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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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Alright I want to talk about nuclear.

Ever since I studied it in high school I've been into nuclear, and shocked as to why we don't build more of it. Trump and Elon discussed nuclear energy in their discussion, and JD Vance apparently endorsed it during the VP debate.

Let's say Trump wins the election - what are the odds his administration actually gets some new reactors built, or at least started? I'd like to say I'm optimistic, but given the US track record for building things it's hard to believe it could actually happen.

People who are more familiar with the process of building these things, please let me know - what chances do we have?

Everyone else - how do you feel about nuclear energy? Are you surprised it's finally a CW topic?

EDIT: as a commenter mentioned, this discussion is happening in Europe as well.

I'm a physicist who's always loved it. I'm surprised. But I'll note that this is not an USA phenomenon. Worldwide attitudes have changed in multiple countries first, UWA is just jumping on the bandwagon.

Personally I think the impetus was Europe getting slapped in the face with the reality of energy shortages. The German Green disastrous shutdown of the German nuclear plant. Following by a European debate (https://www.ft.com/video/864a8145-0862-48a8-a7a9-d3e338d3177e) and an Australian debate (https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-power-in-australia).

Ahh true I didn't think to mention that other countries are discussing it, although the lift seems bigger in Europe than the U.S. Maybe not since they can actually build stuff though.

Note than Europe it has not progressed beyond vibes and campaign promises. Still, progress that politician promise to build nuclear rather than promising to strangle nuclear.

True, I guess it shows the USA can still "just build" when it decides to.

The political problem with Nuclear shows one of the main problems with democracy.

When downside risk is a single major event, and not lots of spread out minor events than it becomes a lot more important in people's minds. Even when the costs of the minor events adds up to more than the costs of the major event.

This is clear on a bunch of metrics with nuclear, where the radiation released from a nuclear plant is less than the radiation released by a typical coal fired plant. Other metrics like deaths, safety incidents, spills, and particulate pollution are all the same.

When downside risk is a single major event, and not lots of spread out minor events than it becomes a lot more important in people's minds. Even when the costs of the minor events adds up to more than the costs of the major event.

Yeah I can see this. It's similar to the idea of optics in environmental stuff. If an animal is cute they get orders of magnitude more attention and funding to help preserve them even if they aren't nearly as important to the environment as some ugly bug.

When emotions come into play over large numbers of people things can get pretty wonky.

When emotions come into play over large numbers of people things can get pretty wonky.

The US just fed 5 trillion dollars to the fire because of mass hysteria over an uncommon cold and only suffered 20% inflation as a consequence.

If we actually wanted to build out nuclear, we would. We don't, because we can afford not to, and by the time we can't afford not to the US will be sufficiently Brazilified/South Africanized that it won't matter anyway.

But even nuclear disasters aren't that bad. Chernobyl killed a number of people somewhere in the double digits - easily within the bounds of disasters people consider perfectly tolerable for other things.

Nuclear power is the victim of bad vibes, not of anything so legible as its downside risks being localized rather than diffuse. Those bad vibes lead to insanity like the Linear No Threshold model of radiation injury that get you the "thousands dead" headlines - even though that model is, frankly, utter bollocks.

Also, Chernobyl, due to cost, used channel reactors that the West was already avoiding due to safety issues inherent to their design. The most-famous nuclear disaster was entirely avoidable when it occurred. Though I suppose political and economic pressures and human error pose some level of risk anywhere.

due to cost

I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I've also heard it suggested that the RBMK reactors were distinctly designed to be dual-use for plutonium (weapons) production. I'm not sure if that is somehow more difficult in a Western-style PWR, though. I know some of the (early) Western weapons projects (Oak Ridge, Windscale) used similar unpressureized reactors.

I am trusting Serhii Plokhy‘s book on Chernobyl regarding the USSR’s preference for cheaper reactors being the deciding factor. I’m not a nuclear engineer, either, so happy to consider additional aspects.

Being able to do partial replacement of fuel rods without shutting down a reactor is critical for bulk weapons-grade fuel enrichment, both to avoid the long cooldown processes from waiting for xenon poisoning to burn off, and because of increasingly bad plutonium isotope ratios caused by continued neutron flux exposure after a critical phase. RBMKs can do that, in ways that most other commonly-used reactor designs can't (while still having enough water pressure to generate industrially useful power, unlike the fully air-cooled Windscale and air-cooled-in-all-but-the-technical-sense X-10). See the Canadian CANDU reactor for a high-pressure variant of enrichment reactor.

While the RBMK wasn't finalized until after the USSR had started scaling back plutonium production, it's very plausible that the administration wanted to keep it as an option, especially as a 'deniable' option. That said, hot-fuel cycling does also have industrial and civil benefits, most directly in being able to provide slightly better uptime even with traditional fuel life cycles. And while some of the necessary compromises (most overtly the minimal secondary containment vessel aka building roof) probably made the disaster worse, most of them didn't make it happen to start with.

On the flip side, it was also much cheaper, and further corners were cut beyond the necessary minima for the design. Chernobyl's best known for the lackluster control rod design, but the extremely high void coefficient was entirely a cost-cutting measure and played a bigger role in the disaster starting. The physical containment being a simple generic building was unavoidable given the requirement for a big refueling crane, but it didn't need to be a glorified warehouse roof. The sketchy SCADA system was a matter of construction and development speed. So on.

If I had to bet, I'd say the costs (and speed of construction) were a bigger driver, but may not have been the only one.

I'm generally pro nuclear and think it should be persued as an energy source, but I recall a friend who was anti nuclear saying that there are issues with long term storage of nuclear waste. I'm not by any means an expert, but if we ramped up nuclear production could this be a long term problem?

There was at some point issues like that. Nowadays its more true that if something is releasing radiation, it can be used as a nuclear fuel source.

Similar concept with engines and biofuels. Early engines and modern hyper focused engines need clean perfect fuel for burning. Then along comes the diesel engine, and the fuel requirement is instead more like "will it burn". My loose understanding is that modern nuclear plant designs are closer to diesel engines.

Storage of nuclear waste fuel is not difficult, unless you choose to make it difficult. Which is what the environmental lobby has been trying to do for a long time.

You can just put it in a secure compound in the middle of nowhere. Places like Russia manage to do this correctly, the US can do it easily(we do not have a shortage of middle of nowhere).

