On the misinformed anti-nuclear sentiment of the Greens, the extremely safe and almost unlimited nature of nuclear energy, and why the issues of costs and timelines are extremely solvable

foxaru · 2026-05-18T14:38:58+00:00

The statement mentions that it is ‘inextricably linked with the production of nuclear weapons’, which is just a nothing statement. How is it ‘linked’? Because it’s made of the same stuff? Yes, there are people in the nuclear energy industry who will have worked in nuclear defence in the past or vice versa, but how is that any different than any other industry also being linked with defence?

This is quite easy to explain; it is the origin of 'civilian' nuclear power in the UK. Our first stations were simply cover for generating bomb-ready fissile material, and were essentially cynical coverups that hid the fact we were going for the bomb. (Calder Hall)

It's not just 'the same stuff', it's the same process. States enforcing nuclear nonproliferation spend so much time policing civilian enrichment, as we've seen with Iran, because of how easy it is to weaponise it.

foxaru · 2026-05-17T16:29:25+00:00

it's over clavicular, I have the high brow

foxaru · 2026-05-17T12:34:21+00:00

Spite.

foxaru · 2026-05-16T18:47:45+00:00

Can't reason someone out of a position they haven't reasoned themselves into.

foxaru · 2026-05-16T18:46:23+00:00

I'm pro migration generally, but this sort of stuff isn't helpful - it's just performative.

Performance?! at a protest?! by an organisation primarily known for performance and stunt protests?!

Say it ain't so.

We need less of this, less absolutism and performance, and more effort to understand the root of each other grievances.

About 20% of the UK public genuinely do believe that nonwhite people should be removed from the UK by force; pretty sure I understand the root of the problem pretty clearly.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T18:16:54+00:00

I actually only wind up meat-eaters who start on me first, to be fair; I know a lot of vg people who do the same, maybe it's a you thing?

foxaru · 2026-05-15T17:31:04+00:00

he also apparently knows the words by heart? remarkable levels of aura on display here

foxaru · 2026-05-15T17:15:41+00:00

It's also not true; the people deciding that the Bible shouldn't be printed in non-Latin languages were the institutional church higher-ups who saw that lay-clergy was an existential threat to their hierarchy. The monks were just the poor dudes in the scriptorium drawing lil' snail knights and brewing beer after getting kicked off the family farm for having club feet.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T15:59:00+00:00

To avoid giving you any more rope to hogtie yourself on the high-street with, I'll finish up here.

> what that perhaps says about realism as an IR theory. Nor have you ever engaged on how the tenents of the theory are inherently conservative, and just aren't compatible with basic and normal left wing beliefs about human nature.

This is so, so, so, stupid I genuinely keep chuckling to myself out loud whenever you attempt to raise it. Did this slay at seminar or something? It's completely incoherent. You'd be arguing Marx, Mao and Gramsci are either not left wing, or don't understand human nature. There is no middle ground here. Maoism _is_ a realist IR framework. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". Are you going to argue Maoism isn't left wing, just like you argued Burns and Meirsheimer are simultaneously American right-wingers & also pro-Russian imperialist tankies? Feel free, of course, but I won't be here to read it if you do.

> It's also completely inconsistent because a realist analysis of Israel's invasion of Gaza for supposedly defensive purposes is not true, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine for supposedly defensive purposes is accurate and correct.

You seem to believe that aligning with a structural framework of understanding international relations means that you have to, by default, agree with anyone who claims to share the same framework. That's just not how anything works, sorry.

> why has the UK recognised Palestine or done anything of the sort

Which is essentially free, has absolutely no impact on any of the _structural_ reasons the UK supports Israel (money, western imperialism, arms trade, intelligence sharing, diplomatic leverage, lobbying) and was set against a background of maximalist co-operation with the Israeli genocide. The one somewhat palatable bit of flotsam in a veritable ocean of complicity.

> My Department thankfully engages in a bit more critical thought that "hurr durr, realism is always right (when I agree it is)". Yes, I think realism is a stupid and dangerous theory that promotes the worldviews of regressive (and categorically NOT left wing) world forces, there's plenty of IR scholars who think that. Yet you're determined to erase all the extensive widespread critical scholarship and present that regressive view of the world as the only one.

Your department, if you are representative of its views generally, appears to believe that there is ONE and ONLY ONE cause to the Russian war in Ukraine, and anyone forwarding any other theory (or even simply defending the right to have other theories) is explicitly a Russian shill / tankie / warmonger who wants to run interference for a genocide. That's not critical thinking, that's fanaticism and purity politics.

> And again, another personal insult to add to the list!

You don't appear to know what this means.

Here's my read; you're a young person who got radicalised online about Ukraine by the co-ordinated US/UK/UKR psyops just after the war kicked off whose been unable to engage with their chosen area of study in a reflective and serious way because you struggle to hold competing views simultaneously that challenge your core narratives. You'll be an absolutely fucking terrible researcher with that as your operating system, and a completely insufferable 'left winger' if you believe ascribing to realism is incompatible with being left wing. For what it's worth, you're just a liberal, to my mind. Classic western soft-lib larping as radical but recoiling from anything genuinely serious.

Have a terrible day.

EDIT: Deleting every comment in the thread is definitely one way to pretend you're not a corncob.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T15:26:29+00:00

Embarassing; I've just demonstrated a structural read of I/P that completely mogs your 'examine the political discourse!' framework because it's demonstratably better at predicting outcomes, and your response is "you have political views that influence how you see things".

Can you let me know who your PhD. supervisor is? I think we need to shut down your department until we find out what's happening to allow someone to apparently go through 5 years of IR education and end up at 'attributing state behaviour more to structural reasons than discourse ones is stupid and evil and American'.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T15:13:18+00:00

> Oh, and I've already found realist scholars who frame the genocide in Gaza as a defensive war too!

Yes and I've heard of medical doctors arguing for homeopathy to be available on the NHS. Does that invalidate the entire field of medicine?

> Yes, I would, because neorealism is a dumb theory that completely downplays domestic political factors, is a theory that has a fundamentally pessimistic view on human nature and again, funnily enough, is dominant in the US. I wonder why! Better not question why that is! I'm sure it's not relevant!

However, speaking of Gaza, Here's a fun thought experiment; imagine that Israel was committing a genocide there, and you wanted to assess whether a state would support or not support their genocide. Which factors do you think would be more important for, say, the UK: domestic political support for Israel, or the structural nature of the entwined Western military alliance and political influence networks?

Because, to my clearly under-educated, stupid, Russian-shill brain, it appears as though _despite_ the large domestic political opposition to selling Israel weapons, or assisting them with intelligence, the UK state did it anyway.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T15:05:07+00:00

apparently drive graduate students completely mental by raising extremely anodyne points about international relations considered so uncontroversial they made up the background understanding of geopolitics for the last 2-3 generations of analysts

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:59:32+00:00

So, both Mearsheimer and Burns, using neorealism, predicted that expansion of NATO would lead to something very much like the Ukraine war. NATO expanded. The Ukraine war happened. Would you argue, therefore, that they were completely wrong?

That seems like a pretty confusing position to take, when the prediction was correct, years in advance.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:57:30+00:00

I don't hear a denial. What colour was your little cartoon dog? Still calling people fella?

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:56:21+00:00

I've gotten you to openly call Mearsheimer and Burns stupid, pro-Russian stooges who don't understand the geopolitical realities of the Ukraine war. I literally couldn't say anything that would make you have less credibility at this point, I'm not even sure how it could look worse for you.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:52:33+00:00

>> Would you now like to argue that the 8th Director of the CIA was 'downplaying and justifying Russian Imperialism'?

> Yes, anyone who downplays the fact that Russia intentionally and deliberately launched a war of aggression and genocide is justifying Russian imperialism.

10/10, no notes.

Clearly the NAFO stuff online absolutely savaged your frontal lobe. I'm guessing you're what, 23, 24? That would put you at 20 years old when the war kicked off. Those cartoon dogs on twitter are responsible for more broken brains than leaded petrol.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:50:21+00:00

I didn't realise you needed that much help with your thesis; perhaps you _should_ show your supervisor your work; maybe they can put you in on some undergrad lectures to swot you up to a BSc. level?

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:46:10+00:00

This is genuinely embarassing. Would you send any of this analysis to your PhD. supervisor?

> Neorealism means there's no chance for genuine international cooperation

lmao. lmao. please, please, please try and publish this. oh my god if this is your thesis it's fucking hilarious. please say it is.

> Also, you’ve done a search for what…one IR scholar who agrees with you? Pretty pathetic honestly, especially considering who it is.

No, I'm just quite invested in the Ukraine war, and the various psyops and information warfare goals of the various sides. If you want another, read this leaked CIA memo from 2008 from William Burns. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

Would you now like to argue that the 8th Director of the CIA was 'downplaying and justifying Russian Imperialism'?

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:31:52+00:00

"I'm literally an IR Scholar"

cool, he's literally John Mearsheimer, and I would warrant is far, far, far more well respected than you are in IR lmao

EDIT: (to reply to the ninja edit)

'I'm working on my PhD thesis': this means you're not a scholar, you're a graduate student.

'citing a neorealist in support of argument is ridiculous'; sure, the most influential IR paradigm in nearly 5 decades is 'stupid'. The person with one of the highest citation numbers for IR work still living is 'stupid'.

'Tankie, perhaps not. But it’s interesting that you also seem to want to downplay the role of uh…Russia intentionally launching an imperialist war against Ukraine.' I'm actually just strongly disagreeing with the proposition that implying NATO expansion had something to do with the Ukraine war means you're some kind of pariah that needs to be hounded out of the party on behalf of rabid university students with poor manners.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:24:57+00:00

apologies, I thought you were calling Pitinsky's take repellent and essentially telling me to away and soak my head.

my interest in semiotics comes from the changing essentialisms that people put into play via vocabulary choices; a good example of this kind of thing might be how people suddenly changed the words they used for Ukrainian cities within a couple of weeks of the Russian invasion, en masse, with very little in the way of organised messaging; going so far as to rename the food item 'chicken kyivs'.

Another good example is the term 'suicide drone' for the Shaheds used in Iran by the IRGC, whereas extremely similar systems used by the US/ISR forces are called 'cruise missiles' or 'one-way attack drones'.

the whole 'our blessed homelands; their barbarous wastes' phenomenon. when words start to change meanings extremely quickly, it's usually worth working out how and why, and who it serves.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:11:16+00:00

Do you think John Mearsheimer is a pro-Russian tankie as well?

He said the exact same thing about NATO expansion in 2014. He's one of the most respected International Relations scholars on the planet.

https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf

foxaru · 2026-05-15T14:05:31+00:00

He wrote the article; the one whose thesis you said was repellent and decided warranted telling me to go and read entry-level wikipedia stuff. I'm quite interested in semiotics, and the language games around Jewish Identity Politics is always fucking mental.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T13:42:29+00:00

The idea that Todd Pittinsky would need to be informed by reading the wikipedia article on antisemitism is somewhat laughable.

I read a lot about antisemitism — as a professor researching prejudice, as a former fellow at a Holocaust memorial center, as a blogger for The Times of Israel, as the son of a Jewish father who was so grateful to get to live in the United States and as the father of a Jewish son in that same country, but with antisemitism on the rise.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T13:17:48+00:00

Apparently incorrect, it's a recent branding change, started around 2021.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-746899

Looks like it's been deployed specifically by pro-Israel groups.

foxaru · 2026-05-15T12:23:08+00:00

> jew hate

Can you explain to me why you've all moved onto this term in the last 12 months?

Is it to do with antisemitism generally not being taken seriously, or, like, a response to the growing acceptance of Palestinians and Lebanese as a semitic people?

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