Armandt at Un-Common Sense is unhappy with what I've been writing about Venezuela: Ol' Hick Falls Out of Boat, Misses Water.
I don't have a clue what Armandt's preferred policy for Venezuela would be. But "Ol' Hick" is pretty good! (My preferred spelling would be "Ole Hick," but we'll let that pass.) He does like some of my posts on the Madrid attack, though.
But he's wrong in assuming that I think American foreign policy "is only about the Global War on Terrorism." Actually, even though I haven't written much about it here, the most important priority in US foreign policy should be nuclear non-proliferation and the reduction of nuclear weapons.
Despite the propaganda efforts to normalize the concept of nuclear weapons by lumping them together with chemical and biological weapons as "weapons of mass destruction," nuclear weapons are qualitatively different from other weapons. And nothing is a greater long-term danger to the United States and the world than nuclear proliferation. Since the scientific genie is out of the bottle, we may never be able to achieve total nuclear disarmament. But the closer we get to that, the safer the world will be.
Armandt also in the comments refers to one of my still-favorite posts, Git Thee Behind Me, Vulcan. He's left a fresh comment at that post saying it "sounds more like an argument against Christianity than one in favor of the Constitution."
Actually, it was a statement of sympathy for the Vulcan statue, a major Southern landmark. Birmingham without Vulcan would be like St. Louis without the arches.
If anyone wants a glimpse at some of my views on Christianity, they could wade through my series of posts on Christianity and The Passion. (If you're allergic to theology discussions, though, you might want to skip those!)
3 comments:
The only question you cared to ask about the administrations policy was:
"How is this making the United States safer against terrorists?" and pointed out that Venezuela isn't funding anti-American terrorists... and they're not accused of harboring "weapons of mass destruction.
If you thought there was more to our foreign policy than executing the GWOT, you must have simply chosen to not ask those questions....
Biological weapons could easily present as serious a "long-term danger" as nuclear weapons. What happens when something goes wrong? What if a mutated virus capable of killing faster than antedotes can be distributed were to "accidentally" disappear? I don't think biological weapons should take a backseat to the nuclear variety: each in its own way can be as deadly.
Biological weapons are potentially terrible threats to civilian populations. But they are virtually useless as battlefield weapons. And epidemics can be contained. We should be doing a lot more in the US to prepare public healthy contingencies. But nuclear weapons are a qualitatively differently class in every way: their immediate effectiveness in battle, their potential for near-instantaneous mass killing, their value as political bargaining chips. - Bruce
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