No. The waste byproducts of nuclear energy are, by both volume and mass trivially small. You will see about 1/4 of the way down that link the waste products of 28 years of commercial reactor operation, this is immediately followed by the note that 97% of those waste products are recyclable. You can also see the lifespan of the remaining 3%, the truly nasty stuff that spews hard gamma radiation- 600 years. In 600 years, the nastiest, most lethal chunks of spent nuclear fuel have decayed to a sufficient degree that by current federal law you would require no protection to handle them, you could simply pick them up with your bare hands.

So, while 600 years is not nothing, its also not the "millenia and millenia" of danger that alarmist propaganda spews.

issues with long term storage of nuclear waste

Exactly how long-term?

there are issues with long term storage of nuclear waste

There were like 40 years ago. These days we have ways of "recycling" the "spent" fuel.

I think this is true.

The anecdote above about Microsoft restarting 3 Mile Island is evidence for it as well.

When one party (Microsoft) gets the benefits of nuclear power, then they have an incentive to use it. But when the benefits are spread out over the population, there isn't the same incentive.

Tragedy of the commons, I suppose.

Microsoft restarted the three miles island reactor. Energy heavy A.I. data centers will probably make use of nuclear energy to an extend.

The scaremongering is one thing, but practically cost is the bigger issue which might be related with scaremongering and erossion of skills.

The big bet is if costs can come down and if the emerging trend of smaller reactors proves economical enough. Its current biggest competition that is beating it is natural gas. Since nuclear energy lacks the negatives of solar/wind which require other energy sources to be used when they are down, it makes sense to invest in improving its effectiveness in terms of bringing down the costs. Current nuclear reactors are safe so that issue is handled.

The zero carbon agenda is the road to national self destruction. Deindustrialization and shutting down energy sources are a terrible idea. Green parties that have such an agenda must be investigated to see if they are funded by foreign powers which includes things like oikophobic ideology which is also disloyalty to your people's future well being. European countries should not agree that they should subsidize the developing world's adjustment, or that Europe should sacrifice its own energy needs for the sake of climate change goals.

The zero carbon agenda is the road to national self destruction. Deindustrialization and shutting down energy sources are a terrible idea. Green parties that have such an agenda must be investigated to see if they are funded by foreign powers which includes things like oikophobic ideology which is also disloyalty to your people's future well being. European countries should not agree that they should subsidize the developing world's adjustment, or that Europe should sacrifice its own energy needs for the sake of climate change goals.

Yeah Europe is really shooting itself in the foot, when it's already stumbling economically. I really do worry for the future of the EU.

I think another reason you don't mention that makes a lot of sense is the time to build, and the political polarization. If another party can get elected and just shut the whole thing down it makes it highly unfeasible.

Yeah Europe is really shooting itself in the foot, when it's already stumbling economically.

Well, they have American Fifth Columnists in their country without the cultural antibodies against American Fifth Columnists. Not that the Americans themselves are doing any better resisting them, but at least they're not stupid enough to listen to the watermelon environmentalists in military matters.

The only non-Combloc European country with a major nuclear buildout is the one that had the most cultural antibodies against the US, and remember that they started it under a military dictatorship (though the fact they followed through with it is significant as well).

I've heard an entirely sincere theory that a major underlying cause of the opposition to nuclear power in the public is that, when people think of nuclear power plants, their brain immediately goes to Homer Simpson (idiotic, careless, buffoonish, lazy and a habitual drunkard) and Charles Montgomery Burns (cost-cutting, shamelessly corrupt, bottomlessly greedy and unabashedly malevolent). Coupled with the fact that there are, to my knowledge, no well-known heroic fictional characters who work in the nuclear power industry. I honestly think it's a significant contributing factor at a minimum.

Co-creator Sam Simon has even personally apologised for how the show depicted the nuclear power industry.

A majority of Americans support nuclear power, and the support has been rising while The Simpsons has been on air.

Point taken. Ad hoc epicycle: the proportion of Americans who oppose nuclear energy is directly proportional to The Simpsons's ratings, and both have declined steeply in recent decades. Per your chart, the ratio of Americans who support:oppose nuclear power has been more or less constant since about 2010, shortly after the last time The Simpsons truly defined the zeitgeist (the release of The Simpsons Movie in 2007).

Still, as far as I can see The Simpsons continues to have a formidable chokehold in the American meme culture, probably the single most memetic show ever insofar as Twitter/Facebook, at least, seem to be concerned (of course these would not capture the current youth trends).

Perhaps, but the Simpsons started not too long after the lowest point of nuclear's public image (Chernobyl), so it's likely the only direction it could take was up from there, and I would think it possible that support for nuclear should have risen higher and faster if it was not for The Simpsons.

They should have moved Homer around. Show him working at a Savings & Loan, then a dot-com company, then a defence contractor, then FEMA, then an investment bank, then a cryptocurrency-company....

And it would have made perfect sense, given that it's already a running joke that Homer has had dozens of jobs in the course of the series. They should have moved him to a new "permanent" job every couple of seasons.

I don’t think that makes much sense. Simpson’s didn’t help that image, but there are a lot of big scary images of nuclear weapons being used, scare propaganda about the aftermath of nuclear war, which certainly don’t help the public image of nuclear power. Add in a few disasters (Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island) and as a power source it has an image problem that long predates Homer Simpson.

The thing about building new nuclear power is that you have to be willing to literally run over protesters. If you aren’t willing to literally run people over, they will physically block you from brining equipment to the site.

Make it a crime punishable by five years in prison. Remove them. Jail them.

Why go through all that trouble when you could run them over once and for all?

Because the train driver will have PTSD for a lot longer than five years.

(There is also the fact that the protester is still a human being.)

This isn’t ‘nam, this is bowling. There are rules.

You don't need to run them over. You just need to get the jackboots on the ground and forcefully incarcerate all of them.

You have to somehow get women on board:

In the May survey, men remain far more likely than women to favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity in the United States (70% vs. 44%). This pattern holds true among adults in both political parties.

Ahh interesting, didn't realize this was a gendered issue. Another unfortunate result of the 19th amendment, I suppose.

Not that it's a total wash, but still. The gendered breakdown of politics is always fascinating to me.

Such a Pew Research result is largely replicated by a Gallup Poll at 67% and 42% for men and women, respectively, as to support for nuclear energy.

It's amusing that abortion is viewed as the Final Boss of gendered issues. Meanwhile, abortion views are relatively balanced between the two sexes (at least when compressed to one axis), and something seemingly innocuous like nuclear energy is much more gendered.

Perhaps it's because, in a potentially rare instance of greater female variance, women are more bifurcated when it comes to "think of the babies!" and "her body her choice" such that it somewhat nets out. However, with regard to nuclear energy, women are on average more risk averse and are more memetic in receiving more of their cognitive cues from media and pop-culture, and thus automatically think of anything nuclear as evil and scary.

abortion views are relatively balanced between the two sexes (at least when compressed to one axis)

Source? According to Gallup, the pro-abortion side includes 63 percent of women but only 45 percent of men.

Pew: Respectively 61% vs. 64% for US men vs. women in 2024 for abortion to be legal in all/most cases, and 38% vs. 33% for illegal in all/most cases.

AP-NORC: 59% vs. 63% for US men vs. women in 2024, respectively, for abortion to be legal in their state for any reason.

Vox: Reinforces the similarity between US men and women when it comes to abortion as of 2019, and discusses how in 35 countries (Europe + US) abortion views are largely similar between men and women for abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Big reactors are gonna take decade+ time periods to get built no matter what the President says. There's definitely spaces on the margins to have impact -- President Obama's NRC Chair was hilariously bad, in particularly two-faced ways given the early Obama admin's pretense of creating nuclear jobs, and more subtly a number of pinch points in later construction are downstream of the US just not having the sort of large manufacturing capabilities outside of SpaceX. But the way the NRC works as an organization is built to make building big plants hard and slow, and like Ted Cruz or Rick Perry found facing the DOE, there's just not the political will. The EU is in a similar boat, maybe worse: the extent Germany has been taken over by complete anti-nuclear fever-dreams is hard to understate.

Actual small modular reactors... maybe. Even if the paperwork side can't be stripped down that much, the greater simplicity and lowered energy density should make them much faster to actually construct and to deploy. I'm not optimistic about the NRC recognizing pre-fab nuclear plants in my lifetime, but even getting it down to the level of something like an experimental kit aircraft would be a massive win. They won't be anywhere as efficient or showy as the big plants, but the distributed baseload capabilities actually have a lot of secondary benefits.

The tradeoff is that SMRs are a clusterfuck: a lot of the high-profile variants depend on new or novel technologies that may not survive first contact with the enemy, and a lot of the more boring technologies aren't getting enough of a time advantage to really focus resources on them.

I'm not an uncomplicated nuclear booster -- there are some genuine limitations to the technologies, and the early days of the US nuclear power world were Not Great Bob -- but it's been a culture war item for a long time, and it's tough to figure out why it broke down like it did. The Standard explanation for the United States is a combination of environmentalism, anti-war philosophy, and Soviet funding anchored it down among the Left, but these come across a little too pat: you don't see just the Soviet-suckers or hardcore environmentalists doing it, and people willing to buck them on other matters come crawling back to the roost when it comes to nuclear power. Instead, anti-nuclear power activists are bizarrely well-connected in specific ways that others from the same sketchy background aren't; we don't have people who fired rockets at pizza shops getting mid-level political appointments.

((Yet. Growth mindset.))

I think there's a lot of it's an accidents of history thing -- particularly successful anti-nuclear weapons activists pivoting through non-proliferation concerns into general anti-nuke power, Carter getting scared out of his gourd, the early atomic energy groups being particularly untrustworthy and caught in it. But that doesn't really help much.

Anti-nuclear was getting funding from the fossil fuel industry. This is a partial explanation for why generally rather ineffectual watermelons are so much more effective on this one topic.

Changing the rules so that the reactors can be build much quicker is possible and I'd like to see much more effort put into that, but the main issue is that elections still happen. A nuclear plant is a huge investment that will take decades to pay off, and at any point a Democrat who wants to make the green lobby happy (or just one who views nuclear as a Red issue and wants to stick it to their enemies) can come along and pass new regulations and mess everything up. You cannot build the reactors without investment, and you cannot get the investment if the whole thing can be wrecked next election. Even if they somehow got everything fast tracked instead of needlessly slowed down and you could go from zero to operational in 4 years (meaning you could get it done before the next election) changes to operating regulations would still be a major risk.

You'd need to get bipartisan support and I just don't see any path to getting Democrats on board. You'd think "nuclear is the only realistic way to replace carbon" would be a winning pitch, but the left never wants to compromise from its preferred vision, and its vision is solar and wind.

There's also an issue, post-Clinch River, where even if you can handle operating regulations changing, the feds can pull a license for any reason or no reason, and it doesn't count as a taking.

what are the odds his administration actually gets some new reactors built, or at least started?

His admin personally? Low. Someone else building reactors because his admin slashed permitting regulations? Pretty decent.

what are the odds his administration actually gets some new reactors built

Very low. On top of various regulatory burdens, nuclear has a major NIMBY problem where even people who like nuclear power often don't want it near them. Nuclear waste disposal facilities are even more contentious.

how do you feel about nuclear energy?

I think we should continue researching nuclear technology and keep active plants running. I have unreasonable hopes for the future of SMRs as well, but I think old school nuclear power's moment has passed and owes more present support to aesthetic preferences for mega-engineering and hippy-punching rather than practicality. We should have been building these plants 30 years ago, but as of right now solar + grid batteries is a vastly more fruitful line of investment (and that would remain true even if we magically slashed all the superfluous red tape (which we won't) and got a wizard to cast Protection from NIMBYs - a properly built nuke plant is still very expensive).

Very low. On top of various regulatory burdens, nuclear has a major NIMBY problem where even people who like nuclear power often don't want it near them. Nuclear waste disposal facilities are even more contentious.

Is that really true (or a practical problem)? When Sweden started seriously investigating the viability of building nuclear power after the most recent election they found that willingness of counties to host nuclear power plants really wasn't a problem. Plenty were very willing, both counties that already had plants and others.

Obviously not everyone wants to have nuclear in their county but that doesn't really matter.

I've been skimming the NRC documents looking for any plan they might have. It all looks like, "make the NRC better," with no statement anywhere I've seen about increasing or reducing nuclear power anywhere. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2207/ML22076A075.pdf

This was what I was looking for: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-small-modular-reactor-design

A coworker had a friend working on the project that got approval. It's the first approval in something like 50 years.

There's also this: https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-announces-900-million-accelerate-deployment-next-generation-light-water-small-modular

I have a feeling nuclear is not out of the fight yet and what you will see is something closer to municipalities, small regional utilities and large businesses investing in their own power generators using small scale modular reactors. I'm no expert though, so take it with a grain of salt.

