I can call what is shown in this video many things, but certainly not humour.
Again, not liking something is fine. I don't like country music. That doesn't mean I can say "it's not music" and write massive screeds trying to interpret it as... I don't know, people having normal conversations with weird speech impediments.
The only important opinion here is yours
No, I'd say the most important opinions are the 10+ million people subscribed to PewDiePie's channel (I'm not one of them, incidentally) and who have been laughing at him for years and years. Those millions of people might all be morons but they could still confirm one thing for you: it's comedy. If you think they have a shitty taste in humor, that's fine. If you think that IT'S NOT HUMOR and that PewDiePie was SERIOUSLY mad... that's just delusional.
Even though he was complaining when they delayed that output for some seconds!!
This is not "opinion". This is "ignorance" or "delusion". PewDiePie was not mad. You don't get the joke. You don't have to LIKE the joke, but in order to be taken seriously you do have to acknowledge that the joke is, in fact, a joke. The ending of it was a dark joke with some subjective interpretation, sure, but that bit you just reference was not actual, legitimate anger or actual complaining.
This very much does matter. He's one of the biggest names on Youtube, if not the biggest, and this drives at the very heart of all this the freedom of speech, PC culture, fake news and 'role of social media' stuff that's been heating up ever since Trump won the nomination (let alone after he won the presidency.) His size makes him "collateral damage of note and influence".
Translation: I do not understand humor. Or at least not PewDiePie's humor. There's nothing *wrong* with that man, different strokes for different folks, but Christ... how did this shit get modded up to +5?
As a poor person who possesses some modicum of awareness and proclivity for deep thought, I have quite a lot to say on the subject of wealth and class inequality, including the long list of laws that sustain the status quo... but the doom and gloom over this technology is both (mostly) wrong and pointless.
What makes you think that these scientific advancements will be equally available to all members of society?
For the same reason that iPhones can be found in significant numbers even amongst the poor--the economics of scale are such that, after an initial break-in period where only the rich can afford it (perhaps two decades at the absolute most, which given the gestation of humans is *far* too short for any real prejudice to emerge), the technology and infrastructure will mature to the point where it's affordable to the vast majority of the population. Also, during this initial break-in period, the improvements offered will probably be modest relative to the game changing superhuman stuff that might come much later.
I'm not super well versed in biotech but I have observed many procedures plummet in cost once things mature (most notably genome sequencing.) Other people in this thread have talked at length about how cheap and easy this is to do in principle... it won't stay a rich persons' product for long, it really won't. It can't.
This will lead to the inequality between the classes to become entrenched on the genetic level.
Yeah, it's a pity rich people never have sex with the poor... oh wait.
You realize that every single lesbian couple wanting a kid will go for the super-sperm, right? (Well, minus the particularly hardcore tofu-eaters.) It's not going to be particularly hard to get hold of. Plus a fair number of single women, plus probably even some women in committed heterosexual relationships.
Even if none of this were true, it's still unclear what the alternative is. China *will* do it, unless there's some cultural impediment I'm unaware of here (there are cultural impediments to organ transplant too, but that hasn't stopped them from apparently harvesting them on-demand from political prisoners.) Russian millionaires will certainly do it.
This is happening. Figure out how to deal with it. Demonizing it is head-in-sand behavior.
Yeah, one need look only at the status of organ transplants in China to see how this is going to proceed. They loathe the peasantry, there's a strong Confucian paternalism still present, blended with a pragmatic, anything-goes Communist attitudes... and they're big into soft and hard media controls to simply prevent their own people to figure out what's going on.
And the motives here will be both personal (high ranking party members who want to do this with their own children) and patriotic (improving the Chinese people to help the entire country.)
There's no good reason at all to shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to ban this, either nationally or internationally. It *is* coming. Better the research take place in the open.
Given how quickly cephalopods can breed and the lack of legal impediments concerning non-humans, I think the more pressing question is "what's the ETA for fully functional tentacle monsters?"
There's actually a side issue here about genetic prevalence, racial attitudes and (especially) ongoing reactionary racial biases. If one can put aside the historical baggage of Aryan theory for a moment, why *wouldn't* we want to save genetically unique features that are possessed by a small *and dwindling* minority of the population, including (but certainly not limited to) red or blond hair, Nordic-pale skin, blue eyes, etc.? Certainly, if you set this alongside the likely scenario of the much more genetically homogeneous Han people (of which there are literally an order of magnitude more than genetically Nordic people) perpetuating their ideal beauty standards[1], it is very hard to see how the commonly articulated terror of blond hair and blues eyes becoming commonplace isn't simply a remnant of anti-Nazi reactionaries (now commonly called SJWs) who are still tinkering with fairly mild forms of anti-white / anti-Nordic rhetoric--not from a genuinely anti-egalitarian place, mind, but merely in an attempt to (in their eyes) rebalance the scales.
