HBO's Chernobyl Mini-series drops next week.

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Joe Exotic
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In reply to easttexasaggie04 • 7:52p, 5/7/19
AG
easttexasaggie04 said:
I really enjoyed the first episode. It doesn't seem political to me at all. Just a crazy event and how the USSR prepared and handled it horribly.


I've read several books on the subject. You'll find that the Soviet political machine had a lot to do with the culture that enabled the faulty design, construction, and accident. They've already made some heavy political exchanges in the first episode. Hell, you already saw a room get swept up in a senior party official's terrible "pep talk".
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A. Solzhenitsyn
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In reply to Joe Exotic • 7:56p, 5/7/19
Bo Darville said:
easttexasaggie04 said:
I really enjoyed the first episode. It doesn't seem political to me at all. Just a crazy event and how the USSR prepared and handled it horribly.


I've read several books on the subject. You'll find that the Soviet political machine had a lot to do with the culture that enabled the faulty design, construction, and accident. They've already made some heavy political exchanges in the first episode. Hell, you already saw a room get swept up in a senior party official's terrible "pep talk".

EVERYTHING that happened in the Soviet union was political.
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A. Solzhenitsyn
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7:57p, 5/7/19
However, I think easttex might have just been saying that the show itself doesn't seem to take a political angle, which I would agree with.
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DannyDuberstein
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In reply to A. Solzhenitsyn • 7:59p, 5/7/19
AG
A. Solzhenitsyn said:
However, I think easttex might have just been saying that the show itself doesn't seem to take a political angle, which I would agree with.
did you sleep through Maester Luwin's Lenin speech? while most of the episode rang true, that was definitely a signature moment that i really questioned because it seemed contrived and inserted for political effect.
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Joe Exotic
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In reply to A. Solzhenitsyn • 7:59p, 5/7/19
AG
A. Solzhenitsyn said:
However, I think easttex might have just been saying that the show itself doesn't seem to take a political angle, which I would agree with.


If that's his point than I'd agree as well.
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amg405
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10:55p, 5/7/19
AG
First episode was great. Very well done.

Even if you're not a history person (I am), you will likely enjoy it.

Looking forward to the rest of the series.
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Gig-Em2003
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11:00p, 5/7/19
AG
Fascinating stuff. A must watch after one episode.
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BBRex
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In reply to Joe Exotic • 11:14p, 5/7/19
AG
Bo Darville said:
Blows my mind that they didn't have permanent wall mounted high level dosimeter alarms in the control room and throughout the plant. The just simply believed there was no reason because of so much faith in the design I guess.


No, because they didn't want the workers to know if they were in eminent danger. That's the same reason the dosimeters they had access to pegged at a relatively low level and to the ones that could get an accurate reading of higher levels were kept locked up.

Just watched the first episode tonight, and it was amazing. I loved how they filmed the initial event.
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easttexasaggie04
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11:17p, 5/7/19
AG
Yes. I'm saying the show isn't taking a political angle as it pertains to the here and the now. Obviously USSR covering it up was all political.
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DollahBillzYo!
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7:05p, 5/8/19
What a great show to remind everyone what a real dystopia Soviet Communism really was. I'm surprised HBO showed this.
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Gig-Em2003
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8:07p, 5/8/19
AG
I Highly recommend the HBO podcast to accompany the viewing. A great listen so far. Really impressed with the creator.
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Hogties
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8:09p, 5/8/19
AG
I loved this show's feel. It was riveting.
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10:29p, 5/8/19
AG
Just finished the first episode. Amazing.

I hate communists. The whole system was such a joke.
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In reply to A. Solzhenitsyn • 10:30p, 5/8/19
AG
A. Solzhenitsyn said:
Bo Darville said:
easttexasaggie04 said:
I really enjoyed the first episode. It doesn't seem political to me at all. Just a crazy event and how the USSR prepared and handled it horribly.


I've read several books on the subject. You'll find that the Soviet political machine had a lot to do with the culture that enabled the faulty design, construction, and accident. They've already made some heavy political exchanges in the first episode. Hell, you already saw a room get swept up in a senior party official's terrible "pep talk".

EVERYTHING that happened in the Soviet union was political.



I haven't read the whole thread but has anyone stated "user name checks out?"
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rambo_99
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2:03a, 5/9/19
Man what an unexpected hbo gem. I've previously watched all the documentaries and videos I could on this incident, and i can't wait to read the books you all referenced.