It all looks like, "make the NRC better," with no statement anywhere I've seen about increasing or reducing nuclear power anywhere.

Yeah, that's a lot of the more frustrating bit around this stuff. For all that Sam Brinton turned out to be a creep and a kleptomaniac, even beforehand there was a pretty damning problem where Brinton was just another seat-filler anywhere it mattered.

I work in tax credits, amongst which are renewable energy tax credits(ITC/PTC) although I mostly work with the LIHTC group and in more of a build the investment management tools role than anything that gets real deep on the finances. I remember around when the IRA came out there were some pro-nuclear provisions and some excitement around maybe having that come up as a new product type but haven't heard much of it since. Although I will say the numbers were being run, if they come out right I do think investment is possible.

I think it's suffered from the same sort of Baumol's cost disease and general bureaucratic incompetance that have plagued all large infrastructure projects. So while it's tempting to say "we made a bunch of nuclear plants back in the 70s, we should be able to keep making them now" that might actually not be true. For the same reason that it's now impossible to build bullet trains, subways, or skyscrapers in western countries, at least not without spending absolutely absurd amounts of money. Even then, that might not be enough- California has spent $33 billion so far and not laid a single piece of rail. I imagine them trying to build a new nuclear plant these days would go similarly. Hell, even large solar installations get protested to death and cost overruns.

Skibboleth alluded to this point below: the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago when the cost/benefit made sense. In the intervening decades, money has poured into solar, wind, and more niche renewables, such that they are now well ahead in terms of marginal cost per unit of energy, even taking into account the intermittency downsides.

There's probably a ton of room for research into fission to produce similar advances, but the question you have to ask now is why? Renewables are already there. Other than an aesthetic preference for major engineering projects or a desire to poke greens in the eye, the only benefit is just to cover intermittency, but there are plenty of alternatives for that as well

the time to build nuclear was 30-40 years ago

The best time was 30-40 years ago. The second best time is now.

the only benefit is just to cover intermittency

"Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"

There's also the land use issue. A 1.21 GW nuclear plant takes up a lot less land than 1.21 GW of solar farms or wind turbines.

there are plenty of alternatives for that as well

Unfortunately, the numbers don't add up for any of them.

Most nations have some nuclear in their generation mix and will continue to have nuclear for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure anywhere in the West outside of France will have a significant percentage covered by it. Peaking plants will probably continue to be gas or hydro as nuclear is not suited for this purpose. But ultimately as with renewable generation, the investment in battery technology mean that storage plants and DERs are simply better placed in terms of cost/benefit again.

There's also the land use issue. A 1.21 GW nuclear plant takes up a lot less land than 1.21 GW of solar farms or wind turbines.

Yes, but at least for solar that's not that big a deal. There's a lot of big, empty, sunny land in the US. Thing is, environmentalists don't like building on it; I used to joke they'd complain about changing the albedo of the planet, but it turns out they actually do complain about that, along with the fragile desert ecosystems. And of course they don't like transmission lines either, which are kinda necessary to get the power to where you need it. And if you could get around the environmentalists, why would you bother with renewables? They're the ones blocking everything else, too.

but the question you have to ask now is why?

Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths. (Also, the environment is too important to leave to the Greens.)

Renewables are already there.

Not from a national security or domestic security perspective, they aren't. For the former, no Western country controls its own supply chain of solar panels or [to an extent] wind turbines; for nuclear, you can reprocess fuel (and don't even need much of it in the first place) and construction can't meaningfully be outsourced.

For the latter, I don't trust my political enemies not to intentionally destroy the alternatives to intermittency (because they're already trying to destroy the ability to build new natural gas turbines, which is the problem they're meant to solve) and turn the West into South Africa in service of their death cult. Not that nuclear isn't immune to this (since it's been done many times before in the US), but it's not something that obviously funds my political allies like coal/oil/natural gas does, so even if those things go away I believe my enemies are more likely to feel forced to continue funding a power grid that still works after 5 PM in the winter.

Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths

But renewable generation also requires engineering effort, why is that not playing to strengths? Fully solving issues related to storage, grid connection, forecasting, etc. will require plenty of engineering skill.

Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise so I can't comment on your second paragraph. Although the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation.

Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise

It's not an area of expertise for any Western country, either. So in 20 years when China has figured out that "hey, now that they're completely dependent on this product, and most of the PV panels we've sold have dropped below the replacement threshold for power output, time to jack up the price", now that cheap product has become a massive liability, just like how the natural gas supply in Europe was sacrificed to further US foreign policy goals in Ukraine.

the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation

Considering the US goes out of its way to encourage that domestic security issue in other Western countries, I agree- it's going to affect them more.

Helene will probably be a weekly topic until every last American is rescued or buried, so I will start the conversation now with the latest updates I am aware of:

Biden has ordered "500 active-duty troops with advanced technological assets to move into Western North Carolina." I'm not sure what "advanced technological assets" they are deploying, hopefully it's something like helicopters, bridges, and drones.

There are many people asking why did he wait over a week to deploy these troops. This question is somewhat unfair in itself. In the same document Biden reminds the American people that there are already 1,000 troops on the ground (though it's not clear to me if that is across the affected region or specifically in North Carolina. The numbers he gives for National Guard is the number across Florida to Tennessee.)

I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out. Young kids naked and crying for their parents, ropes still wrapped around their arms from where their parents desperately tied them to trees above water. People without a roof over their heads or potable water, sewers flooded, hornets unhoused, prime matter for disease and misery. Roads and bridges gone, and no easy path to rebuilding them in the same places due to the banks and cliffs they occupied being washed out.

My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.

In Greenville, SC, FEMA has taken over a runway with 10 helicopters that loitered all Sunday. For the past week, that runway was being utilized by private charities who were sending materials into the disaster area. Yesterday, it was out of commission for no visible or communicated reason.

Meanwhile, a Blackhawk helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?), North Carolina. Was it intentional? I hope not. But it displays a level of incompetence that boggles the mind.

All the details indicate to me that the Feds think they can just say, "X number of troops, time to deploy" and solve the problem. But there's no real leadership. No one making a plan to actually help people. The Military and National Guard is too slow and cumbersome. Private charities are able to respond quickly in a crisis, because they have a shorter chain of command and fewer rules. This might be a weakness, in that they will make more mistakes, possibly put their own people's lives at risk. But in the face of the disaster, maybe that is what is needed.

Meanwhile, an Apache helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?),

While it may be sexually identifying as one, I don't think that's an attack helicopter.

(Sorry to make light of this, the news popping up have been rather horrifying for me as well, even with no connection to the US, but I can't resist autistic nitpicking and a bad pun).

Sorry, I edited it right after I noticed my mistake. It's a Blackhawk, probably Nat. Guard.

I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out.

Where does this figure come from? The latest news reports I can find are still talking about a figure of 200something dead, which includes the area of initial landfall.

Really, I'm wondering where this perception of "biblical proportions" is coming from. Central Europe (approximately next door from me) had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing, where the death toll stood around 24. A factor of 10 difference just seems to be about what I'd expect given the lower level of preparation, inferior civic infrastructure and construction standards in the US (typical European houses would be much less likely to collapse), and the European flood is now being filed away as a fairly boring once-in-a-few-years event (outside of media that is still trying to make culture war hay of it).

had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing

I would care mostly population affected, not comparing cherry picked pictures when comparing how many people died.

the European flood

Note that similar area was affected in 1997 floods. Wrocław (major city in area affected by heavy rants) was not flooded this thanks to new dam/polder build after 1997 floods. During 1997 it was catastrophically flooded.

Case where people actually managed to learn from history.

And this region has decent experience and equipment for dealing with floods. It is THE primary natural catastrophe expected to happen here.

I was taking "Biblical levels of destruction" to be defined in terms of the vibes of the best pictures you can cherry-pick, rather than any concrete data-based criteria. The Bible itself may not have pictures, but it certainly doesn't make its case with data.

"4 Reefer Trucks" in one county from here: https://tiktok.com/@glutenfreebreadwinner/video/7421950512544697642

No running water at a hospital:

Mission Hospital still has not regained running water. It’s expected to take weeks for access to water to be restored region-wide, due to widespread damage to the water system.

Healthcare workers typically use running water in abundance for tasks ranging from handwashing to sterilization. They’re getting creative in its absence.

The local population is understandably filthy:

The sewage system was so backed up after the storm, Drummond said, that it wasn’t possible to flush toilets.

“We were pooping in bags and buckets,” she said.

Access to clean water was also wiped out. Patients were showing up at the hospital drenched in floodwater saturated with gasoline, chemicals and other unknown toxins.

Those people would normally be placed in showers to clean off, Drummond said. Not so after Helene barreled through, knocking out the basics of hygiene.

“It’s been really difficult to do decontamination,” Drummond said. Her team, she said, was forced to fill trash cans with whatever clean water it could find to dump over patients in an effort to rinse them.

This is from the group of people who have made it to a hospital. How many thousands are still trapped without a road in these conditions? How many dehydrated people are drinking dirty water in desperation? How long does it take before these conditions lead to disease outbreaks and deaths?

Edit: More witnesses of mass deaths: https://x.com/KristyTallman/status/1842032303637463274

People asking for more body bag donations: https://x.com/TheThe1776/status/1842120280229158963

Over 100 bodies marked in a six mile stretch of river: https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1842908549795512354

Someone seeing bodies left in trees, thought they were Halloween decorations at first: https://x.com/KellyJo_Rn/status/1841284842085880279/photo/2

Edit 2: Going to keep links to the most credible videos here so that I can reference them as people (rightfully) ask for receipts:

https://x.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1842944529172734286 - Woman saying she needs 500 body bags. County Sheriff kicked FEMA out of the county.

https://x.com/sarahsansoni/status/1842129974888644801 - Account of bodies floating in river. Similar language as some other reports, where they thought they were Halloween Costumes, then saw the faces and realized they were real bodies.

Not directly related to body count, but interesting in itself - https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1842648530436911554 Volunteer reporting that her organization has told her to flee any FEMA agents she encounters, because they will confiscate everything she has, including her search and rescue dogs (???). Also her volunteer organization has tracked that a lot of the items confiscated from their organization have been sent to migrants (at the border?) instead of citizens. She says that when she was in the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard stopped working with FEMA because they would do similar things to them.

And in response to that video, Ryan McBeth who I also vaguely trust and respect (or at least I knew of him well before this disaster which is more than I can say for most of these) said that that this is misinformation that is killing people. He was on the phone with the National Guard (all of them at once? ha, I know what he means, but not saying who exactly he spoke to or what their position is annoys me.) National Guard is declaring that people are putting themselves in danger to avoid FEMA.

I think I trust Ryan that this is what the Nat Guard is saying, I don't trust that the National Guard has it all under control. I do not believe that if all private citizens just stopped working around the government's lack of help that it would all have turned out better.

On the more credible side: Gen. Flynn asking for donations to a Rescue/Recovery team that is normally tasked by FEMA for situations like this but, "No tasking to date (not surprising)." https://x.com/GenFlynn/status/1841822490730910109

People on the ground saying that they haven't seen FEMA or didn't see any FEMA until more than 5 days after the Hurricane: https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1842977547103219797

Lastly, most professional video of the infamous Fire Chief directly preventing the rescue of a couple: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s8ICG0iaHqw

https://x.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1842944529172734286 - Woman saying she needs 500 body bags. County Sheriff kicked FEMA out of the county.

I don't know if I'd call this credible. The woman being interviewed never mentions FEMA once; the interviewer says it in an interspersed clip taped separately. And he doesn't say where they are. Possibly because he's in Lincoln County, which got some damage but is part of the Charlotte metro and a world away from the mountain areas that got hit hard.

At this point I doubt we will ever really know what happened in Western North Carolina. An oral tradition might appear describing how FEMA's incompetence (at best) caused hundreds of excess deaths. Stories of people dying of exposure, dehydration and disease because FEMA sat on their hands, and didn't allow anyone into the sparsely populated mountain/valley they lived in.

All the official statistics will be weird side stepping non sequiturs. X number of personnel were allocated. Y number of dollars were spent. They compare favorably to the X number of people and Y number of dollars spent in supposedly comparable natural disaster. Therefore all complaints have been debunked. Shut up.

And everyone will talk past each other forever. One day a politician might take up the torch of what really happened after Helene, but all those investigative resources will mostly get funneled to deep state cogs who will merely look at the aforementioned statistics about X and Y and declare the government innocent, after having pulled down fabulous salaries for a bloated staff that took excessive years to tabulate their report.

