On Friday, I pointed to some survey results showing that more men than women support nuclear power, by a 72-40 percent margin.
Today, I was reading a Lou Aguilar piece in National Review called "Real Men Vote for McCain" -- which as far as I can tell is not parody, though it's difficult to be sure these days -- and I ran across this:
3. McCain supports nuclear power. Obama backs wind energy.
Put aside the merits. I want to focus on a specific question: Why is nuclear energy considered manly? Why do so many more men than women support it? Why do NRO writers think it's what "real men" do?
I want a good sociopolitical explanation, and I don't feel like I've gotten one yet.
Two senators push to ramp up nuclear energy
Nuclear companies face reactor design problems, ethics questions
Will South Carolina become the nation’s new Yucca Mountain?
Comments
View as Flat
314159265 Posted 4:05 am
18 Aug 2008
Manly like BS...
Mars J. Pictor Florifulgurator, Western Bavarian Forest.
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 4:14 am
18 Aug 2008
Move nuclear power to Mars
Appoint Darth Cheney ruler of Mars, then the new corporate feudal colony can guzzle up all the hydrocarbons and burn them to make an atmosphere.
The new colony will need to build a huge superconducting power grid to create a planetary magnetic field to keep the solar wind from blowing the new atmosphere off into space.
Plenty of work for them! Maybe they will leave us alone for a few centuries.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
Jon Rynn Posted 5:41 am
18 Aug 2008
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 6:16 am
18 Aug 2008
But they have to wash the dirt off...or at least off the money. Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
GRLCowan Posted 6:34 am
18 Aug 2008
If that's so, and one could somehow compare men and women selected for equal left-wing-ness, the sex differential should vanish.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
Permalink
GreenMom Posted 3:24 pm
18 Aug 2008
Wind is SAFE.....and CLEAN.
Ever hear that George Carlin routine about football vs. baseball? Nuclear energy is football (armed combat). Wind energy is baseball ("safe...at home").
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 3:46 pm
18 Aug 2008
I'm racking my manly brain here. Clogged with testosterone, can't think. Sex, beer, vroom... that's all I'm coming up with.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
MAD MAC Posted 3:49 pm
18 Aug 2008
I want a good sociopolitical explanation, and I don't feel like I've gotten one yet."
You are probably not going to get one. Men and women differ in their outlooks on many questions in life, and all of it is not explicable - at least not in concrete terms.
I note there is a lot of man bashing going on here - by men. The Grist remains home to some self-loathing, depressing individuals who really need some help. You all seem to hate life and the world we live in. It changing to make you happy - sorry, the way it is.
Lastly, I definately qualify for "Real Man" status. 27 years in the US Army, 10 years as an active boxer........ those are serious credentials. And I am voting for Obama.
Victory in Pattani
Permalink
MAD MAC Posted 3:51 pm
18 Aug 2008
It's not changing to make you happy
Which is what I am sure I typed.......
Victory in Pattani
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 4:03 pm
18 Aug 2008
Real men don't need to "qualify", we know what we are. Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 4:25 pm
18 Aug 2008
It's manly homophobic group think DR.
Man one: "Are you for sissified wind power, like a woman?"
Man two: "Uhh, certainly not! I'm a real man and I'm for manly nuclear power!"
And so forth. Every real man, like Larry Craig for instance, wants to out-manly the next guy. It starts in grade school and just gets worse as these pro-nuclear power, profoundly homophobic men age.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
grumpyoldman Posted 5:40 pm
18 Aug 2008
In my eyes, it has nothing to with gender, with money and lobbying. As mentioned in this blog, the Belgian government voted in 2002 a law to abandon nuclear power. One has made several attempts not to implement and thus cancel out this law.
The real truth is that Electrabel - the nearly monopolist power supplier in Belgium - doesn't want these nuclear power plants to be closed. Built with tax money, they are already marked down (for depreciation) for years now and thus each day that those plants remain open are extra profit.
Eddy
http://www.grumpyoldman.be
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 5:55 pm
18 Aug 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/world/europe/17francenu ....
Americans are strangely confused about the French. Whoever called them "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" has no historical memory, that way back in the 1st century BCE, the Gauls gave Julius Caesar a long bloody struggle before submitting; then, starting with Charlemagne and his Peers, most notably Roland, up through Napoleon a thousand years later, the French were probably the most consistently warlike and destabilizing of all European nations. Even their saintly and much admired King Louis IX, after whom Saint Louis, MO, is named, was a crusader and imperialist.
Of course, whether bloodthirstiness, and being good with a blade, are true signs of manliness, I leave to Mad Mac to decide ...
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 6:29 pm
18 Aug 2008
Nuclear power is compensation. They wanted to be the manliest, nuclear power plant buildingest bad boys on the block. It makes sense.
And the most hate filled conservatives like Larry Craig, turn out to be compensating.
Men are afraid if they don't support things like nukes they will appear weak and unmanly. The NRO piece that DR linked to is all that all the way through.