I mention this only as a tangent of obscure and mild intellectual interest, surely nothing that people would enjoy screaming about for hours.
1. There is sometimes an argument that they favor having "western eyes", but a cultural aesthetic aversion to especially prominent epicanthal folds does not imply that Asian eyes aren't viewed favorably in east Asia any more than an aesthetic aversion to albinism means that blond hair and blue eyes aren't viewed aesthetically favorably in many western countries.
Yes, this is obviously a potent weapon for NZ (and one that I'm in favor of using.) I was referring to accidental releases not being super likely to be extinction-level events even if we didn't intervene.
the numbers and tree damage never declined. Killing 300 in a night wasn't unusual in some areas.
Which is why the Luddites here are so odiously backward. This isn't an area I'm deeply read on, but NZ's large area combined with a lack of naive non-bat mammals makes critters like possums and mice a uniquely devastating threat, probably exceeding the damage that has already been noticed. To argue from a place of concern about mice is just ludicrous. Slightly less ludicrous would be issues of temporary food chain disruption if the mice are a key prey species for other threatened animals, but this is something that could be addressed with targeted efforts to preemptively protect and preserve the house mouse population in those areas.
But given I'm talking to someone with "stoat" in his name, I feel I might be preaching to the choir here.
You don't get to demand that, not until you've presented your evidence that the incineration of spent fuel rods from a single nuclear facility would kill off the entire northern hemisphere. That is a much more specific (and much more ludicrous) claim.
The elimination of disease, enhancement of intelligence, etc. are good and desirable things for the vast majority of people. There will be clever arguments, not all of which are entirely wrong, that this is bad or at least highly dangerous for humanity, but outright banning it is much more dangerous. Do you think that all ~200 countries in the world will not only follow suit, but will proactively enforce the law?
The Brave New World comparison is quite weak. Huxley's world didn't use genetic modification as I recall; they used embryological stimulation in an artificial womb. That was the key to their entire society--no more pregnancies, the government controlled all births. Now tell me, what do rich designer babies (with all of the usual attendant horrors of there being more blond people in the world, oh noes!) have to do with total and complete governmental control of reproduction and child rearing?
These things are not only unalike; they are opposite. People having control over their bodies and genes and children is directly opposed to the government having control (and/or denying them such control through bans.) There are plenty of real concerns here, but I fear they will be completely drowned out by nonsensical BNW and GATTACA quotes.
I fear and suspect the western world will end up intentionally abandoning this technological revolution, leaving it up to another power (perhaps the Russians or Chinese) to lead the way, very possibly in a clandestine way known only to the rich ruling elite. I must say, though, it'll be pretty amusing if the Chinese get there first and show us all just how ridiculous those "oh no, too many Nordic-looking people!" arguments are.
Better question: is there anyone on the internet who can accuse someone of an ad hominem (or straw men, for that matter) correctly? I literally don't think I've ever seen it done. Most people use it to incorrectly imply that all overt insults are logical fallacies, but you've taken it a step further to apparently mean that all implicit character criticisms are logical fallacies. I really didn't think it was possible for that guideline to be mangled any more than it already has been, but you've managed it. Bravo.
Tu quoque doesn't apply if I expand my of the cuff comment to clarify that of course this behavior is highly undesirable from Trump and the Republicans and should be stopped if we can, but the problem should not be thought of as unique to them. In fact, the more partisan you make issues like these, the less progress you will make. Instead of "Trump behaves like a gangster", frame it in terms of insisting on paper trails and increased accountability for all politicians, everywhere.
Excuse me, let me clarify that by "single reactor", I meant "single nuclear power facility". Slip of the tongue. It's not the same thing, but it doesn't change the fundamental lunacy of his claim that the fire would wipe out the entire northern hemisphere, or the fact that MrKaos is still repeatedly lying about his sources supporting his claims and so far has refused to offer any back of the envelope numbers to support his claim, not even pulled out of his ass numbers.
The only semi-concrete thing he did was compare it to Chernobyl, which he released 1/170th of the amount of material he's talking about. Well, Chernobyl killed ~4000 people (not immediately. The immediate death toll was well under 100) , so let's just do a naive overestimation of 170 *4000 = 680,000... yup, that looks like the entire goddamn northern hemisphere to me.
Whining that a doggedly on-point and effective takedown is emotional and that therefore you win is, to any reasonably perceptive person, the equivalent of conceding defeat. I would leave it at that but your post is still full of exceedingly amusing bits that I simply must poke at. (You're wrong about the tone, by the way. This is generally an immensely relaxing and mind-clarifying endeavor for me; not something that riles me up.)
That's quite a lot of off-topic blathering Shane.
That's a truly amazing statement. Go and look at the number and density of direct quotes from your post. Everything I said was obviously on-topic, unlike your fairly off-topic attempt to dodge all of these issues by playing the very tired "anyone who writes a post that sounds a little too enthusiastic must be irrational and therefore must be wrong" card.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Indeed. Keep believing that a strawman is "whatever I disagree with". You definitely shouldn't to go look it up and educate yourself or anything. Just appeal to pedestrian stupidity; that's the ticket. It's worked brilliantly for creationists.
You provided something about a chemical fire burning coal at 540 degrees Celsius as opposed to a radioactive fire burning plutonium 3000 degrees Celsius.
You still don't understand that sentence? Analogy. Not "comparison". Hint: the issues are about exaggeration and quantification. The difference between a chemical and nuclear reaction plays no part whatsoever here.
Crybaby Shane... temper tantrum.
I will give you $20 if you'll recite my entire post followed by your entire post on Youtube. You have to fully emote it, though. No halfassing it.
Oh! I seriously just this second realized... you're referring to the ad hom bit, aren't you? That was humor. Jesus Christ. I'd completely forgotten after our encounter last year that you have no sense of humor / irony / sarcasm whatsoever. You have my sincerest of apologies. But nevermind about the reading it on Youtube bit. You won't be able to do it properly.
The point about putting in those insults, you see, was to illustrate how these things were *not* ad homs, because none of them formed the premise of an argument...
what makes you think I'm anti nuclear?
If you want to work on your Trump impression, you'll have to find someone else. I'm not impressed. Asserting absurdly hyperbolic lies about the dangers of nuclear and then implying that you're pro-nuclear... yeah, whatever.
4 articles, 2 from highly respected Japanese news agencies on the damage to the spent fuel cooling pool, followed by 2 published works on plutonium fire. Your thought bubble exploded when Mr Trump grabbed you by the pussy, Shane.
A reminder for anyone who has somehow stumbled in here late: he has claimed that incinerating the spent plutonium fuel rods from a single reactor will kill off the entire northern hemisphere. He's had like 4 posts to either clarify this, apologize for misspeaking, or offer citations to support his ludicrous claim.
He has done none of these things, but keeps lying and pretending that he has.
An explicit analogy, in the form of a simile, is not and never can be a strawman argument. It can involve other fallacies, but never a strawman because it contains an explicit indication that one is not talking directly about the argument that was just presented.
You are like the seventh person this month I've seen demonstrate a completely unhinged, random conception of that fallacy. It often requires a mere fifteen seconds on Wikipedia to not sound like a moron; you should give it a try sometime.
Here we go with the predictable ad-hom attacks
You see, that's more like it. You're still laughably wrong and could have taken ten seconds to learn an ad-hominem actually is, but at least you managed to get it wrong in the same exact way that all the other lazy, whinging assholes get it wrong.
An ad-hom is not an "attack", you pathetic whiny schoolyard twat. Being impolite has nothing to do with being right or wrong, logical or illogical. An ad-hom fallacy is using fallacious or fiat character attacks as the sole basis of an argument, most commonly as a dismissive type of refutation. If an insult is used as an aside or as part of the conclusion of an argument, it *cannot* be an ad-hom fallacy. You fucking moron.
Chernobyl pumped out roughly 5 tons of material to irradiate 3500sqKms.
There is no non-irradiated/irradiated binary state. Again with this irrational, magical thinking. No useful numbers given whatsoever, just a mythical state of "irradiation". How many people live within a that ~550km radius (3500/2pi) of Chernobyl? (Or adjust that for wind patterns or whatever.) What is their increased radiation dosage? What are their past and current rates of cancer? How does that rate compare to other common carcinogens and causes of death and disability? And can those numbers be extrapolated to the Pu fire you have in mind?
I would look up and calculate the answers to these questions if I thought you were capable of registering when you are wrong. Also, the onus is on the person talking bullshit to prove said bullshit.
You can't compare it to anything else because there is nothing else to compare it to.
Holy crap, I didn't even read this part when I wrote the above. You really are coming perilously close to actually saying the word "magical", aren't you?
These things have fairly well understood mathematical properties, albeit with some variables like the wind and precipitation patterns. You could easily come up with reasonable back of the napkin numbers with under an hour of effort.
the new information
If you keep spamming me with links that do not in any way, shape or form support your laughable claim about the effects of that Pu fire, I'm going to pray to the radiation fairies to sterilize you in your sleep.
It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.
TL;DR for posterity: He made specific claims. I made no claims whatsoever except to say that his claims appear to be hysterical fabrications.
His response has been to spam irrelevant links and then essentially lie by pretending they prove his assertions, proudly demonstrate his ignorance of the informal logical fallacies of debate, complain about my correctly calibrated levels of contempt and misanthropy... and now pretend that I'm the one making arrogant and unsubstantiated claims... as opposed to the guy who just claimed that the entire northern hemisphere would be killed off if the spent fuel from a single nuclear power plant were incinerated.