I can set aside the politics of why it happened, and be humbled that thousands of ordinary, Russian citizens at the command of an inept government knowingly sacrificed their lives to ensure an even bigger catastrophe was adverted.

Those men were basicallly drafted to go die and they saved eastern and Western Europe. Those husbands, fathers, and sons are heros lost to the USSR cover up machine.
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aTmAg
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5:59a, 5/9/19
AG
Why set aside why it happened? It's important to learn why so that things like this aren't repeated again.
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G Martin 87
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In reply to aTmAg • 7:42a, 5/9/19
AG
aTmAg said:
Why set aside why it happened? It's important to learn why so that things like this aren't repeated again.
Yes, as long as the correct conclusions are learned. Some people will unfortunately push the tired line that nuclear power is the villain of this story rather than the mindless bureaucracy and culture of fear that comes with communism.
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bobinator
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In reply to DannyDuberstein • 9:08a, 5/9/19
AG
DannyDuberstein said:

did you sleep through Maester Luwin's Lenin speech? while most of the episode rang true, that was definitely a signature moment that i really questioned because it seemed contrived and inserted for political effect.
I think it kind of served as an easy to way to cut out about 30 characters from the show. From the books I've read it wasn't really one person that made a speech like that, but he did pretty well sum up the overriding reaction from the higher ups in the party and the local government.

I can see why the show would want to cut down on the number of Soviet bureaucrats that were around just for the sake of simple storytelling.
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aTmAg
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In reply to G Martin 87 • 11:02a, 5/9/19
AG
G Martin 87 said:
aTmAg said:
Why set aside why it happened? It's important to learn why so that things like this aren't repeated again.
Yes, as long as the correct conclusions are learned. Some people will unfortunately push the tired line that nuclear power is the villain of this story rather than the mindless bureaucracy and culture of fear that comes with communism.
Ageed. It sucks that nuclear energy has been set back by decades in this country because of that tired line. They "learned" the exact wrong lesson.

I would take the real lesson further. Socialism inevitably leads to some form of communism because the lack of incentive encourages laziness. So the state has to provide that incentive through punishment (where the fear comes in). Then they have to set "guidelines" on what the standards of performance are acceptable (where bureaucracy comes in). Basically, the closer to socialism a society ia the more like this show it gets.
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bobinator
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In reply to aTmAg • 11:13a, 5/9/19
AG
aTmAg said:

I would take the real lesson further. Socialism inevitably leads to some form of communism because the lack of incentive encourages laziness. So the state has to provide that incentive through punishment (where the fear comes in). Then they have to set "guidelines" on what the standards of performance are acceptable (where bureaucracy comes in). Basically, the closer to socialism a society ia the more like this show it gets.

I 100% disagree that this is the lesson that should be learned.

What led to this kind of situation in the Soviet Union wasn't the idea of socialism itself. It's that enacting socialism is impossible. Even if 95% of a group of people want some kind of completely egalitarian society, that 5% is enough to ruin the entire thing. So it doesn't work.

The Soviet Union didn't have anything close to socialism. What it had was a sort of psuedo-feudalism where only a certain group of people had access to certain things and the only way to gain access to the class was to be part of the machine.

And all that anybody in the machine wants to do is move up the machine to get better stuff (housing, jobs, schools for their kids, etc) so there is absolutely no incentive to say that something isn't working. So everybody just pretended like everything was working all the time.

It wasn't laziness, in fact many of the people that were part of Chernobyl weren't lazy at all, they worked insanely hard. It's that they built a system that didn't allow for bad news.
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Definitely Not A Cop
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11:29a, 5/9/19
AG
I always thought the lesson to learn from Chernobyl is that government is always incompetent, and having a political structure where government controls everything only exacerbates that.
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bobinator
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In reply to Definitely Not A Cop • 11:35a, 5/9/19
AG
I think what happened there could happen in private industry also. In a way we've kind of seen it with autonomous vehicles though not to anywhere near this degree. The urge to get out ahead of a big trend has led to accidents that some of the scientists and researchers knew were possible but they were pressured to go ahead anyway.

Or another example is all of the recent Theranos stuff. They showed how a company can get EXTREMELY far in this country without having to actually prove that they're not lying.

