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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?

You know, I just realized that the second era of great music corresponds almost exactly to Thatcher's time as the UK PM. That can't be a coincidence.

I've noticed a similar thing to your observation when it comes to approaching doom. Back in the day the cold war and threat of nuclear annihilation inspired a whole bunch of great songs. Today the doom is climate change and we get... nothing.

We have had ample proof of nuclear weapons' destructive capacity.

Meanwhile, the actual impact of climate change can, by one so willing, be ignored entirely with little ill effect, and the catastrophe scenarios spun up about it come from people with the air of the stereotypical madman claiming that "the end is nigh".

Nah, Nuclear Armageddon was a psyop. Yes, it would suck to have nuke dropped on your head, but not much more so than an artillery shell, or a conventional bomb or missile. It was probably even more exaggerated than the impact of climate change.

Sure, there were a lot of wild tales about nuclear war that remained just that or even ended up discredited, like setting the atmosphere on fire or causing nuclear winter.

But the degree of destruction that global nuclear war would have caused can be roughly extrapolated by anyone who knows what happened to those two Japanese towns plus the further development of nuclear weapons and the increased size of the stockpiles, whereas the impact of climate change is all error bars and "take my word for it".

The fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki arguably forms a part of why nuclear mythos is so exaggerated, though. Even if we don't consider the whole symbolic implication of two little bombs forcing mighty Japan to surrender, the dawn of atomic age etc., Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't all that representative of what would happen now; the Japanese tradition of paper-based construction meant the houses went up in flames even more easily than comparative European homes of the period, and the further development of nuclear weapons has been accompanied with developments in population protection (sturdier housing, still-extant shelters etc).

Also, while there's obviously bigger nukes and stockpiles than in 1945, people probably also have a wrong image of these in the other direction; once I started looking into this, I (used to nuke strength being measured in megatons) was surprised, for instance, to learn that according to most recent American estimates Russia does not have any nukes of 1 Mt or higher in power and that the Russian nuclear stockpile is a bit over 10 % of the height of Cold War (I had of course known it had gone down, but still, while it probably still packs a punch, it's not of destroy-the-world capability, even if one would expect all of them to work, not be intercepted, not fall to a first strike or a second strike etc.)

ICBMs, MIRVs and more accurate missiles basically made multi-megaton nukes obsolete. You get much better destructive power over an area if you spread a bunch of 100 kton nukes over it instead of concentrating all that power at a single point because of the three dimensional nature of the explosion.

Certainly, the point just being that people have a completely facile image of the raw power of current nukes. In "nuclear demonstration" maps like this, the nuke used to "demonstrate" a potential nuclear war is literally the 100 Mt Tsar Bomba - a device that literally only existed in the planning stages and was not even tested, and would not have remotely resembled your average Soviet nuclear warhead even in the height of the Cold War.