Well, SJW is a much trickier term than alt-right since the latter is primarily a self-identification (though it's certainly taken some descriptive-derogatory tones in recent months) and the former is primarily a derogatory epithet that's inconsistently applied. That aside, I think that an "appear to beracists" or maybe "are in practice racists" claim is more easily defensible because many of them profess and even appear to genuinely believe in racial egalitarianism, it's just that they've constructed pendulum-needs-to-swing-the-other-way type justifications for non-egalitarian tactics, comments and judgments. And these are shoehorned into that larger framework with a goal of egalitarianism, which is a goal not genuinely believed in by some SJWs, but I do hesitate to say "most".
In other words, it's tricky to separate the delusional from the malevolent.
Who's articulated their desire to kill you lately? None of the neo-Nazis I've seen have put Asians near the top of their to-do list.
Jews often get near the top, though. And they still aren't considered people of color, possibly not even the Sephardi Jews. You can't argue privilege as the X factor here, either... not when the point of comparison is east Asians.
I've got a yellowish tinge under my lily-whiteness, as opposed to a pink one.
I can see where this comes from but seems pretty exaggerated and isn't universal among the east Asians I've known. Also, not all white people have any pinkness to speak of; it's primarily the Nordic and (especially) the Celts that have that. And as an aside, I've never heard "gray" used to describe the paler south Asians, which to my eye is much more noticeable cast than the east Asian yellow.
All the iron ever produced is sufficient to kill every human, cow, and horse now alive, if distributed one bullet per heart.
I think this as an even more effective comparison if you changed it to iron poisoning from ingestion, which I'm fairly certain will be true if you crunch the numbers.
If your lazy mind cannot extrapolate what happens when you take ten times the amount of fuel that is in a nuclear reactor, pack it close together then remove the moderator from between the fuel rods then we're back to you having inadequate knowledge of the things we are discussing.
That's like saying the coal mine fire in Centralia is going to grow until it kills everything in the northern hemisphere. This was a quantitative claim you made, not merely a qualitative one. A large plutonium fire would be very bad, yes. I never disputed that. But it turns out there is a lot of "very bad" stuff that happens all the time (including stuff connected to nuclear power, fossil fuel power, and damn near every other major industrial thing we do) that doesn't escalate to an "extinction level event for the northern hemisphere".
You're just making shit up, thus confirming my original and overarching point about most vocal anti-nuke people being hysterical morons (which does not then imply that the pro-nuke people or the people who designed many of the operational plants in the world today are geniuses.)
There are more than two political positions in the world. Polarization is a very large part of what got us here, and it's going to get much, much worse if leftists keep insisting that the proper response to a hysterical Trump is for the left to become hysterical.
One of the example of politically incorrect things (not goddamn executive orders on immigrations, just PC shit) I recently saw in the news was Trump referring to Warren as Pocahontas again and Al Franken throwing a hissy fit about it, saying he wish he'd been there to tell Trump to stop being racist.
This is brain-rotting PC garbage. The internal logic of Trump calling her that, dumb and overblown as it may be, has nothing to do with racism. The entire POINT in calling her Pocahontas is to mock her (rightly or wrongly) for claiming to be of a race that she isn't. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Native Americans being inferior. (That's not to say Trump isn't racist; merely that this statement isn't racist.)
Twain routinely used the word "n*gger" (the slashdot lameness filter is insisting I censor this), and yes, PC-obsessed asshats have called him racist for it. Twain would have no sympathy whatsoever for these cretins, just as he'd have no sympathy whatsoever for Trump.
I understood perfectly and Twain would have despised political correctness as a phenomenon, not as a label. fucking hell, he was so afraid that what was truly on his mind was too controversial he insisted that it not be published until 100 years after his death.
None of those articles contain the words "fire" or "north/northern". In fact, all I saw was " such exposure would release great deal of radiation into the environment", which is a nowhere near specific or suggestive enough.
Maybe, just maybe, one should try with some isolated island with no international trade links first...
That's fair enough, although I'm not certain there are likely to be any surprises, provided we already have good mathematical models for mice dispersal, breeding and interaction.
Most parts of the whole effing world, as far as I know.
According to the map I saw, they were not originally native to (but are established in) the New World, Southeast Asian Islands (and Australia and NZ), and South Africa. There could be some question over whether they currently form an important part of the ecology (perhaps after having displaced native species), but the speed with which these buggers can bounce back makes this a relatively minor concern, I think.
What exactly are these female mice you've collected going to breed with?
There are thousands and thousands of square miles of range, and dozens or hundreds of islands. They will not all be contaminated with the males, and it will be easy to test for modified males (just let them breed and look for females.)
We've done the whole "There's so many of them, they'll never go extinct" thing before and it never seems to work out.
We've never tried anything remotely like this before, to my knowledge. The common analogies used are complete bullshit, and as the frequent usages of shockingly ignorant phrases like "never seems to work out". Gators worked out just fine--hunted them to near extinction, then we stopped and they rapidly bounced back to being plentiful. And gators are far less prolific breeders than house mice.
