I disagree with your position, seeing you argue that will be productive and we can learn new things. I'm saying that the long-term waste storage argument is an irrelevant distraction from the cost argument.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
(If you don't mind her weighing 250lbs)
Well, the idea that Greeks are better than Romans might have raised some hackles, and Plutarch did have his political career to think about. But I don't know the exact situation in Greece under the Flavian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties, it could have been that valorizing the Greeks under Hadrian was the classy thing to do. I suspect Strauss was reaching with that one, it was only a casual remark to students.
I tell my populist friends all the time that this is something to meditate on, that these things are long-term processes and we are definitely at the Gracchi stage rather than the Caesar one.
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