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It's one of those ideologies that even the mega-crazy radicals like to have around so they can say, "At least I'm not those guys." Same with the "Ragnar Redbeard" school of individualist anarchism.

They're opposed. I may be misremembering, but I believe some of them go even further and are opposed not just to agriculture, but to language. If that seems unreasonable, remember that this is an ideology whose best-known adherent is a domestic terrorist.

Do you have a link to this? I googled but didn't find anything but conspiracy theorists. At first glance that looks extremely implausible, but this is not an area I know much about.

It's probably a very bad idea to not use unit shielding. Which will drive up the weight of the reactor - the XNJ140E didn't use it, it used a shadow shield - but will keep you from accidentally frying anyone who comes too close, along with eliminating most concerns about radiation degradation of...

The NB-36 reactor is not really comparable. It was used exclusively as a radiation source, to test shielding technology and radiation propagation modeling. It was not intended for producing power, so its power density was correspondingly pretty sucky. What you want is one of the planned...

This is getting into modern politics, which is something I don't discuss on the internet, so I'm going to bow out of that part of the discussion. I have two objections to this: first, while the cyclical model of history is not impossible, it's far from proven. When you really drill right into...

While I agree that modernism in its current form is a passing phase - after all, nothing lasts forever - I dispute that we're going to see a return to traditional social forms. I would suggest that the industrial revolution, like the agricultural revolution, is a genuine phase change in history...

As I understand it, the main criterion for the Ubermensch - though not the only one - is that the Ubermensch creates their own system of values. This isn't just a matter of sitting down and writing a set of moral rules, which inevitably ends up producing a slightly modified version of whatever...

I haven't read Tragedy and Hope, but I did read his other macrohistory book, The Evolution of Civilizations, and it seemed to be mostly a ripoff of Toynbee with a bit more focus on economics.

Sorokin is pretty noteworthy in actually providing quantitative evidence for his theories. That evidence has a lot of problems, but it's still pretty impressive. However, his actual theory is another variant of cyclicalism, and is much less specific than Spengler or Toynbee, so it lacks some of...

I think another key difference is that a Spenglerist Germany would probably also be bent on the conquest of Europe. After all, Spengler believed that the twentieth century would see the emergence of the World Empire, and better to be the conqueror than the conqueree. In addition, I think it's...

I think that, regardless of one's opinion about whether they're a good thing or not, companies like Google and Amazon.com are things that have been created, and did involve some creativity in that creation. Similarly, a good politician had better have some ideas, or they're not very useful...

They're creating businesses, policies, political consensuses, etc. He's using "creative" in a broad sense. As fascinated as I am by the field, basically all macrohistorical theories are derived primarily from the author's personal biases, more or less embroidered with facts.

I've been getting into it, but it's hard to find a lot of these books these days. :( Sorokin's my favorite so far, if only because he goes a lot further towards providing evidence than most of these guys, even if a lot of that evidence is fatally flawed. Spengler strikes me as very similar to...

Someone else who's read Toynbee! What a bright day! I occasionally meet people who've read Spengler - and of course there's plenty of Marxists - but none of the other macrohistorians. Admittedly, I only read the abridged Toynbee. I do think there's something to the idea of "challenge and...

I don't think you need to even carry it that far to make it scary. One of my personal fears is a successful utilitarian society. The society that is happy, safe, comfortable, where no one has to struggle, where everyone is genuinely happy, not by such sinister means as drugs or surgery or...

Truman (or Henry Wallace) decides to use the Bomb in Korea. Atomic weapons become normalized, no different than an incendiary bomb on a larger scale. By the late 50s, with weapons-grade fissiles plentiful, the US military equips with large quantities of small-scale atomics, and they become a...

Almost certainly yes, but as far as I know, no one on the inside has ever said so for certain in public.

It's a lot harder to have a high fusion percentage when your yield is relatively low, and for most nuclear excavation - not sure about Qattara - multi-megaton devices are too much bang to be practically useful. 10 to 100 kilotons is the range that I usually see discussed in the literature...