For a guide to the perplexed and bewildered about nuclear energy, I highly recommend Depleted Cranium. Its posts are first rate! Post topics shed significant light on nuclear energy. A today post on theDisaster At Chernobyl is the latest in a long string of enlightening entries. See also How Greenpeace Comerates a Radiation Accident, Greenpeace on Nuclear Energy: SCIENCE DOES NOT MATTER, Nuclear energy video: Blunt, Nasal and Right…, What is spent fuel anyway?, and more. All first wate stuff.
You might be interested to know that some clown from Friends of the Earth is demanding that Doc take down his post The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn as it is anti-environmental. Drop over and lend some support.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate his support for nuclear energy, but his Islamophobia makes me highly uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I'm concerned, extreme Islamophobes and Malthusian ecotards are two sides of the same coin - "genocidal ****suckers".
George, are you sure about that. I am critical of Islamic fanaticism, especially of the fundamentalist sort, but then I am also critical of christian fundamentalism, Jewish ultra=orthodox cults, and Hindu fanaticism. The Tamils are crazy too, by the way, except for my Tamil friends. Russian Old Believers are nuttier than fruit cakes. Have I missed anyone?
ReplyDeleteOpposition to jihadist terrorists is not Islamophobic (in fact many more moderate Islamists liken groups like al-Qaeda to the Kharijites -- a terrorist cult which ravaged the early Caliphate).
ReplyDeleteAn Islamophobe is someone who hates the religion of Islam itself and wants to destroy it.
History shows that the more monotheistic a religion, the more effective it is as a set of memes. Christianity easily defeated paganism in Europe -- in many cases without war, and paganism almost never regained territory lost to Christianity even temporily.
Similarly Islam is stronger than Christianity -- in medieval times many Christians converted to Islam under various pressures, but Islam itself was never rolled back except by outright ethnic cleansing (as in Spain for example).
The corollary of this is that Islam could only be destroyed by the physical extermination of its adherents. (Barring a Muslim conquest of the entire world - highly unlikely - the same is almost certainly true of Christianity.)
Incidentally, why do there seem to be so many Dawkinsian antitheists on the nuclear blogs I read? I had always imagined that it was biology and psychology which were the bastions of atheism in the scientific community, not the physical sciences.
I suspect it has to do with human psychology. There is an urge to grasp on to a group, a very real strength in numbers kind of thing. This means that fence sitting leaves you alone and vulnerable. This leads people to either embrace science (and all it's trappings) or religion (and all it's ignorance). There seems to be a real human tendency to shy away from the middle ground which is admitted ignorance and humility, ironically not bad things in either proper scientific theory or proper religion belief.
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