The US actually has done this is the past, but domestic political opposition has resulted in the projects being cancelled. Two particularly famous examples are with North Korea and Iran.
In North Korea: In 1994, the Clinton administration and North Korea signed the Joint Agreement Agreed Framework that resulted in North Korea stopping it's nuclear program in exchange for 2 US-built nuclear power plants. The details are complicated, but essentially the new power plants were a proliferation resistant design and North Korea agreed to regular international inspections by the IAEA that would ensure no nuclear material was diverted to weapons development. The Bush administration, however, effectively canceled the agreement. The stated reason for the cancellation was that North Korea was not abiding by the terms of the agreement and was continuing to develop nuclear weapons in secret. The North Koreans claim that the US was the first to break the agreement by failing to construct the power plants and deliver other agreed upon aid.
More recently in Iran: Obama signed the JCPOA in 2015 with Iran. The idea of the treaty was that the US would supply Iran with "medium enriched uranium". At 20% enrichment, this would be sufficient to power Iran's domestic nuclear power plants and manufacture medical isotopes, but would not be sufficient for weapons manufacturing. In exchange, Iran would agree to dismantle it's infrastructure for uranium enrichment. In 2018, however, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. Although Trump made claims about Iran failing to uphold it's end of the bargain, this was essentially a move to appeal to his domestic base.
In both cases, we have democratic presidents agreeing to nuclear treaties that would at least in theory prevent proliferation (and in my opinion would have). Then republican presidents dismantling those treaties. This type of pattern is very common in American international relations, and makes foreign countries (especially those not very closely aligned with US interests) very hesitant to enter longterm agreements with the US.
This vacillation in American foreign policy has long been known, and both Iran and North Korea were very hesitant to enter into these particular agreements for fear of the US not following through. Both countries, however, were under lots of internal stress at the time of the agreements (North Korea due to the breakup of the USSR and subsequent 1992 famine, Iran due to sanctions and the various middle eastern color revolutions), and they probably would not have entered these agreements if they were in a more favorable negotiating position.
(I was a nuclear officer in the US navy, and participate in unofficial diplomatic efforts with North Korea.)
PokerPirate
10mo ago
Do you have any particular reading recommendations about these quaker antics? I spent a year as apart of a quaker meeting, and always heard about the anti-slavery stuff, but never from anything like a primary source.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
About 10 years ago, I found a recording on the internet of a Catholic military chaplain blessing the little boy atomic bomb before it went off to destroy Hiroshima. Stupid me forgot to save the reference, and I've been searching for it in vain ever since :(
PokerPirate
11mo ago
Ehh... I think you're being inconsistent/missing the point.
You previously said:
Fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris, might look impressive from the outside but it is ultimately mundane.
and then called these things "something of a cheap thing", to which I wanted to know what you think is "expensive".
The "fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris" absolutely have to "live with the long-term injuries and the PTSD" just as much as any infantryman.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
I'd love to hear what you think is "expensive" if you call daily devotion to those mundane tasks of firefighting/caring for an infant/etc "cheap".
PokerPirate
11mo ago
That's more-or-less my point. It's all ultimately mundane to the people who do it regularly.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
I'd be shocked if there was only 1 sample from the Oslo mine. This is a super trivial thing to verify, and I would have assumed both the US and IAEA at a minimum would have done so.
I did a brief read through the references in the wikipedia article and found a handful of non-French scientists who've published about Oslo, but I don't see any references to actual samples taken from the mine except the French one.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
Ehh... I think you have a bit too much of a "soldier climbing over the top at the Somme" notion of physical courage. The other examples [1] of physical courage in the prompt don't have nearly the chance of resulting in a "cheap" death, but are still associated with physical courage. I think a more poignant military-adjacent take is that all these examples of physical courage can be explained away by "training" your body to react a certain way in the face of danger so that you don't need courage in the moment. For example:
-
Fire fighters practice running into burning buildings everyday. This may seem scary to an outsider, but after you've learned to do it safely, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. You rarely see firefighters meaningfully risk their lives for strangers, and the captain would certainly scold them for breaking protocol afterward if they do.
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Steelworkers don't start on their first day 10 stories up. They've been slowly building the building floor by floor, so that by the time they're 10 stories up, they're confident in their balance. And any violations of safety protocol are going to get them quickly fired.
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The underdog boxer and the mugged man standing up for themselves are certainly putting themselves in real danger. But it's not the sort of danger that results in a "cheap death" so much as potentially very painful and longterm injuries. I'm sure that most people who do this also have trained for it in someway, but I can't know for sure.
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The mother has trained her mind/body for years through countless small acts of service to her children in order to value their lives above her own. "Mundane" sacrifices like waking up for years at midnight, then 2am, then 4am to feed a baby and change it's diaper make throwing your body infront of fallen debris a no brainer. These mundane sacrifices don't seem at the surface to be too related to physical courage, but I definitely think they end up resulting in actions that seem physically courageous.
[1]: for reference, I'm referring to
The courage exercised by a soldier climbing over the top at the Somme, by a firefighter running into a burning building, by a rock climber attempting a difficult route with shaky fall protection, by an underdog boxer stepping into the ring in a fight against the odds, by a steelworker calmly welding ten stories in the air, by a man refusing to give his wallet to a mugger wielding a knife, by a mother using her own body to shield her children from falling debris.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
I'm trying to challenge your statement:
And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature.
I don't see how you can argue that a "traditional Christmas display" (such as the angels/trumpets linked in the OP, or the still common nativity scenes) is "fully secularized" while a Menorah is not. My point is that the Menorah has no more significance in Judaism than these symbols have in Christianity, and I'd even argue it is much more minor than something like the nativity.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
sex positive traditionalist
This is more or less how I hope to raise my own children. It'd be nice if there was a catchier name though.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
The Menorah is a minor religious symbol and does not hold the same status in Judaism as the cross does in Christianity. The Torah is probably about as important to Jews as the cross is to Christians, and the Torah is not regularly displayed in public spaces.
It's true that Menorahs on public grounds have always been culture war, but I think everything else in your post is gross exaggeration.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
I'd love a source for the wargaming story if you have one. I don't recall similar stories from my reading of nuclear history books.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I think the editors don't allow links in news stories because it harms the website's pagerank to have outbound links to other (often competing) webpages. This is one of the many subtle unforeseen harms caused by google's monopoly on search that I haven't seen people properly discuss.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.
There's a pretty simple explanation that already aligns with your stated values: Caring about the homeless guy on the street can convert him into a productive member of society (maybe one of the people working at USPS's sorting center).
There's certainly a fine line between "caring" and "enabling" that needs to be debated, but my impression of most of the YIMBY crowd is that their "care" for the homeless guy stems from the same rational self-interest that you're describing.
PokerPirate
2yr ago
FWIW, I am a Christian, and this line of reasoning was a major factor in my becoming a pacifist and leaving the navy as a conscientious objector. Killing abortion doctors seemed obviously un-Christlike, and I couldn't find a moral difference between killing abortion doctors and killing enemy soldiers. So I decided I should stop killing enemy soldiers.
I tend to agree that I used to worship the flag more than I worshiped Jesus, and that I see a lot of other Christians doing the same.
PokerPirate
2yr ago
Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.
Christianity has a pretty strong tradition of requiring the "consent of the ruling authority" in just war theory. For example, Thomas Aquinas describes three criteria for a "just war", the first of which is that it must be waged by a proper authority. (The second is that the war must have a just cause and the third is that the soldiers must have a just intent.)
PokerPirate
2yr ago
Are these 3d printed guns remotely useful in combat? I can't imagine any plastic parts---let alone printed plastic---standing up to the pressures/temperatures created when firing a bullet. And AK47s are already dirt cheap.
I could see a 3d printed gun being useful for an easily concealable, single-shot assassination weapon, but that's not what a jungle guerrilla needs.
I appreciate your technical clarifications. I think these corrections only reinforce my main point though that getting long term domestic support for nuclear cooperation is very hard in the US, and that's why we don't see more of it even if it could be an effective foreign policy tool.
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