Nuclear war? I guess I'll be away from Twitter for like at least a year!

"REALISTIC" OPTIMISM AND A POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE
The American Religion
- The secret to surviving nuclear war is a Positive Mental Attitude mixed with a little Not Being Inside The Blast Zone.
  Don't worry about dumb stuff like fallout and nuclear winter, the biggest danger in the nuclear apocalypse is bad vibes.
  
  Well fallout literally gives off bad vibes
- Gotta hustle if you're gonna succeed in the nuclear wasteland! Rise and grind! Do what you love! The early mutant ghoul gets the three-headed worm!

If there's a nuclear exchange and a couple years later I'm doing the same tax forms I would have preferred the inferno.

COVID has normalized single-digit percentage death rates as "survivable" and "not a big deal". Turns out normalizing what otherwise would be unacceptable deaths of neglect can become instrumental in manufacturing consent for sending everyone into the meat grinder in order for Liberalism to survive.
EDIT: From the same lib: "3/4 of everyone you know might die but if you survive you will still have to go to work, etc". Wow, that makes it SO MUCH BETTER. https://twitter.com/Empty_America/status/1498398932514353159?s=20&t=SK_xJVo7eQU18Gabrwb4Mg
- That is my family: 3% of people dying is acceptable, especially when they aren't young neurotypical able bodied working people.
  Fuck em

I've seen tons of people here that are way too doomer about nukes in general (which I'll admit is not exactly the worst thing someone could be doomer about), but a large-scale nuclear exchange would end civilization as we currently know it if for no other reason than killing 90% of the population and EMPing all current infrastructure is just a tad disruptive.
Humanity (let alone life in general) would survive a nuclear war and civilization would restart, but in the sense that we restart at feudalism and maybe speedrun the last 1000 years of human development except with guns and a knowledge of what penicillin is.
- not super sure of that after all the massive explosions would kick up dust blocking the sun right? and the disruption to the ecosystem that would follow from that and the radiation/blasts on top of the disruption of the blasts and any survivors being isolated from each other with no communications infrastructure left.
  Seems like something that would be a bad idea
  
  Nukes are almost exclusively used as airburst weapons for exactly that reason, as you don't yeet much dust into the atmosphere if you detonate a few thousand feet above ground but you do still get the city-flattening blast. Even if you're crazy enough to use a nuke you still probably don't want to block out the sun and poison the soil forever, and if you do you'd just build a cobalt-59 bomb instead which you could detonate in your own backyard for the same effect.
  The actual radiation from a nuclear war would only be a major threat for the first few weeks afterwards, after which it would rapidly decay down to something resembling current background levels.
- a large-scale nuclear exchange would end civilization as we currently know it if for no other reason than killing 90% of the population and EMPing all current infrastructure is just a tad disruptive
  I just want to point out that 90% of the world dying sure sounds like doomsday to me. But maybe Posadists have the right idea.
  
  It absolutely is, but for comparison 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas died within 20 years of Columbus setting foot on Hispanola from old world diseases and then the remnants had to deal with centuries of slavery, genocide, and oppression from a population that didn't, and yet there are still plenty of First Nations peoples around today. There's a meaningful difference between apocalypse and Everyone Is Dead Forever.
- civilization would restart, but in the sense that we restart at feudalism and maybe speedrun the last 1000 years of human development except with guns and a knowledge of what penicillin is.
  haven't we already used most of the major resources on the planet that are easy to extract without mechanization and globalization? stuff like basic electricity and guns might come back, but i don't know if advanced electronics that require using rare earth minerals or heavy industry would. if that were so we might just get stuck at like mid 19th century levels of technology forever afterwards.
- How in the ever loving fuck is there a non-doomer version of a nuclear war?
  
  There isn't, but I've seen a dozen different people on here in the past two weeks claiming that 100 nukes could permanently sterilize the planet and wrap the Earth in an endless winter haze. It's bad enough without people coming up with even more doomerist takes on it.
- That's like massively catastrophic to a degree few of us could survive
- People always forget that when shit gets real bad, there's no one around to safely shut down all the nuclear power plants. Even if you survive the initial blast, radiation etc, the power plants are gonna go next.
  Nm, my info was old or never right in the first place
  
  Pretty much all modern plants are designed to safely shut down without human intervention. And as shitty as a new potential Chernobyl is, it's a regional disaster.
  