People claiming to argue for prudence are really arguing "we can't ever do anything right ecologically speaking, so let's not ever try even if it means the wholesale destruction of unique ecosystems" on closer inspection. If you have specific alternative ideas or tweaks, say so. Otherwise, you're going to be called out as the neo-Luddite you are.
Slashdot Mirror
I can call what is shown in this video many things, but certainly not humour.
Again, not liking something is fine. I don't like country music. That doesn't mean I can say "it's not music" and write massive screeds trying to interpret it as... I don't know, people having normal conversations with weird speech impediments.
The only important opinion here is yours
No, I'd say the most important opinions are the 10+ million people subscribed to PewDiePie's channel (I'm not one of them, incidentally) and who have been laughing at him for years and years. Those millions of people might all be morons but they could still confirm one thing for you: it's comedy. If you think they have a shitty taste in humor, that's fine. If you think that IT'S NOT HUMOR and that PewDiePie was SERIOUSLY mad... that's just delusional.
Even though he was complaining when they delayed that output for some seconds!!
This is not "opinion". This is "ignorance" or "delusion". PewDiePie was not mad. You don't get the joke. You don't have to LIKE the joke, but in order to be taken seriously you do have to acknowledge that the joke is, in fact, a joke. The ending of it was a dark joke with some subjective interpretation, sure, but that bit you just reference was not actual, legitimate anger or actual complaining.
This very much does matter. He's one of the biggest names on Youtube, if not the biggest, and this drives at the very heart of all this the freedom of speech, PC culture, fake news and 'role of social media' stuff that's been heating up ever since Trump won the nomination (let alone after he won the presidency.) His size makes him "collateral damage of note and influence".
Translation: I do not understand humor. Or at least not PewDiePie's humor. There's nothing *wrong* with that man, different strokes for different folks, but Christ... how did this shit get modded up to +5?
Meh, the contacts I've seen have looked fairly crappy up close.
What makes you think that these scientific advancements will be equally available to all members of society?
For the same reason that iPhones can be found in significant numbers even amongst the poor--the economics of scale are such that, after an initial break-in period where only the rich can afford it (perhaps two decades at the absolute most, which given the gestation of humans is *far* too short for any real prejudice to emerge), the technology and infrastructure will mature to the point where it's affordable to the vast majority of the population. Also, during this initial break-in period, the improvements offered will probably be modest relative to the game changing superhuman stuff that might come much later.
I'm not super well versed in biotech but I have observed many procedures plummet in cost once things mature (most notably genome sequencing.) Other people in this thread have talked at length about how cheap and easy this is to do in principle... it won't stay a rich persons' product for long, it really won't. It can't.
This will lead to the inequality between the classes to become entrenched on the genetic level.
Yeah, it's a pity rich people never have sex with the poor... oh wait.
You realize that every single lesbian couple wanting a kid will go for the super-sperm, right? (Well, minus the particularly hardcore tofu-eaters.) It's not going to be particularly hard to get hold of. Plus a fair number of single women, plus probably even some women in committed heterosexual relationships.
Even if none of this were true, it's still unclear what the alternative is. China *will* do it, unless there's some cultural impediment I'm unaware of here (there are cultural impediments to organ transplant too, but that hasn't stopped them from apparently harvesting them on-demand from political prisoners.) Russian millionaires will certainly do it.
This is happening. Figure out how to deal with it. Demonizing it is head-in-sand behavior.
Yeah, one need look only at the status of organ transplants in China to see how this is going to proceed. They loathe the peasantry, there's a strong Confucian paternalism still present, blended with a pragmatic, anything-goes Communist attitudes... and they're big into soft and hard media controls to simply prevent their own people to figure out what's going on.
And the motives here will be both personal (high ranking party members who want to do this with their own children) and patriotic (improving the Chinese people to help the entire country.)
There's no good reason at all to shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to ban this, either nationally or internationally. It *is* coming. Better the research take place in the open.
Given how quickly cephalopods can breed and the lack of legal impediments concerning non-humans, I think the more pressing question is "what's the ETA for fully functional tentacle monsters?"
Well, substitute blue eyes then.
There's actually a side issue here about genetic prevalence, racial attitudes and (especially) ongoing reactionary racial biases. If one can put aside the historical baggage of Aryan theory for a moment, why *wouldn't* we want to save genetically unique features that are possessed by a small *and dwindling* minority of the population, including (but certainly not limited to) red or blond hair, Nordic-pale skin, blue eyes, etc.? Certainly, if you set this alongside the likely scenario of the much more genetically homogeneous Han people (of which there are literally an order of magnitude more than genetically Nordic people) perpetuating their ideal beauty standards[1], it is very hard to see how the commonly articulated terror of blond hair and blues eyes becoming commonplace isn't simply a remnant of anti-Nazi reactionaries (now commonly called SJWs) who are still tinkering with fairly mild forms of anti-white / anti-Nordic rhetoric--not from a genuinely anti-egalitarian place, mind, but merely in an attempt to (in their eyes) rebalance the scales.
I mention this only as a tangent of obscure and mild intellectual interest, surely nothing that people would enjoy screaming about for hours.
1. There is sometimes an argument that they favor having "western eyes", but a cultural aesthetic aversion to especially prominent epicanthal folds does not imply that Asian eyes aren't viewed favorably in east Asia any more than an aesthetic aversion to albinism means that blond hair and blue eyes aren't viewed aesthetically favorably in many western countries.
the numbers and tree damage never declined. Killing 300 in a night wasn't unusual in some areas.
Which is why the Luddites here are so odiously backward. This isn't an area I'm deeply read on, but NZ's large area combined with a lack of naive non-bat mammals makes critters like possums and mice a uniquely devastating threat, probably exceeding the damage that has already been noticed. To argue from a place of concern about mice is just ludicrous. Slightly less ludicrous would be issues of temporary food chain disruption if the mice are a key prey species for other threatened animals, but this is something that could be addressed with targeted efforts to preemptively protect and preserve the house mouse population in those areas.
But given I'm talking to someone with "stoat" in his name, I feel I might be preaching to the choir here.
You don't get to demand that, not until you've presented your evidence that the incineration of spent fuel rods from a single nuclear facility would kill off the entire northern hemisphere. That is a much more specific (and much more ludicrous) claim.
The elimination of disease, enhancement of intelligence, etc. are good and desirable things for the vast majority of people. There will be clever arguments, not all of which are entirely wrong, that this is bad or at least highly dangerous for humanity, but outright banning it is much more dangerous. Do you think that all ~200 countries in the world will not only follow suit, but will proactively enforce the law?
The Brave New World comparison is quite weak. Huxley's world didn't use genetic modification as I recall; they used embryological stimulation in an artificial womb. That was the key to their entire society--no more pregnancies, the government controlled all births. Now tell me, what do rich designer babies (with all of the usual attendant horrors of there being more blond people in the world, oh noes!) have to do with total and complete governmental control of reproduction and child rearing?
These things are not only unalike; they are opposite. People having control over their bodies and genes and children is directly opposed to the government having control (and/or denying them such control through bans.) There are plenty of real concerns here, but I fear they will be completely drowned out by nonsensical BNW and GATTACA quotes.
I fear and suspect the western world will end up intentionally abandoning this technological revolution, leaving it up to another power (perhaps the Russians or Chinese) to lead the way, very possibly in a clandestine way known only to the rich ruling elite. I must say, though, it'll be pretty amusing if the Chinese get there first and show us all just how ridiculous those "oh no, too many Nordic-looking people!" arguments are.
Better question: is there anyone on the internet who can accuse someone of an ad hominem (or straw men, for that matter) correctly? I literally don't think I've ever seen it done. Most people use it to incorrectly imply that all overt insults are logical fallacies, but you've taken it a step further to apparently mean that all implicit character criticisms are logical fallacies. I really didn't think it was possible for that guideline to be mangled any more than it already has been, but you've managed it. Bravo.
Tu quoque doesn't apply if I expand my of the cuff comment to clarify that of course this behavior is highly undesirable from Trump and the Republicans and should be stopped if we can, but the problem should not be thought of as unique to them. In fact, the more partisan you make issues like these, the less progress you will make. Instead of "Trump behaves like a gangster", frame it in terms of insisting on paper trails and increased accountability for all politicians, everywhere.
Excuse me, let me clarify that by "single reactor", I meant "single nuclear power facility". Slip of the tongue. It's not the same thing, but it doesn't change the fundamental lunacy of his claim that the fire would wipe out the entire northern hemisphere, or the fact that MrKaos is still repeatedly lying about his sources supporting his claims and so far has refused to offer any back of the envelope numbers to support his claim, not even pulled out of his ass numbers.
The only semi-concrete thing he did was compare it to Chernobyl, which he released 1/170th of the amount of material he's talking about. Well, Chernobyl killed ~4000 people (not immediately. The immediate death toll was well under 100) , so let's just do a naive overestimation of 170 *4000 = 680,000... yup, that looks like the entire goddamn northern hemisphere to me.
That's quite a lot of off-topic blathering Shane.
That's a truly amazing statement. Go and look at the number and density of direct quotes from your post. Everything I said was obviously on-topic, unlike your fairly off-topic attempt to dodge all of these issues by playing the very tired "anyone who writes a post that sounds a little too enthusiastic must be irrational and therefore must be wrong" card.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Indeed. Keep believing that a strawman is "whatever I disagree with". You definitely shouldn't to go look it up and educate yourself or anything. Just appeal to pedestrian stupidity; that's the ticket. It's worked brilliantly for creationists.
You provided something about a chemical fire burning coal at 540 degrees Celsius as opposed to a radioactive fire burning plutonium 3000 degrees Celsius.
