{"id":75832,"date":"2022-08-23T05:00:17","date_gmt":"2022-08-23T09:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=75832"},"modified":"2022-08-22T20:24:20","modified_gmt":"2022-08-23T00:24:20","slug":"progressives-and-the-always-just-over-the-horizon-promise-of-fusion-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/08\/23\/progressives-and-the-always-just-over-the-horizon-promise-of-fusion-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Progressives and the (always just-over-the-horizon) promise of fusion power"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was busy over the weekend, so I didn’t get a chance to post this from Severian<\/a> at Founding Questions<\/em>, but it’s still one of those things I wish I’d written:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
    \n

    Nuclear fusion breakthrough as “ignition” finally achieved<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n

    Woohoo. They’ve been promising us fusion power my entire life. I can’t even tell how many “breakthroughs” ago I stopped believing it. But since God has a sense of humor, this might actually be it. Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Finally we have pretty much limitless energy, for free\u2026 and there’s no fucking way the Left would ever allow it to come online. Because that would result in a massively increased standard of living for the average person, and that’s one thing the Left simply will not allow.<\/p>\n

    That was really the point of that “if I were rich” post the other day. I will admit up front that Envy has never really been a problem for me (for me, all the hit points that would’ve gone into Envy have been allocated to Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust). Nonetheless, I’ve never been able to understand the sheer pettiness of the Left. It doesn’t bother me that some people have more. Even if they don’t “deserve” it. Hey, them’s the breaks. And in fact, I even largely agree with the very old school Liberal idea of “progressive” taxation \u2014 the rich can afford to front their communities a little bit more money, provided it actually goes to the community<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    But the PoMo Left is all-in on Envy. But it’s a weird kind of envy \u2014 like everything else in Clown World, it’s inverted. They don’t want to have more<\/em>, themselves, personally \u2014 they want you<\/em> to have less<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    To the PoMo Leftist, the only possible point of being rich is to keep other people from having stuff. They don’t want you to eat the bugs because it’s better for the Earth. They want you to eat the bugs to keep you from eating steak. See what I mean? It’s not “you must eat bugs in order that they can have steak,” because of course they can already<\/em> have steak. Rather: you also<\/em> can have steak, and that’s bad. You shouldn’t be able to, you filthy prole. You don’t deserve<\/em> to eat steak, because you’re not Enlightened like they are.<\/p>\n

    So with fossil fuels and all the rest. You don’t deserve<\/em> to be able to fly places. If you must<\/em> travel \u2014 you know, if they need your labor somewhere else \u2014 you should be down there in steerage. And so on, because that’s what you deserve<\/em>, peasant. Free, limitless, clean energy would be nice … in the abstract. But since you people<\/em> would just use it to run your air conditioners and whatnot, we’re going to store the Mr. Fusion machine in that big warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was busy over the weekend, so I didn’t get a chance to post this from Severian at Founding Questions, but it’s still one of those things I wish I’d written: Nuclear fusion breakthrough as “ignition” finally achieved Woohoo. They’ve been promising us fusion power my entire life. I can’t even tell how many “breakthroughs” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,53,41,15,13],"tags":[1386,1020,1462],"class_list":["post-75832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-politics","category-quotations","category-technology","category-usa","tag-nuclearpower","tag-progressives","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jJ6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75834,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75832\/revisions\/75834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}