  I think that was a plot point in the show The 100, with the added feature of having absolutely no comprehension of how radiation or nuclear power plants worked
  
  ~~Actually, come to think of it, this was the most realistic part of Fear the Walking Dead lmao~~
  
  did you get that from Mr Burns a Post-Electric Play? there's a monologue like that in it

- capitalist realism brain level 100000. not even the end of the world will bring about the end of capitalism
  
  Building fake shops to bring goods back to the shelves like some kind of fucked up cargo cult treat system.

any nuclear war preparation that doesn't amount to "make peace with your God" seems a touch optimistic about how bad nuclear war is

- I moved from one place with an American base to another with an american base. I really thought I was moving away from the American base
- there's a book about nuclear survivors in Australia after a nuke hit like New Zealand, or Southeast Asia or something and about how everyone on Australia rushed from one side of the continent to the other to try and escape the radioactive winds. eventually they all die because you cant outrun that.
  
  Ah, I was thinking of Alas Babylon. Same concept except its Florida.
- As I understand it, the southern hemisphere would be a bit better off , but would still have to deal with years of freezing temperatures and crop failures as all the fallout and dust kicked into the atmosphere blocks out sunlight.

"well actually, ive played fallout 3, so i know nuclear war is extremely survivable" [pushes glasses up on nose]

"yes, the dead would outnumber the living within the first year, but think of the silver linings"
- Your rent might go down!
  Ha ha just kidding, the rent is going up.

positive mental attitude
- Good vibes eat radiation.

Its not surviving the nukes its surviving the aftermath. The chaos. The desperation. The refugees. The lack of food. The dead crops. The wildfires. The sky turning black.
- Everything is fine if you can still see the little holes in the night blanket that let the light in.
- Its not surviving the nukes
  :I-was-saying:
- Yeah but it will cancel out global warming. Futurama said so :so-true:
  
  In fairness, there's no faster way to get to zero-carbon emissions than a global nuclear exchange. Talk about your degrowth.

After a thermonuclear exchange..
:biden:
Nothing will fundamentally change!
- Guh. Another campaign promise broken.

The thought that terrifies me the most is that there might be people in the Russian or American leaderships who believe that a nuclear war is winnable.
I know Russia is an evil crazy Asiatic dictatorship but the US elite has been getting high on its own propaganda supply for decades.

as if datacenters and internet exchanges aren't on the list of 'shit to blow up'
- Do they even have to be? My city can't keep the lights on when the weather dips into the teens. My ISP goes on the fritz in sever weather. It really doesn't take much to knock over the apple cart.

If you think you would survive a nuclear exchange, you’re gonna be the first one to end up dying.

Calling a war an 'excitement'

One person I wouldn't mind seeing die in the wasteland

:doomjak:

I bet they were playing Civ V and were underwhelmed by the nukes and thought that was real life

I’ve watched hours upon hours of Surviving the Aftermath. Can’t wait to live it! :heated-gamer-moment:

Manifest those radiation burns away my guy

"Honey, I got to go outside. You were wrong - all the food's gone. But my hazmat suit as a rip. And - anyway - I don't understand how a hazmat suit helps against radiation."
"Just duct tape it."
"And what will go be doing when I'm out foraging for food?"
"I got imaginary football to watch on the whiteboard ultra-thin flat screen tv."
- Duct-taping a hazmat suit would work as a (temporary) fix. It keeps radioactive particulates out.
- Hazmat suits can keep out the fallout, the radioactive dust that spreads everywhere after a nuke. Of course you still need to drink the water and breathe the air and that will still have fallout in it.
  
  You also need to decontaminate at best, this is where if you train people will fail hard when it becomes routine, esp. with water becomes rare, then sands are alternatives...

i really have no words for this level of delusion