

i wonder if hearing people talk about radiation as though it’s an infection that can spread from person to person makes other nuclear enthusiasts twitch as much as it makes me…
or hearing someone imply that any nuclear reactor can explode in exactly the same manner that an atomic bomb does “by accident”.



My faith in the law has been shattered for quite some time, and the insidious (subconscious) whispers in the back of my mind suggest that there has never been any justice, only an illusion of it.
And that what we call ‘justice’ is merely specific instances of harm happening to people in ways we happen to prefer–
[sanity check stack-dump initialized]
[reconstructing from first principles]
…which I suppose would make the only real point of contention the matter of what excuses we adopt, from which we derive such preferences:
Which of the excuses we adopt to determine preferred kinds of harm,
as well as which of the excuses we adopt to determine preferred recipients of said harm.
We’ve come to use kinder euphemisms than “excuses”, such as “reasons”, “rationales”, “logic”…
Excuses with extra steps.
Not to imply that those extra steps are useless; they are the fulcrum around which we turn our aim.
The biggest difference between us and the feral hog infestation terrorizing communities across this entire continent is which excuses we find most or least objectionable.
When Brennan Lee Mulligan joked in the voice of an anarchist fictional character, “Laws are threats made by the dominant socio-economic ethnic group of a given nation; It’s just a promise of violence that’s enacted, and police are basically an occupying army, ya know what I mean?”, it is still referenced now and again even half a decade after he uttered it because it resonates with people. On some level, sometimes… maybe we’re afraid it’s the truth. Not that we know it’s the truth, but that it makes us wonder, makes us interrogate ourselves, makes us question. Like an intrusive thought. Like the call of the void. Most of the time we just usher it out of our minds and remind ourselves “no, we have systems in place to manage this, we already have it figured out, we all agreed to follow the same set of presuppositions and adhere to the same social contract, so I can trust that if I follow those directives then nobody will murder me, or if they do they’ll be punished, which is a very good reason for them to not murder me.”
… and then fucking shit like this happens.
KINDA HARD TO DISMISS THE SINKING FEELING NOWADAYS ISN’T IT
KINDA HARD TO JUST SMILE AND NOD AND ASSUME EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE NOW HUH
we’re either all safe or none of us are, and right now none of us are safe.
I still don’t know what to do. But my gut tells me that the very worst thing to do right now would be “nothing”.