You still don't understand that sentence? Analogy. Not "comparison". Hint: the issues are about exaggeration and quantification. The difference between a chemical and nuclear reaction plays no part whatsoever here.
Crybaby Shane ... temper tantrum.
I will give you $20 if you'll recite my entire post followed by your entire post on Youtube. You have to fully emote it, though. No halfassing it.
Oh! I seriously just this second realized... you're referring to the ad hom bit, aren't you? That was humor. Jesus Christ. I'd completely forgotten after our encounter last year that you have no sense of humor / irony / sarcasm whatsoever. You have my sincerest of apologies. But nevermind about the reading it on Youtube bit. You won't be able to do it properly.
The point about putting in those insults, you see, was to illustrate how these things were *not* ad homs, because none of them formed the premise of an argument...
what makes you think I'm anti nuclear?
If you want to work on your Trump impression, you'll have to find someone else. I'm not impressed. Asserting absurdly hyperbolic lies about the dangers of nuclear and then implying that you're pro-nuclear... yeah, whatever.
4 articles, 2 from highly respected Japanese news agencies on the damage to the spent fuel cooling pool, followed by 2 published works on plutonium fire. Your thought bubble exploded when Mr Trump grabbed you by the pussy, Shane.
A reminder for anyone who has somehow stumbled in here late: he has claimed that incinerating the spent plutonium fuel rods from a single reactor will kill off the entire northern hemisphere. He's had like 4 posts to either clarify this, apologize for misspeaking, or offer citations to support his ludicrous claim.
He has done none of these things, but keeps lying and pretending that he has.
Are you serious, a strawman argument
An explicit analogy, in the form of a simile, is not and never can be a strawman argument. It can involve other fallacies, but never a strawman because it contains an explicit indication that one is not talking directly about the argument that was just presented.
You are like the seventh person this month I've seen demonstrate a completely unhinged, random conception of that fallacy. It often requires a mere fifteen seconds on Wikipedia to not sound like a moron; you should give it a try sometime.
Here we go with the predictable ad-hom attacks
You see, that's more like it. You're still laughably wrong and could have taken ten seconds to learn an ad-hominem actually is, but at least you managed to get it wrong in the same exact way that all the other lazy, whinging assholes get it wrong.
An ad-hom is not an "attack", you pathetic whiny schoolyard twat. Being impolite has nothing to do with being right or wrong, logical or illogical. An ad-hom fallacy is using fallacious or fiat character attacks as the sole basis of an argument, most commonly as a dismissive type of refutation. If an insult is used as an aside or as part of the conclusion of an argument, it *cannot* be an ad-hom fallacy. You fucking moron.
Quick quick, call me a troll next.
Chernobyl pumped out roughly 5 tons of material to irradiate 3500sqKms.
There is no non-irradiated/irradiated binary state. Again with this irrational, magical thinking. No useful numbers given whatsoever, just a mythical state of "irradiation". How many people live within a that ~550km radius (3500/2pi) of Chernobyl? (Or adjust that for wind patterns or whatever.) What is their increased radiation dosage? What are their past and current rates of cancer? How does that rate compare to other common carcinogens and causes of death and disability? And can those numbers be extrapolated to the Pu fire you have in mind?
I would look up and calculate the answers to these questions if I thought you were capable of registering when you are wrong. Also, the onus is on the person talking bullshit to prove said bullshit.
You can't compare it to anything else because there is nothing else to compare it to.
Holy crap, I didn't even read this part when I wrote the above. You really are coming perilously close to actually saying the word "magical", aren't you?
These things have fairly well understood mathematical properties, albeit with some variables like the wind and precipitation patterns. You could easily come up with reasonable back of the napkin numbers with under an hour of effort.
the new information
If you keep spamming me with links that do not in any way, shape or form support your laughable claim about the effects of that Pu fire, I'm going to pray to the radiation fairies to sterilize you in your sleep.
It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.
TL;DR for posterity: He made specific claims. I made no claims whatsoever except to say that his claims appear to be hysterical fabrications.
His response has been to spam irrelevant links and then essentially lie by pretending they prove his assertions, proudly demonstrate his ignorance of the informal logical fallacies of debate, complain about my correctly calibrated levels of contempt and misanthropy... and now pretend that I'm the one making arrogant and unsubstantiated claims... as opposed to the guy who just claimed that the entire northern hemisphere would be killed off if the spent fuel from a single nuclear power plant were incinerated.
Well, SJW is a much trickier term than alt-right since the latter is primarily a self-identification (though it's certainly taken some descriptive-derogatory tones in recent months) and the former is primarily a derogatory epithet that's inconsistently applied. That aside, I think that an "appear to beracists" or maybe "are in practice racists" claim is more easily defensible because many of them profess and even appear to genuinely believe in racial egalitarianism, it's just that they've constructed pendulum-needs-to-swing-the-other-way type justifications for non-egalitarian tactics, comments and judgments. And these are shoehorned into that larger framework with a goal of egalitarianism, which is a goal not genuinely believed in by some SJWs, but I do hesitate to say "most".