Yeah, this is a perfect example of "Seeing Like the State". In the eyes of many people, solving problems is as simple as allocating resources.

Want people in rural areas to have broadband? Allocate $45 billion.

Want to build a network of EV charging stations? Allocate $7 billion.

Want a high speed rail in California? Allocated $inf billion.

And in a high trust society with high state capacity that's exactly what would happen. But, of course, that's not the society we live in. No rural citizens were connected to broadband, and almost no charging stations were built, and 16 years later California doesn't have a rail system.

We have a government competency crisis.

government competency crisis

It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

You can sometimes see how well this works in practice. It's like when you've a cashier that can't make change and you try to give them 2¢ so you get $1 and not 98¢ in change.

Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

This is the essence of modern management theory. It can be done, but probably not for disaster recovery or any other task where every situation is significantly different.

The difficulty is the 'decision makers' have often moved on before the pigeons come home to roost.

Even highly repeatable processes will often have edge cases / or odd failure modes that while rare if the process is very frequent will throw errors often enough to cause problems.

Also these jobs tend to suck which presents other challenges.

I'd rather interact with someone competent than an idiot with a checklist. I'm sure there's an appropriate Idiocracy clip.

It’s a way to get away with using less skilled workers and cheaper and faster training. Properly training someone to handle a disaster would require the person to have some understanding of what kinds of things happen in disasters to various common systems that run society. You’d have to show them what happens to electrical grids in hurricanes, the issues involved in fixing them, and what upstream and downstream effects might be. This requires at least a basic understanding of electrical engineering. Which takes a lot of intelligence and skill to understand. It’s full of math and physics, after all. Even getting someone to understand the system as well as a journeyman electrician is going to take some time and money. It will help them understand things like why an app is a bad way to distribute aid in a hurricane aftermath zone, but you’ll have to pay more to attract a better candidate, and you have to train them. Or you can set up a generic process for every disaster and hope that they’ll be good enough for most disasters even when executed by Jenny a former secretary at a car dealership who has no idea what the issues even are. Before the disaster scenario happens, you’re getting kudos for doing this because Jenny is a pretty cheap hire, and she’s ready to go within a few months instead of years.

It's not just that the employees are less skilled, they're less capable.

Seleting for someone higher skilled may also select for someone capable of stretching. A competent person can be competent in many situations and scenarios with minimal training.

School used to do a better job of selecting for competence, graduation rates were much lower but graduates could pass competency exams.

I’ll definitely agree on the education part. I think honestly the schools are so bad at this point that they’re meaningless. It seems like it started with the end of the Cold War, mostly because we were moving all the factories to other parts of the world. That triggered a crisis as now everyone needed a HS diploma and a bit more if they wanted to have anything like a working class, let alone middle class lifestyle. And since the biggest determinant of getting a “good job” once the factory was gone was education, all barriers to education were systematically eliminated. You can’t be so cruel as to flunk a kid who can’t do the work because if he doesn’t graduate, he’s going to live in poverty and be basically unemployed forever. Then of course you have student loans so everyone could go to college. Of course colleges saw this as a cash cow. Lower the standards so that any kid who graduates high school can “earn” a diploma.

And now you have functionally uneducated college grads who believe they’re smart competent people, but aren’t and probably wouldn’t pass their grandparents freshman year of high school. Try it. Find math problems that a 14 year old in 1920 was expected to be able to solve and give it to a college grad in 2024. They cannot do it. They cannot read books that were read for fun in 1950. Forget such arcane subjects as geography, history, or science. It’s a scary sad thing that people with college degrees know less about science than high school kids in 1980.

It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

It's Weber's "rationalization," it's a hallmark of "modernity," and it's one of the top reasons why I want "modernity" destroyed. Go back to the personal leadership of @Stellula's "high agency people" and away from the tyranny of "idiots with checklists," to borrow from @AvocadoPanic, and away from Arendt's "tyranny without a tyrant" created by the bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility.

I’m going to ask you the same thing I asked jeroboam.

What could possibly convince you otherwise?

Deaths. I expect there will be much haggling over the narrative. But if there are more post immediate flood deaths from dehydration, disease and exposure than not, FEMA irredeemably fucked up, no matter what the experts claim.

Look at a map. Think logistically. There is absolutely no reason to be flying fixed-wing aircraft from Greenville to Asheville. Fixed-wing aircraft have longer ranges than helicopters. Those supplies can be flown in from further away locations. However, there are a limited number of airports within helicopter range of the affected area. Greenville is one of them. It is the correct move to dedicate the Greenville airport to helicopter missions.

Correct. The complaint is that the helicopters aren't moving. They're not being loaded. They aren't going anywhere.

Edit: It's like someone said, "We need helicopters" and brought helicopters over, but hasn't decided how to use them yet. Just bringing helicopters over doesn't win any brownie points.

Also, the nice thing about helicopters is they don't need a runway. For loading, you can put them anywhere on the tarmac so you can drive a truck to them, and if they're not actually loading at the moment they can be on grass.

The federal government throwing up their hands and saying "golly gee I guess we can't figure this out!" is a monstrous blackpill.

I don't know how to describe specifically what I mean, but there's a certain energy from high agency people that is clearly present in the local guys "borrowing" excavators and building roads, and clearly not present in the federal government. Call is hyper masculine vs hyper feminine, but if you've ever worked around these types of people it is as clear as day.

If I'm really getting out there and letting my mind off it it's leash: the type of high agency men I'm describing here terrify the federal government. I think a lot of people here work in tech and have maybe at some point met a real life 10x "cracked" engineer who pisses you off (playfully) because of how good they are.

These people exist in the physical realms too, and they're allergic to people like FEMA.

I've met people who have that energy, except 90% of them go around wrecking shit and making a mess while effete, low-agency people have to clean up after them. They're also usually incorrigible because they rarely have to deal with the consequences of "helping".

I'm sure everybody has their "issues" with the entire response, mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

Here's Kamala bragging about sending $150 Million to Lebanon to pay back for some of the destruction that Israel enacted upon them somehow also my tax dollars indeed

Somehow the Texas Air Guard can go help with flooding in Czechia

The other "issue" is that FEMA is fullfilling the "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" meme. It seems like they want to occupy the role or "organizer", and less so doer. The local guys in ENC siphoning diesel fuel into excavators and building improvised bridges are doers, and they are looking to their local church leaders and community members as organizers. They want/need resources (money, equipment, helicopters) from FEMA, but they actively do not want to be "organized".

