This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Throwaway for limited OPSEC
You're right here, though maybe with a few interesting caveats that others might find interesting from the (very niche) field.
Classic nuclear winter (everyone dies on snowball earth) was fairly quickly ruled out, and the worst case scenarios of present day teams most concerned on the issue seem unlikely. For example, the 150 Tg (a Tg being a million tonnes of soot in the stratosphere, where it persists) requires 4,400 unique (non overlapping) detonations over the most dense cities in the list, all of which make a firestorm. That's more than the total strategic arsenals available, some of which will be destroyed, fired at targets not in cities or held back, targeting is heavily duplicated in nuclear planning to ensure kills and not every urban detonation will cause a firestorm.
However, nuclear winter is unfortunately still possible, or at least the National Academy of Sciences is concerned enough not to rule it out at all and more research is being funded: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27515/potential-environmental-effects-of-nuclear-war. Models which exclude the possibility of stratospheric injection don't include latent heating (a huge deal) - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022JD036667 and you only need ~400 firestorms injecting soot to take out something like 30-50% of global crop yields via 47 Tg, depending on how well you adapt agriculture https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395439565_Strategic_crop_relocation_could_substantially_mitigate_nuclear_winter_yield_losses .
Add in losing agricultural inputs, access to mechanization in fields and mass logistics should the war also seriously disrupt global industry and civilizational complexity, and you have the conditions for a lot of mortality (that's actually true even without the winter, it just makes it much worse). This isn't certain, but it's really risky, and deaths in non target countries could be in the billions.
Like you say, it's hard to go from that to human extinction, and I don't personally think it's too plausible myself, but we have never run the experiment of putting our society in a situation where 80% are likely to die (absolute worst case following big rearmament, I would guess). Catastrophes can spiral, people could take risky actions as a result that contain x risks, maybe we cannot recover, it's full of unknown unknowns to quote the man who actually did the most for disarmament arguably in living memory.
More options
Context Copy link