Every system needs to have checks.
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Boo Weekley
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In reply to Hogties • 1:17p, 5/9/19
Hogties said:
I loved this show's feel. It was riveting.
The first episode was amazing imo. I knew it would be good, but it surpassed my expectations. Very very well made in all aspects so far. The whole time I was just thinking how thankful I was to be at home on my couch, and not there.
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aTmAg
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In reply to bobinator • 4:57p, 5/9/19
AG
bobinator said:
aTmAg said:

I would take the real lesson further. Socialism inevitably leads to some form of communism because the lack of incentive encourages laziness. So the state has to provide that incentive through punishment (where the fear comes in). Then they have to set "guidelines" on what the standards of performance are acceptable (where bureaucracy comes in). Basically, the closer to socialism a society ia the more like this show it gets.

I 100% disagree that this is the lesson that should be learned.

What led to this kind of situation in the Soviet Union wasn't the idea of socialism itself. It's that enacting socialism is impossible. Even if 95% of a group of people want some kind of completely egalitarian society, that 5% is enough to ruin the entire thing. So it doesn't work.

The Soviet Union didn't have anything close to socialism. What it had was a sort of psuedo-feudalism where only a certain group of people had access to certain things and the only way to gain access to the class was to be part of the machine.

And all that anybody in the machine wants to do is move up the machine to get better stuff (housing, jobs, schools for their kids, etc) so there is absolutely no incentive to say that something isn't working. So everybody just pretended like everything was working all the time.

It wasn't laziness, in fact many of the people that were part of Chernobyl weren't lazy at all, they worked insanely hard. It's that they built a system that didn't allow for bad news.
The reason socialism is flawed is because it is impossible. 100% of people could be egalitarian and it would still fail. People are simply not going work damn hard when they don't get compensation for it. Then you suffer the consequences of the diner's dilemma. It's as certain as the sun rising tomorrow.

It's a natural consequence of socialism that people strive to "to move up the machine", as you put it, because you cannot improve your situation by harder work or efficiency like you can in a capitalist society. Since the people on top can easily appoint themselves better housing, jobs, and schools, others strive to have that stuff for themselves by also striving to move up the machine. It's no accident that "no perfect socialist society" has ever "been tried". It's because they ALWAYS devolve into what happened in USSR, NK, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. Notice how guys like Bernie Sanders praised Venezuela to the hilt when it Hugo first started his policies, but now chalks it up as "not true socialism". It's because they are too naive to realize that what happened in Venezuela was inevitable. It would happen here too if he tried.

The farther towards it a nation goes, the worse off they become. Yet the closer to maxim liberty a nation goes the better off they become.
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bobinator
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In reply to aTmAg • 5:11p, 5/9/19
AG
My point is no system works when there's no way to check it, and that's the lesson to me from Chernobyl.

It doesn't matter if it's socialist, communist, capitalist or some other -ist, if you dis-incentivize the truth, then you're going to get lies. And when you build something on a tower of lies, something is going to go wrong.

And in the case of Chernobyl, it didn't have anything to do with any sort of laziness. It had much more to do with an environment devoid of negative feedback. Accidents had happened before and were covered up by the state, a few scientists knew that this could happen with these reactors but weren't allowed to tell everyone, they built safety protocols but they didn't tell the workers why they built them and then they pushed them for unreasonable goals so they often skipped the protocols.

Everyone was lying to everyone, so then the people at the top didn't even have the ability to create realistic goals, which then leads to more lying.

I think the best anecdote from one of the books I've read about the Soviet Union that kind of sums it up is that the KGB knew that they weren't getting good information about crops, so to try and assess how much grain they had they turned their own spy satellites on their own fields.

If you're a leader, you need to foster an environment that encourages people to challenge the status quo and ask tough questions that force leadership to continually assess and explain why things are done the way they're done. That to me is the bigger lesson here than it just being about socialism.
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aTmAg
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In reply to bobinator • 5:26p, 5/9/19
AG
bobinator said:
I think what happened there could happen in private industry also. In a way we've kind of seen it with autonomous vehicles though not to anywhere near this degree. The urge to get out ahead of a big trend has led to accidents that some of the scientists and researchers knew were possible but they were pressured to go ahead anyway.
Uuuh... autonomous vehicles have a lower crash rate (3.2 crashes per million miles) than human drivers (4.2 crashes per million miles). Thankfully, that "urge to get out ahead" has saved lives. Furthermore, compare the safety records of East German cars to West German cars after the wall came down. It was night and day. That's what freedom gets you.