Young kids naked and crying for their parents, ropes still wrapped around their arms from where their parents desperately tied them to trees above water.

I've been watching this really closely and haven't seen anybody claim this. Can you link to a source for this?

/images/17283174732845304.webp

mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

TBH if it were as simple as just cutting a check I think the Feds would be quite effective. But as discussed last week, it's not that simple; they actually have to go into a chaotic and desperate situation in very rough terrain and try to coordinate between thousands of local folks, out-of-state good samaritans, etc., and they have to do it with unionized and over-bureaucratized government workers who suffer very little personal blowback for failure.

I don't accept this.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US. We're sending aircraft carriers to the region to assist Israel in their ridiculous war, redirect those aircraft carriers to Myrtle Beach, and make the pilots fly over ENC with thermal cameras pointed at the ground. Put a drone in the air and look for people. Send helicopters.

Even if this is pointless, it's symbolic.

I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

I think the point is that the government is completely incompetent. So they can distribute money but they can't actually rescue people.

But they are also incompetent when they spend money overseas. For example, they sent an aircraft carrier to deal with the Houthis but then retreated in defeat after a couple months. Or, for another example, they spent a couple hundred million building a floating pier to deliver supplies to Gaza, but then it didn't work and they just abandoned it.

So, while I agree we should spend at least as much on our own disasters as those in Ukraine and the Middle East, more money won't necessarily solve the problem since FEMA seems to be incompetent.

Honestly, I think the same. We’ve lost the ability to do a lot of things that our great grandparents took for granted that would just work. I could go down the list of usual government functions and for the most part we did them better in 1924 than we do in 2024. And I think it’s a combination of easy living, culture and poor education that’s created an elite that simply cannot handle the realities of running a complex society in the real world.

It’s because this isn’t a money problem, it’s a logistics problem. Israel and Ukraine are already managing their responses, so it’s easy to give them aid. With the hurricane you have to figure out what goes where, and how to get it there, which is a difficult problem.

Also, I believe the majority of the value of the aid given to Ukraine in particularly is not cash, but arms, ammo, and loans.

With the hurricane you have to figure out what goes where, and how to get it there, which is a difficult problem.

There are people in ENC at this moment who have figured this out. What they want now is for the government to get out of their fucking way. To the feds: I know it's going to hurt your pride but tuck your tail between your legs and ask the local churches how you can help and then do what they say.

What specifically is making you think that FEMA is bungling the response? I see it repeatedly taken as fact in this thread, and that we should trust to random tiktok videos, but very little actual documentation of the situation.

I’m not claiming everything is perfect. I just think that rumors always swirl in the aftermath, and the insane political polarization in this case is making it worse. I expect clearer information to come out in the next few weeks.

What would you consider "actual documentation" other than people there right now saying that they're jamming it up?

I’ll grant that there’s a shortage of quality evidence about the state of the hurricane response, but the evidence we do have points to the government response being pretty bad.

To the feds: I know it's going to hurt your pride but tuck your tail between your legs and ask the local churches how you can help and then do what they say.

Amen. This is what democracy actually looks like; life-and-death power being exercised by common people for their own benefit and that of their neighbors

But the government, specifically the Army/DoD and by extension the National Guard, are supposed to be experts in logistics in impassable terrain. It's not like wars are always fought on open desert: sometimes they are, but there are plenty of battlegrounds in recent memory with far worse terrain than North Carolina. Oh, the bridge is out? That never happens in war! They are supposed to be able to cross unbridged rivers rapidly under fire. And do Search and Rescue and extraction operations day and night. If they can supply remote fire bases by helicopter, surely we could setup tents and feed hot MREs to people anywhere on the ground on mere hours notice. Or at least airdropping rations.

On the other hand, I'm clearly armchair quarterbacking. Those things are all harder than they sound, I'm sure. Maybe all the bridging engineers are already out fixing washed out roads, and helicopters are out on SAR or supply missions. But it doesn't seem like we should throw up our hands and claim that it's completely beyond us: at the very least we should be learning lessons for next time.

It's not like wars are always fought on open desert

Even open desert has more logistical issues than you'd expect. Just ask Erwin Rommel or Archie Wavell. Or the crusaders at Hattin.

But the government, specifically the Army/DoD and by extension the National Guard, are supposed to be experts in logistics in impassable terrain.

What... do you think expertise means in a logistics sense? The ability to do something with investments and time, or the ability to do something without infrastructure?

Military engineers do difficult logistics in two main ways: creating one-width roads, and flying gas blivets out to help extend the range of helicopters. Both of these are relatively limited throughput, and certainly can't support large populations, hence why there is such a focus on capturing seaports and airports with higher throughput capacity.

Oh, the bridge is out? That never happens in war! They are supposed to be able to cross unbridged rivers rapidly under fire.

Ha, no, no. That's how you get things like the Battle of the Siverskyi Donets.

If you're doing a river crossing, you do it slowly (so that the vehicles don't drive a slighly off-angle and drive off the bridge, flipping everything over), and if you're under modern-era effective fires (which means artillery and precision munitions and rockets, not just a smattering of light-infantry weapons), the main reason to keep crossing is if you're trying to run away in a retreat.

In practice, most river crossings aren't even of major rivers. They're more likely to be fording operations, or only very narrow creeks, or just putting crossing plates on a pre-existing bridge. A commander in the modern era who tries to force a crossing of an unbridged river under fire would be removed as an incompetent.

There are certainly things the military can do, but you are getting some impressions more from holywood than history.

What... do you think expertise means in a logistics sense? The ability to do something with investments and time, or the ability to do something without infrastructure?

"Without infrastructure" is, in this case, more or less the definition of the task, so I don't follow your point.

The point is that military engineering is the former and not the later, and always has been.

Also, I believe the majority of the value of the aid given to Ukraine in particularly is not cash, but arms, ammo, and loans.

From https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107232:

Of the approximately $62.3 billion provided to the Department of Defense, it had obligated about $52.3 billion, such as for procuring missiles, ammunition, and combat vehicles for Ukraine and to replace U.S. stocks. In its own reporting, DOD combines this formal obligated amount with internal commitments to convey its financial commitments. Of the approximately $46.1 billion provided to the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the two agencies had obligated about $44.4 billion, such as to support the Ukrainian government's civilian budget, including salaries for first responders, health workers, and educators. Of the approximately $3.4 billion provided to the Department of Health and Human Services, it had obligated about $3.1 billion, such as in grants for supporting Ukrainian refugees settling in the U.S. Of the approximately $1.6 billion provided to eight U.S. agencies and offices covered in this review, they had obligated about $1.4 billion, such as for nuclear security and sanctions enforcement.