Of course now that a man who doesn't need to compensate, Obama, is running, that upset the NRO writer.
McCain had to compensate by offering his wife up to the biker "beauty" contest to prove he is still a man, because of his age. McCain's fighter pilot tailhook, hard drinking, Don Juanism in his younger days was repeated at the biker rally.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
Pangolin Posted 6:53 pm
18 Aug 2008
Or better, find a landsailer and duct tape him in it with a stiff wind going and see if he doesn't wet himself. Crashing one of these is no joke.
There's a huge amount of power in a tiny patch of wind. Far more than is available as nuclear power if you count the whole country. That should be plenty manly enough.
Put the Carbon Back
Permalink
MAD MAC Posted 7:11 pm
18 Aug 2008
This is not an either or issue. You can have nuclear and wind. You can have nuclear and solar. You can have solar and wind. You can have hydro and Solar........ or any other combination of anything.
In certain areas one type of power generation may make more sense than in other areas. This doesn't have to be an all or nothing question.
As for the original question - why do men tend to favor nuclear in greater proportion than women, I would answer "irrelevant". Who cares why? It doesn't matter.
Victory in Pattani
Permalink
vakibs Posted 9:27 pm
18 Aug 2008
...DANGER, and really, really BIG EXPLOSIONS!!!!
Please GreenMom.... grow up !! Try to have a real conversation with a nuclear supporter, and you will understand the arguments in support of it.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
Permalink
vakibs Posted 9:42 pm
18 Aug 2008
Everyone please, a grand round of applause for this brilliant theory. Amazing discovers new lows in human intellectual potential.
Why does France have nuclear power ?
Well, there is a simple reason. France doesn't have anything else. It doesn't have coal, it doesn't have oil or natural gas. It doesn't have the geopolitical clout to throw around like the USA does. Unlike USA, it cannot guard the straits of Hormuz or pipelines through Georgia.
Nuclear power was the only reliable energy option the French could find to satisfy the needs of their industrialized economy. The same with Japan, which relies a lot on nuclear power.
It is big bad boys like the USA who didn't have to care about nuclear power, because they were confident that their geopolitical strength will ensure them of all the energy supplies they need. Big mistake ! The US share of global economic product is falling rapidly, and with it will be gone its geopolitical clout.
Sensible policies like what France has adopted will then begin to make sense to the big bad boys of the world.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
Permalink
314159265 Posted 10:31 pm
18 Aug 2008
Mars J. Pictor Florifulgurator, Western Bavarian Forest.
Permalink
vakibs Posted 11:44 pm
18 Aug 2008
A great power is a country which consumes 4 times or more of the amount of natural resources that it possesses. These resources are procured from other countries and are assured by a large economic and military supremacy. USA qualifies to be a great power, the erstwhile soviet union was a great power. France is not, and never was a great power after the 2nd world war.
What the a-bomb gives a country is supreme sovereignity. If you have an a-bomb, you don't have to listen to the dictates of the bullies around you (read USA, Soviet Union etc). You can continue with your policies, even if they raise eyebrows internationally. This is why the aparthied South Africa had an a-bomb, and why Israel has one. France was getting too close to comfort in the NATO, it was worried of being a junior ally of the US and opted to get out with an a-bomb. The same story for China in the red camp. India and Pakistan built a-bombs so that nobody can threaten their sovereignity (and why Iran would like to build one).
A-bombs are a relic of the cold war, of an era which saw an intense power game between the great powers. We are no longer in this era. We are entering an era where great powers don't exist anymore (no country will consume more than 4 times its natural resource potential). This is because the world economic product is growing exponentially, and as a result, the world is getting richer in its entirety.
So a-bombs are getting obsolete and will soon lose their utility.
Also, a-bombs have absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power. The countries which have the maximum number of a-bombs are not the ones which use nuclear power the most (japan, for example, will never build an a-bomb).
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 11:53 pm
18 Aug 2008
Real compensation is fusion power. Regular old fission nuclear reactors, so played.
That big baby in PJs in N. Korea has even gone atomic.
Vak your slip is showing.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
VeganCountyFan Posted 7:31 pm
19 Aug 2008
Amazingdrx - 'I'm racking my manly brain here. Clogged with testosterone, can't think. Sex, beer, vroom... that's all I'm coming up with.' Hysterical, thanks, you made my day :) xx
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 8:57 pm
19 Aug 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
MAD MAC Posted 9:36 pm
19 Aug 2008
As a great man once said, there has to be something that gives you pleasure in life.
Victory in Pattani
Permalink
vakibs Posted 10:14 pm
19 Aug 2008
Kinda gets me worried of anti-nukes and their feminine venom..
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 10:14 pm
19 Aug 2008
Just can't match the vroom of beer and hormone addled sex? Or the thrill of the battle field, depleted uranium kill? Or the big boom of a mushroom cloud?
Yep, that's how life passes the trogolodyte right by. And then you die. Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink