Price of lies

I don't watch movies alone much anymore, so it took a while to get around to the HBO Chernobyl miniseries youngest son loaned me. It is well made and moving, but is not for someone who'd be too horrified at depictions of radiation poisoning. It made a few concessions to drama that klunked for me: I don't know how reactor workers in the USSR were trained, but to work in much less dangerous environments we were told to plan our work and get it done briskly, not hang around for dramatic effect. And an impossibly supercompetent woman was created to stand in for a large team of scientists and engineers--no single human being has that many details at his fingertips. But all in all, a good depiction.

The overdue safety test (signed off on at the reactor's commissioning but not yet done) was designed without a critical bit of information about a design flaw in the control rods. Because the state could not make mistakes, the control rods had no flaw, right?

We go a bundle on lies in this country too. Article XIII Section 5 of the Illinois Constitution: "Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired."

They promised that pensions would be paid, but never set aside money for it. They lied.

Is there any difference in nature between claiming that the soviet control rods are good because they represent the People's Will, and saying that "indigenous ways of knowledge are as good as colonialist science?"

Many fashionable claims seem like ventures in "How far can we go before they stop believing us?"

Politics is awash with lies--it is harder to find someone telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" than the reverse. And since, as usual, the media are involved in politics...

And ever since "You will be like gods" it has been deadly, in the end, to believe them.

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“It is not within the power of practitioners of demonstrative sciences to change opinion at will, choosing now this and now that one; there is a great difference between giving orders to a mathematician or a philosopher and giving them to a merchant or a lawyer; and demonstrated conclusions about natural and celestial phenomena cannot be changed with the same ease as opinions about what is or is not legitimate in a contract, in a rental, or in commerce.” — Galileo Galilei

"reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” — Richard Feynman, in the report on the Challenger disaster.