this board feels like it's gatekeeping properly
Why are you even posting over there, you fairweather traitor?
If you aren't willing to go completely cold turkey on reddit and walk away from everything then just don't even bother posting here.
Cautiously pessimistic. Molten sodium's notorious chemical reactivity kind of cancels out any advantages of not having to deal with a steam primary.
Also the sodium will itself be radioactive (albeit short lived), compounding the contamination of any accident that compromises the primary loop.
the US knew about the Japanese wanting to bomb Pearl Harbor
Cordell Hull (SecState) and Roosevelt wanted them to do it.
US Ambassador Joseph Grew sent Hull a message that basically amounted to "WTF ARE YOU MADMEN DOING?!" (in a lot more words) after they snubbed Fumimaro Konoe's negotiation attempts. Grew realized that Hull wanted the Konoe government to fail, so they'd get Tojo who would give them the war they wanted. Grew was furious about being led on by Washington and went to Hoover with a tell-all.
Or that they're naturally inclined towards such behavior even without outside interference?
Basically this.
The Quakers were the OG cultural progressives. The American Civil War was largely instigated by rabble rousers from the London Yearly Meeting that travelled America inciting abolitionists. The Civil War was a Quaker holy war, if such a thing could exist. It annihilated us; many enlisted (during the early "the union generals suck" phase; and worse, most of them fought under Grant). Those who didn't die were largely converted by the much more militant Methodist and Lutheran preachers that joined the Union army as Chaplains.
The Friends are by far the most pacifistic, egalitarian, idealistic, and utopianist branch of Christianity. We were egalitarian about race and gender for a couple hundred years before any other branches were.
To put this in perspective, Quakers were not welcome in Unitarian, Universalist, and Puritan colonies (Pennsylvania was very Quaker, everyone else was very NOT). They were so radical, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had a law that if a Quaker was caught in Massachusetts... on the first offense they'd be kicked out. Second offence they'd be whipped to the border. Third offense, death.
King Charles II ultimately had to send them an order demanding that they stop executing Quakers for visiting Boston. You can beat 'em, just stop killing them.
Before I say Quakers sound based
Don't, cuz the majority of the Yearlys are really, really pro-BLM. Paradoxically, the "conservative" Quakers are the most radically progressive because of what "conservative" means in the context of the Friends. The Conservative Friends rejected the shift to evangelicalism (like having pastors and programmed worship) but because of it they're the MOST culturally progressive.
Yearly: Every Friends church participates in a larger "yearly" meeting. The specific yearly they participates in denoting their specific branch of the faith. In the US there are a couple dozen yearlys, roughly grouped into four basic camps. These are the Conservatives, the Evangelical Friends, the Friends United Meeting, and the Friends General Conference. I for example grew up with the Iowa Yearly (Conservative) but right now I don't attend meetings because Iowa Yearly is... pretty leftist and I don't have any other meeting options.
saying it's because the calendar told me to cheapens whatever I did
Yes, precisely.
Now, you'd be hard pressed to find quakers who are SO uptight about fun that they don't do kids birthdays. But, like, worthy events to gather for would be accomplishments: graduations and weddings for example. Also Easter. Easter and the concept of the resurrection is waaaaay more important than Christmas, because part of our thing is that god is among everyone.
So we just cancel it all because le consumerism?
Also paganism.
Basically what I'm saying is that my position is that celebrating these holidays should be beneath any Christian, or at least any who claim to not be Catholic.
I mean, cuz let's face it, we've been fighting the Catholics for five hundred years, they're not gonna change.
This originally WAS our utopia. Iowa was mostly Quaker in 1850.
Maybe if we hadn't sacrificed an entire generation cleaning up the founders' mess we'd still be the largest denomination in the midwest and people would say first day instead of sunday.
Because by and large they were hijacked by brazen consumerism decades ago.
Better to end the public observance, give people a month of personal holiday each year, and let the people who actually do give a shit about this or that holiday celebrate as they will.
I'm Quaker. Holidays kinda aren't a thing for us.
Imagine each year having the exact same days/dates. Every 14th would be a Thursday every year for eternity.
You mean every 12th. And every month has a Friday the 13th.
And the Cotsworth Calendar is actually cool and we should totally adopt it. Here's how it works:
There are 13 months of exactly 28 days. At the end of the year there are one or two leap days that operate on the Gregorian system. The leap days are considered to be part of a "14th" month that is generally treated as a holiday, and/or lumped into the preceding month for purposes of billing.
From an accounting and scheduling perspective it would be much simpler to have fixed length months with a holiday leap. It would eliminate the "three check month" phenomena that hits most employees roughly quarterly, where the difference between biweekly pay and monthly bills results in a sudden jump or drop in cash on hand.
Factory farming is propped up purely based on government funding and censorship of the negative aspects of it
No, it became the norm post-Borlaug because its efficient as fuck.
If the cities vanished, right now, 75% of the population vanished and food demand dropped accordingly, do I believe that rural farming would go back to yeoman farmer America?
No, I don't.
Oh, you'll see SOME reductions of the extremes. Fewer feedlots, fewer high density hog enclosures. But will farmers stop using glyphosate? No. Fuck no. No chance, as long as the energy industry is there to produce it.
Why? Because it's efficient. Spraying isn't free. They're not doing it because they feel pressured by demand to do it. They're doing it because if they don't their yields drop. In other words it costs less to buy spray then the drop in yield would cost them if they didn't spray. It's a completely cold economic assessment, cost of spray vs cost of lost yield.
THAT WON'T CHANGE.
At least not without a total collapse in the energy sector. Or a precipitous drop in demand and prices such that it's no longer economical to spray.
I voted against Romney because he thought horse parking was a more worthy Olympic sport than wrestling.