So, it appears at least a near majority (51.1 of 103.4 billions) are in fact cash disbursements.

ETA: Not intending to dispute the post above, just adding context that the balance is pretty close.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US.

But it's not as simple as sending money - that's my whole point. Money alone won't haul a tree out of a roadway or repair a washed out bridge; you need road crews and equipment for that. Money will help you acquire those things, but unless you already know where to go to put them together and how to get them quickly to the places where they're needed, you're SOL. FEMA don't appear to be logistically-competent to put together that kind of a response, so they're left waving money around in the air with nothing to show for it.

We're sending aircraft carriers to the region to assist Israel in their ridiculous war, redirect those aircraft carriers to Myrtle Beach, and make the pilots fly over ENC with thermal cameras pointed at the ground.

It's at least two weeks from the eastern Mediterranean back to the U.S., and longer from the Persian Gulf or Red Sea - even if we ordered them back as soon as the hurricane hit, they'd still be at sea.

Put a drone in the air and look for people. Send helicopters.

This is a more valid complaint; I'm not sure what, if anything, holding up the 82nd Airborne and other rapid reaction forces on domestic bases from deploying. But that's a matter of will and organization (notably we have a President who is clearly suffering from advanced dementia, works like two hours per day, and spends the rest on the beach, while his VP is notably vacuous, scared of her own shadow, and busy campaigning. Not promising) not funding.

Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

There's always a relevant xkcd....

Also, every bit of Ukrainian clay seized by Russia will undermine the post-WWII standard against wars of territorial expansion, which will almost certainly cause more problems here.

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s absent the post-WWI implementation of modern passport and visa systems.)

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries.

I broadly agree with the sentiment, but, you know, I don't think it's in the Constitution of the United States.

Funny enough paying the Danegeld can sometimes work. See Alfred.

There's always a relevant xkcd....

I think a better analogy for that XKCD comic would be: We can't fund the Ukrainian space program until our space program doesn't have anything left to do. If Ukraine wants to have their own space program their citizens can choose to fund that, or if US citizens want to fund the Ukrainian space program they are free to donate their money to it.

Which...yes?

That analogy might work better if Mexico were trying to re-negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at tank-point, or if Canada were aiming for a re-match of 1812.

However, as we do not currently face any remotely credible threat of armed invasion* at this time, our 'keeping the Stars-and-Stripes flying over El Paso and Detroit' program doesn't have anything left to do.

*No, people coming in looking to work for money is not the same thing as an invasion.

Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

You sure about that?

Furthermore, if Russia were to have encountered no opposition in the forceful seizure of Ukraine, how long would it be before they went after the Baltics? Poland? Eventually we wouldn't be able to stand on the sidelines any more.

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Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

They don't pay taxes, but the view of the people running the US is that there's a substantial benefit for the US in defending the rules-based international system*, that in the long term is probably worth substantially more in dollar terms than the cost of funding Ukraine. Maybe they're wrong but it's still largely an economic calculation, not a decision based on abstract philosophical principles for their own sakes.

*Rules that the US sets and gets to break, before anyone comes with examples of the US being hypocrites on this front.

There are perfectly reasonable foreign policy objectives in funding Ukraine’s war effort.

countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence, it will be true if Israel collapsed tomorrow, it will be for all the evidence we have true for hundreds of years.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence,

That's a convenient elision of the fact that the Jews trying to escape the Nazis were in large part turned away from those nice western countries. Even years after the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of European jews were still sitting in Displaced Persons camps guarded by allied soldiers because no "nice western country" would take them, and were only able to leave after the establishment of Israel as a national homeland for jews (those "nice western countries" still weren't willing to take them).

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future. France is already markedly unsafe, and as Britain islamicizes over the next couple decades anti-jewish sentiment is likely to increase.

There’s a convenient elision of the fact that it’s not the forties anymore. Israel has the right to exist, they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

If Israel fell tomorrow the Jews would move to Anglosphere countries and Central Europe. Well, the ones that didn’t get massacred in the process of it falling at least. There won’t be a second Holocaust.

Elian Gonzalez has entered the chat. Progressive emphasis on immigration uber allies has long had a lot of exceptions for political utility.

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they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

A blank check would entail allowing Israel to actually do what the rest of the arab world - including the palestinians - did and continue to do: pushing all of their enemy's co-ethnics out of all territory they can martially claim. What they're doing now is significantly more humane than what the Saudis did to the Yemenis (and lost), or what the anti-Assad rebels backed by the west did to the Yazidis, or what NATO-ally Turkey does to Kurds, etc., etc., etc. Much of the criticism of Israel is one giant isolated demand for rigor.

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It's easy to play armchair general, but I think @Celestial-body-NOS made a point that can't be ignored.

While you might feel certain that Western countries would take in Jewish refugees, you presumably don't have any skin in the game. Would you be willing to be the lives of your family on this?

As a fellow armchair general, let me say that while I think it's probable that Israeli refugees would be accepted, it is far from certain. Nothing is certain when it comes to hypothetical future world conflicts. And if we're indexing from known past events, we know that Jews haven't been welcome with open arms in the past.

What a perverse cycle of history: the West turned away Jews, Holocaust, West feels guilty and sets up asylum laws Never Again etc, those asylum laws ultimately end the "guilty West," becomes anti-Semitic again, Jews get turned away.

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future.

Bring back the Slattery Report.

We did get a middling detective story out of it, at least.

Would you wager your life on that? Your children's lives?

Were I married to a Jew I would no more worry about the USA going 1930’s Germany on them than I currently do about an alien invasion.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel.

Has any ethnic group gotten blanket asylum in the West? There has been a slow shift away from permissive asylum policies (see the entire cats thing): nobody is letting in "the other" wholesale (Rwanda? South Sudan? Yazidis?) with maybe a few limited exceptions like Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion or Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. That's putting a heavy assumption that those Jews won't be treated as "the other" there (for which there are plenty of pre-WWII examples), and even then I don't think that supposedly-favored groups like white Zimbabweans (whose population there is down at least 80% since the country became independent in 1980) have ever been recognized as categorical refugees.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.