It's hard to argue against nuclear power when you're also arguing against pollution and waste.
It's hard to argue against nuclear power when you're also arguing against pollution and waste.
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
And demand for electricity.
my junk is ugly
I guess there is a rational in the sense that.
1. Taiwan is one of the most natural disaster prone zone in the world, it's got more earthquake on average than say... Los Angelos, and it has at least half a dozen typhoon a year.
2. Taiwan is super super densely populated, meaning that if the worst case happens, a huge portion of the population will be effected.
Still yeah, despite the fact that Taiwan has virtually 0 oil and only a tiny bit of natural gas, AND no river worth a damn for electricity purpose, we have around the same $ per KW cost as the US average, while not all of that is due to Nuclear (it also have to do with government monopoly, being on one of the busiest shipping lanes, and limited distance to transfer power) but it's hard to see how denuclearizing quickly will not have an ugly averse effect to that.
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
yeah, which is the point, in a vacuum, probably 100% of the folks vote against nuclear power, but it's not a vacuum, we have little alternatives and if vote goes down like that also almost no window of time to make up for the difference. forget about the inefficiency of wind/ solar, even if we want we don't have the land mass to do large scale wind / solar power.
A recent major events with potential severe consequences going forward.
The Philippines is 2 days ago had a patrol boat gun down a Taiwanese fishing boat, killing one of the crew (the owner of the boat), the boat was operating in overlapping waters of the 2 sides' territorial water.
As you can see, this doesn't make much sense from Taiwan's POV, as we're right next the the northern end of this claim, so in reality there's a overlapping part . unfortunatly the Philippines have been among the most aggressive (to put it kindly) in "reinforcing" such claims, often confiscating fishing ships from China or Taiwan for high fines (aka, ransom.)
Taiwan, due to it's problematic status internationally, have long tried to keep this under the rug, but this latest event have made it almost impossible, as all signs seem to suggest the Philippine coast guard essentially chased the fishing boat out of their territorial water (aka into ours.) and gunned them down with heavy machine gun. the chase lasted over at least 3 hour, so .... it's pretty hard to see what sort of real argument can be presented here.
The Philippine government have so far been very strong in saying that it's not their fault, that somehow this was the result of The fishing ship ramming them (which totally explain the 3 hour chase part yes.) . part of this may be that they're schedule to vote tomorrow, but this sort of reaction have been nothing new from their side.
Taiwan has, in a rare turn from the norm, declared an ultimatum on the Philippines to provide a formal apology and reimbursment within 72 hour, or face at the very least, the withdraw of all official ties and the freezing of all Philippino workers in Taiwan ( they are Taiwan's 3rd largest source of foreign labor, with over 80 thousand working here at least.) and potentially the shutdown of all trade. In reality, we probably will park our navy in that water if we don't get a positive response soon. (the most insane thing of all this is that, the Philippines have virtually no navy, Taiwan can realistically destroy their entire navy with 1 ship.)
This is going to get ugly, China obviously also made a fuss on this, which further complicates the situation.
But the truth is , Taiwan's been on the butt end of one too many of these crap that at some point it's gotta end.
Last edited by RollingWave; 05-12-2013 at 06:39 AM.
I ca only see the Filipinos backing down on this but you never know.
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
Not looking good at all, we have already expelled their ambassador, recalled ours, and declared the Philippines a no travel zone (code red). this is like... basically 1 step away from declaring war.
Oh right we're also holding an exercise with 1 ship from every major battle fleet we have tomorrow in that disputed water. aka enough ships to blockade Manila if we really want to.
How it ended up this bad? well the Philippines have been playing some diplomatic games with us in the last 24 hours, first saying they'll apologize, they back track, then try to haggle, then apologize.... to the victim (in total contradiction to standard international diplomacy) . I'd think the only thing you can do to make this situation worse is to try to play that whole "Taiwan isn't a country" thing at a point like this, unfortunately this seem to be exactly what they're doing.
Our government in on the hot seat here, the President , rightly or wrongly (mostly wrongly) is seen as a weak buffoon at times though he has made plenty of breakthrough negotiation with China, but yeah.. given that he's saddled with that image, and that the press and everyone is playing this up as the #1 thing, he has zero room to back down unilaterally.
The Philippines seem to be making massive misjudgment of the severity of the situation here. and unfortunately so have the US, heh CNN hasn't even noticed this story yet. and the State department made some vague remarks on this.
The US have some personal in the Philippines, though no official military once, but it doesn't take a geopolitical academic to see that if this goes further the US can't stay completely out of it.
Mister D (05-16-2013)
This rift between Taiwan and the Philippines isn't getting better.
The Philippines state department is now saying they'll consider EVACUATING all Philippine citizens in Taiwan (there may be as many as 150K of them, on an island smaller than Massachusetts.) , while Taiwan is likely to declare the conflicting EEZ between the two side high risk waters (aka, on par with Somalian coast, a not so subtle jab that we see the Philippine Coastguards as pirates.) which would allow the ships working there to either arm them self or bring armed escorts (Taiwan is a full gun ban country BTW, which makes this a remarkable leap.) And is probably going to cancel the previous limits we set on our own naval / coastal patrol in the EEZ, which means we're gonna patrol right off the coast of the main Philippine island of Luzon if we want to. and probably start arresting Philippine Fishing boats in retaliation.
All of these are pretty scary $#@!, the Philippines have nearly 10 MILLION folks working abroad, and they are obviously often the subject of less than optimal treatment in the various countries (true for almost all major worker exporting countries.), so the Philippine press have been playing up some incident in Taiwan where Filipino workers gets hurt or attacked or what not, certainly those things happen and are less than ideal, though by similar standards Taiwan is certainly nowhere near the bottom half of countries that really REALLY mistreat these workers (hint, Saudi Arabia is among the worst, because most workers there are female house maids.)
Logically sides should start talking more sense soon instead of letting this spiral towards war (which it is obviously in a trajectory towards.) but there hasn't been much signs of this yet. the two sides' investigation so far presents COMPLETE OPPOSITE version of what happened. with the Philippines claiming it was self defense on ships working inside their waters, while the Taiwan side have concluded so far that the ship was neither working, nor in their territorial waters, nor attempted to ram the PCG boat. one side is obviously lying, but it's hard to argue with a small boat that has 50 bullet holes in it. and the Philippines have presented almost zippo scientific evidence so far, with their claim based entirely on testimony of the crew.
This is getting to a pretty dangerous point.