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whiskeys's avatar

Can I suggest that whether nukes exist isn't necessarily a pressing question? I mean if they want to destroy you, everyone and everything in the area, the land, all of it - look at Dresden. No nukes required. I'm failing to see a lot of difference between that and Hiroshima in terms of what happened to people. Have I missed something here?

As for teaching people to live in fear - it wasn't nukes. It wasn't covid, either, at least not in the same way (it was the government that scared the hell out of me then - yes, I'm Canadian, but this isn't the only place where we discovered we have no rights!)

Weirdly, I was talking about this on another stack. I can't time it precisely, I'd guess maybe 25 years ago? If you're younger you might remember when. Media and experts were filling people's heads with so many horror stories. Your children are not safe! You must protect them! Letting children free range will kill them, one way or another. And that's when people turned into helicopter parents. Kids didn't have a moment alone. Every activity was planned and chaperoned. For their safety, of course.

Untold damage was done.

But is that why so many people fell into line and did what they were told so easily when covid hit? Or because climate change?

Sorry for the wild off-topic here.

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Laurence's avatar

While I have never seen a nuclear weapon, like I've never seen a blue ringed octopus, I would believe in both of those things. I feel that there are a lot of complex things that people would prefer not to exist.

I think that denial is comforting because it has an easy answer.

Does the poison of a blue ringed octopus need to be seen to be deadly?

I didn't die last night because of a missile strike on my apartment block. I used to think that people couldn't die in their sleep. Once I realised that people could just go to sleep one night and never wake up I also realised that the scale of simultaneous and shocking events on Earth was likely to be a lot more terrifying and unfair than I had previously imagined.

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