Why is it pro-nuke people think they're invested with some scientific divine mission that entitles them to be dismissive and insulting?

hear hear!

to be generous, one is supposed to understand their derision is only due to their love of the planet and their passionate desire to save it, especially from those naive and deluded enough to believe the 'greenpeace propaganda', whose 'infantile, utopian' desire for clean, sustainable energy is actually handing the game to the 'bad guys' of the coal industry, which is choking all breathing, sentient beings into species suicide while wind/solar enthusiasts are supposedly just whistling past the graveyard.

one contrasts this with the calm, lucid, economically rational contributions to the debate by Jerome, DoDo, Crazy Horse, afew, Bruce and others, which soberly assess the present situation and suggest empirically proven, and in J'and CH's cases actually achieved results that can be pointed to as successful in the real, concrete world of reality, and bringing the greatest good to the many.

the advance of truth and intelligence, as seen in the lowering prices for customers effect, proves beyond doubt that the new systems can cohabit (till they supplant) the old, and of course that permits and turbocharges the hopefully inevitable process of ramping up this ever more undisguised boon, and achieving several side effects, such as diminishing attraction to, (and irritation of) terrorists intent on sabotaging our energy supplies to draw attention to their jihad, and subsequently justifying the need for an ever more paranoid, militarised state surveillance/control of its citizens, and the need for more resource wars and higher bills capturing money from the many and concentrating it in the hands of the few, while diminishing quality of life for all but the very rich in the process.

whew!

this propensity to turn into a flaming arsehole because you're right while the others are wrong, (because you think you see clearly better than the mentally challenged, befogged idiots who don't see it like you do), is a dead giveaway to be that their arguments depend on a kind of bullying and ego intimidation, a foretaste of the kind of society which would ensue, were these 'superior' intelligences to grab the wheel of public opinion.

good call afew, it should be a vermilion flag to anyone that these shills need to depend on shutting down critical thinking in readers and planners, till the latter are humiliated enough by the propagandists to STFU.

i'd personally like to apologise to them (and tony hayward) for not believing either in their content of their arguments or the style of their delivery, but i never did like kool-aide...or fascism either, which to my admittedly limited vision would be an inevitable corollary to their diseased dystopia of a future.

i may be as against nukes as Harvey Wasserman, but i recognise J's attitude to nuclear power as justifiable by his lights, and i particularly like that he may not want to ban nuclear, but he does have a viable alternative, and never adopts the kind of tone which you refer to in this perceptive, psychologically astute comment. that attitude seems peculiar to the pronuke faction alone...

great diary, thanks Bruce! Go wind/solar/rail!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty