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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2651 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Not very Christmasy but... 'World War Three, by Mistake'

Some time around 2010 Eric Schlosser became convinced that the god-like titans who he thought protected his childhood from the Red Menace had feet of clay. He didn't realign his understanding; he wrote a "the sky is falling" book and spent the next four years trying to convince the world that the nuclear spectre he grew up fearing was still the most important thing you should freak out about right fucking now.

He hasn't added anything to the mix since.

Here's the thing about nuclear armageddon - the Russians love their children, too. Russia would like to be a world superpower again, but it'd rather get a good price on its oil than send troops to die somewhere in the name of Mother Russia. We lasted 40 years of finger-on-the-trigger, "we will bury you/Evil Empire" rhetoric in an era where it took a Red Phone to communicate with the other guy. Now? Now we got frickin' Twitter.

Every example Schlosser cares to cite is an example of computers doing something dumb and humans going "...but I'm almost positive the Americans have no reason to end the world right now. Surely there must be a mistake." These are not sophisticated systems we're talking about. Contrary to what everyone wants to believe, just because we can end the world in 30 minutes or less doesn't mean the world is going to end in 30 minutes or less.





camarillobrillo  ·  2651 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

kleinbl00  ·  2651 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Know what comes up when you search "Curtis LeMay Dr. Strangelove" into Google?

Eric Schlosser.