Reply #103: All of your posts cheer for coal. [View All]

[NNadir]

This is because you repeatedly ignore the risks of coal, while magnifying every single minor risk associated with nuclear power.

You have no option to present to replace nuclear with an alternative. None. Zero. Moreover you have no demonstrated evidence beyond silly newspaper articles about every bolt to demonstrate that it is more important to replace nuclear power plants than it is to replace fossil fuel facilities. When asked about this, you change the subject, issuing yet another vague and essentially meaningless one liner. All of your statements are negative statements about nuclear power, but you can offer no positive alternative except (also) vague meaningless blather about "politics and economics." Actually there is no evidence that your understanding of either politics of economics is stronger than your understanding of energy in particular or technology in general. Neither do you seem to have even a rudimentary sense of risk.

If you have a political or economic program that you think will work and realistically address the immediate crisis of global climate change, come out with it then. Tell us what political or economic plan you advocate to address global climate change. I note that many people are clear on that. DCFirefighter, for instance, writes eloquently about detailed programs of tax policy and the philosophy of ownership. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=48057&mesg_id=49176 One need not agree with him (or her) to recognize that he is specific, thoughtful, and clear about what he or she thinks needs to be done.

In my opinion you are the sort of person vilified by Theodore Roosevelt - correctly I think - in his 1915 speech "Citizenship in a Republic."

The relevant parts of that speech I reproduce here:

There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the The rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.

http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/3745/tr.html

President Roosevelt the first had his faults, but he certainly wasn't a coward, intellectual or otherwise.