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Or another example is all of the recent Theranos stuff. They showed how a company can get EXTREMELY far in this country without having to actually prove that they're not lying.
Theranos lasted 15 years (and wasn't engaged in fraud until they built their machine and started lying about it's capabilities.. so a subset of that). Meanwhile Social Security is over 80 years old is a dishonest ponzi scheme. In compared to government, the market acted fast against Theranos. SS looks like it will last until it craters our economy. Furthermore, Theranos defrauded people. Nobody serious is arguing that fraud shouldn't be against the law or not punishable.
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Boo Weekley
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In reply to bobinator • 5:32p, 5/9/19
bobinator said:

It doesn't matter if it's socialist, communist, capitalist or some other -ist, if you dis-incentivize the truth, then you're going to get lies. And when you build something on a tower of lies, something is going to go wrong.

You see how capitalism would be much less likely to foster this type of environment in general than communism though, right? I am not saying capitalism is perfect.
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bobinator
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In reply to Boo Weekley • 5:50p, 5/9/19
AG
Yeah, I'm not trying to defend socialism here. I'm just saying 'Socialism doesn't work' isn't my biggest takeaway from what happened at Chernobyl.
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Boo Weekley
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In reply to bobinator • 5:54p, 5/9/19
bobinator said:
Yeah, I'm not trying to defend socialism here. I'm just saying 'Socialism doesn't work' isn't my biggest takeaway from what happened at Chernobyl.
I think it's multi-faceted and that both you and other posters make great points. I do think socialism played a large role though, as someone else said, it rewards and punishes a lot of the wrong things. Especially in a more "fascist" form, like you saw in the USSR.
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bobinator
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In reply to aTmAg • 5:58p, 5/9/19
AG
They only have a lower crash rate because, for the most part, they've only been rolled out after thorough testing and in tested environments. But there have been some isolated incidents of things happening that the companies knew could be a problem but went ahead anyway.

Like I said, there hasn't been anything to the degree of an incident like Chernobyl, I'm just saying creating a culture where there's no negative feedback can happen anywhere. It's not exclusive to socialism.

With Theranos, I was talking more about their corporate culture. If anyone raised issues, they were fired, so fewer people raised issues. At one point you had whole parts of the company that didn't know this technology they were promoting didn't work like they said. The example there is that that sort of corporate culture can happen in the U.S. also.

Again, definitely not trying to write a treatise defending socialism, that's just not the thing I bring away most from Chernobyl.
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Boo Weekley
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In reply to bobinator • 6:01p, 5/9/19
bobinator said:
They only have a lower crash rate because, for the most part, they've only been rolled out after thorough testing and in tested environments. But there have been some isolated incidents of things happening that the companies knew could be a problem but went ahead anyway.

Like I said, there hasn't been anything to the degree of an incident like Chernobyl, I'm just saying creating a culture where there's no negative feedback can happen anywhere. It's not exclusive to socialism.

With Theranos, I was talking more about their corporate culture. If anyone raised issues, they were fired, so fewer people raised issues. At one point you had whole parts of the company that didn't know this technology they were promoting didn't work like they said. The example there is that that sort of corporate culture can happen in the U.S. also.

Again, definitely not trying to write a treatise defending socialism, that's just not the thing I bring away most from Chernobyl.
I just think most would argue that it is much more prevalent and deep rooted in a more fascist state...which socialist/communist countries tend to be. If tech workers were terrified to be sent to the gulag for rolling out a faulty product, you'd see a lot more lying and finger pointing.
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bobinator
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In reply to Boo Weekley • 6:03p, 5/9/19
AG
It doesn't necessarily have to though, theoretically. That's where I think it's kind of hard to parse out what's actually 'socialist' from what it was the Soviet Union was doing.

For the record I have a fascination with Russia and the Soviet Union so I love any conversation that involves these kind of topics.

If you haven't read any books about Chernobyl y'all should because the whole thing is bonkers. On the TV show I don't see how they're going to get around just making a lot of the people in charge look like idiots, but the truth is a little more complex than that because often people were denied access to materials that they would have read/learned if they'd have been able to. So they say stuff that sounds idiotic but it's because they had no way of knowing the truth.
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aTmAg
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In reply to bobinator • 6:07p, 5/9/19
AG
bobinator said:
My point is no system works when there's no way to check it, and that's the lesson to me from Chernobyl.

It doesn't matter if it's socialist, communist, capitalist or some other -ist, if you dis-incentivize the truth, then you're going to get lies. And when you build something on a tower of lies, something is going to go wrong.

And in the case of Chernobyl, it didn't have anything to do with any sort of laziness. It had much more to do with an environment devoid of negative feedback. Accidents had happened before and were covered up by the state, a few scientists knew that this could happen with these reactors but weren't allowed to tell everyone, they built safety protocols but they didn't tell the workers why they built them and then they pushed them for unreasonable goals so they often skipped the protocols.

Everyone was lying to everyone, so then the people at the top didn't even have the ability to create realistic goals, which then leads to more lying.

I think the best anecdote from one of the books I've read about the Soviet Union that kind of sums it up is that the KGB knew that they weren't getting good information about crops, so to try and assess how much grain they had they turned their own spy satellites on their own fields.

If you're a leader, you need to foster an environment that encourages people to challenge the status quo and ask tough questions that force leadership to continually assess and explain why things are done the way they're done. That to me is the bigger lesson here than it just being about socialism.
So don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the guys working at Chernobyl were lazy.

I'm saying that many of problems of socialism stem from the fact that lazy people are not naturally punished like they are under a free market. So the Soviets had to do things like turn their spy satellites on their own fields to figure out if they needed to punish producers or not. In a free market, if a farmer doesn't produce enough food to sell, then he can't pay his bills and goes hungry himself. That is all the incentive he needs to produce more grain. He can lie all day long and claim he's producing more than he really is, but it won't help his predicament if he is under producing. Because of this natural feedback loop, our government does not have to waste time, dollars, and bureaucrats to go make sure that farmer is producing enough, and those resources are put to better use.
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aTmAg
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In reply to bobinator • 6:20p, 5/9/19
AG
bobinator said:
They only have a lower crash rate because, for the most part, they've only been rolled out after thorough testing and in tested environments. But there have been some isolated incidents of things happening that the companies knew could be a problem but went ahead anyway.
I don't know what problems you are talking about, but by rolling out what they had they saved lives. Why would it be better for them to withhold their technology and let more of their customers die, while they can spend months focused on isolated incidents? The best thing to do is to send the technology out now, save lives, and keep working to improve to save yet more lives later. I see absolutely zero problems with that.

Quote:
Like I said, there hasn't been anything to the degree of an incident like Chernobyl, I'm just saying creating a culture where there's no negative feedback can happen anywhere. It's not exclusive to socialism.
Capitalism has a natural feedback loop where socialism does not. And it's far more swift than government ever has been.

Quote:
With Theranos, I was talking more about their corporate culture. If anyone raised issues, they were fired, so fewer people raised issues. At one point you had whole parts of the company that didn't know this technology they were promoting didn't work like they said. The example there is that that sort of corporate culture can happen in the U.S. also.
And the natural mechanism of the free market punished them. They are now out of business. And the people who invested billions of dollars without doing enough due diligence in what they were investing into got punished for their mistakes. Hopefully soon the government will catch up and finally put her and her cohorts in jail for fraud.
Compare that to government where agencies claim that their failures are due to being underfunded and are rewarded with larger budgets the following cycle.

Quote:
Again, definitely not trying to write a treatise defending socialism, that's just not the thing I bring away most from Chernobyl.
So the thing I bring away from Chernobyl is:
1) damn those guys were F-ed over by their management
2) damn those guys were brave

But I understand that the problems primarily existed due to their government. Those brave and pour souls did what they did despite their government. It sucks that they were put into that position, but they deserve praise for their actions (except the dudes at fault).
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bobinator
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In reply to aTmAg • 6:22p, 5/9/19
AG
That's where I think the Soviet Union is kind of a hard example because it was never going to work there. Even in some kind of mythical utopian socialism, you have to put some systems in place that the Soviet Union was never going to have.

It had an inherent imbalance of resources and wealth when it started, and they built in a sort of Russia-bias into the system as well. Especially in non-Russia areas like the Ukraine, people that were actually meeting their quotas and things not being rewarded what they were told they would be was as much of a problem as the lazy people.

I do agree that this universal safety net is an inherent problem with some kind of utopian socialism, I just don't think it was that big of a deal in the Soviet Union.

Put another way, on the list of reasons why the Soviet experiment didn't work, I wouldn't have 'it didn't punish lazy people' near the top of the list.
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