Argument Clinic: Let’s Go, GerrardOfTitanServer

In my recent post about government’s manifest failure in the face of climate change, GerrardOfTitanServer naturally cropped up and started banging the “Nuclear is our only option” drum. I got so annoyed – he has pulled several comment threads into the weeds in the past – with him that I implied that maybe he could fuck off a little bit.

I regret that. The philosophical ideal would be to not be King Thag of This Blog, and fall back on my authority – which is real as far as bits in this corner of the internet go – I should have had the patience to engage, instead. So, I thought about GerrardOfTitanServer’s arguments for, oh, 5 minutes, and noticed a few gigantic, glaring holes in them. This posting is about that, and I welcome and invite anyone who wants to argue with GerrardOfTitanServer to go ahead.

This can be the GerrardOfTitanServer thread and, note to GerrardOfTitanServer: do not continue to drag other comment threads into endless text-walls of argumentation or I’ll shut you down. You’ve got your thread, now, here you go, this is it.

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I Suppose Corruption Is Inevitable

Lacking a better term for it, I mentally think of my deep suspicion regarding civilization as “anti-social” because it is, literally, a distrust of society verging on the belief that maybe civilization will turn out to be a bad idea in the long run. In my darker moments I think that civilization may be a great big hack that was perpetrated by the power-hungry, and those seeking luxurious lives. It’s as if they invented the idea of “lets be a ‘people’ so that they could be king of ‘a people’ instead of just layabout greedy thugs.

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1/4 Again?

Congress ought to be holding hearings to investigate the FBI’s non-competence as it sat around with its thumb up its butt while a nearly successful coup brewed. Remember, the FBI is the organization that is responsible for domestic counter-terrorism – the organization that notoriously spends a great deal of time creating terrorist plots so they can arrest the people who fall into their snare – their job is to do things like, well, stopping coups. The US people and government have placed an inordinate amount of trust (and money) in the FBI and we ought to be investigating the monumental incompetence of the agency.

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The Use of Nuclear Weapons – 2

It was a dark and stormy night in Okinawa, 1962; the seas were beaten into foam by the wind that howled across the island.

No, that’s not right. But it seemed like a better setting for “almost the end of the world.” And there was a storm, but it was a storm of toxic, invisible, lies. Lies were the fuel of the cold war; their target was the population of the whole planet, who were not trusted with anything close to the truth.

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Retaliation Strikes That Miss

Resistance to an occupying power is a human right, the nationalists say. I’ve always felt that arrangement was set up because even nationalists eventually figure out that eventually you’re not the top dog, anymore. It’s a sort of a back door built into the system for authoritarians to justify their eventual resistance to any power that overcomes them.

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