In other words, it's tricky to separate the delusional from the malevolent.
Jews often get near the top, though. And they still aren't considered people of color, possibly not even the Sephardi Jews. You can't argue privilege as the X factor here, either... not when the point of comparison is east Asians.
I've got a yellowish tinge under my lily-whiteness, as opposed to a pink one.
I can see where this comes from but seems pretty exaggerated and isn't universal among the east Asians I've known. Also, not all white people have any pinkness to speak of; it's primarily the Nordic and (especially) the Celts that have that. And as an aside, I've never heard "gray" used to describe the paler south Asians, which to my eye is much more noticeable cast than the east Asian yellow.
All the iron ever produced is sufficient to kill every human, cow, and horse now alive, if distributed one bullet per heart.
I think this as an even more effective comparison if you changed it to iron poisoning from ingestion, which I'm fairly certain will be true if you crunch the numbers.
If your lazy mind cannot extrapolate what happens when you take ten times the amount of fuel that is in a nuclear reactor, pack it close together then remove the moderator from between the fuel rods then we're back to you having inadequate knowledge of the things we are discussing.
That's like saying the coal mine fire in Centralia is going to grow until it kills everything in the northern hemisphere. This was a quantitative claim you made, not merely a qualitative one. A large plutonium fire would be very bad, yes. I never disputed that. But it turns out there is a lot of "very bad" stuff that happens all the time (including stuff connected to nuclear power, fossil fuel power, and damn near every other major industrial thing we do) that doesn't escalate to an "extinction level event for the northern hemisphere".
You're just making shit up, thus confirming my original and overarching point about most vocal anti-nuke people being hysterical morons (which does not then imply that the pro-nuke people or the people who designed many of the operational plants in the world today are geniuses.)
There are more than two political positions in the world. Polarization is a very large part of what got us here, and it's going to get much, much worse if leftists keep insisting that the proper response to a hysterical Trump is for the left to become hysterical.
One of the example of politically incorrect things (not goddamn executive orders on immigrations, just PC shit) I recently saw in the news was Trump referring to Warren as Pocahontas again and Al Franken throwing a hissy fit about it, saying he wish he'd been there to tell Trump to stop being racist.
This is brain-rotting PC garbage. The internal logic of Trump calling her that, dumb and overblown as it may be, has nothing to do with racism. The entire POINT in calling her Pocahontas is to mock her (rightly or wrongly) for claiming to be of a race that she isn't. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Native Americans being inferior. (That's not to say Trump isn't racist; merely that this statement isn't racist.)
Twain routinely used the word "n*gger" (the slashdot lameness filter is insisting I censor this), and yes, PC-obsessed asshats have called him racist for it. Twain would have no sympathy whatsoever for these cretins, just as he'd have no sympathy whatsoever for Trump.
I understood perfectly and Twain would have despised political correctness as a phenomenon, not as a label. fucking hell, he was so afraid that what was truly on his mind was too controversial he insisted that it not be published until 100 years after his death.
None of those articles contain the words "fire" or "north/northern". In fact, all I saw was " such exposure would release great deal of radiation into the environment", which is a nowhere near specific or suggestive enough.
[Not in Citations Given]
Maybe, just maybe, one should try with some isolated island with no international trade links first...
That's fair enough, although I'm not certain there are likely to be any surprises, provided we already have good mathematical models for mice dispersal, breeding and interaction.
Most parts of the whole effing world, as far as I know.
According to the map I saw, they were not originally native to (but are established in) the New World, Southeast Asian Islands (and Australia and NZ), and South Africa. There could be some question over whether they currently form an important part of the ecology (perhaps after having displaced native species), but the speed with which these buggers can bounce back makes this a relatively minor concern, I think.
Obviously there are captive lab mice populations all over the place, but common house mice?
...are the same species. Also, virtually every pet store in America has common house mice (granted, they're often albino)
What exactly are these female mice you've collected going to breed with?
There are thousands and thousands of square miles of range, and dozens or hundreds of islands. They will not all be contaminated with the males, and it will be easy to test for modified males (just let them breed and look for females.)
We've done the whole "There's so many of them, they'll never go extinct" thing before and it never seems to work out.
We've never tried anything remotely like this before, to my knowledge. The common analogies used are complete bullshit, and as the frequent usages of shockingly ignorant phrases like "never seems to work out". Gators worked out just fine--hunted them to near extinction, then we stopped and they rapidly bounced back to being plentiful. And gators are far less prolific breeders than house mice.
People claiming to argue for prudence are really arguing "we can't ever do anything right ecologically speaking, so let's not ever try even if it means the wholesale destruction of unique ecosystems" on closer inspection. If you have specific alternative ideas or tweaks, say so. Otherwise, you're going to be called out as the neo-Luddite you are.