Jonathan Gibson wrote:
>
>> Nuclear Islamic Terrorism is far more dangerous than Nuclear
>> Communism. They had something to lose, while the islamic fanatics
>> don't - not even if the retaliation would reduce every sacred
>> islamic place to radioactive dust.
>>
>
> Nonesense. Why do the puppetmasters pushing suicide bombers have
> less to lose than the soviet aparatchniks did? There are any number
> off technical, political, cultural, etc, reasons for a ffoolish
> leadership to intentionally, or by blender, trigger nuclear bombs.
> The scale of mistakes is obviously much worse under the old Cold
> War than an isolated nuke going off here or there. Losing Morder,
> er Washington DC, to an attack would be bad, but nothing compared to
> globe-straddling nuclear winter after a typical US-v-USSR script.
> The scale is obvious and one you don't address.
>
Of course it's hard to estimate probabilies of future events,
and even harder to estimate probabilities of alternate-history
events [what was the chance, from 1945-1990, of an all-scale
nuclear war? Of a limited nuclear war? Since it didn't happen,
the probability is zero! :-P], but I was thinking, above, about
a single individual risk.
[OTOH, I don't believe that when the next A-bomb explodes
killing millions of civilians, it will be an act of war by
a nation against another nation. Most likely it will be terrorism,
blackmail by international crime, students playing with
things they don't know, or students doing it for fun].
>> But what is the solution to North Korea's problem? There's no
>> simple solution. Not even starving the kp-ians to death does
>> any good. Maybe offering a huge bribe to kp's dictator, making
>> sure he will spend the rest of his life in some tropical
>> paradise and nobody will ever touch him or his fortune could
>> solve that problem, but this would establish a predecent that
>> would make every dictator try to get the same "bonus".
>
> Well, invading Iraq certainly didn't slow them down now did it?
>
I don't know. Khaddaffi [whatever its spelling] seems quite tame
now.
> Additionally, we now lack a sharp military instrument to enforce our
> disagreements with them. Simple solutions sold grandly and to a war
> drumbeat rarely work and are never really simple.
> Engage them. Infiltrate and subvert with hugs and kisses that win
> over their people as you disarm their installations. It's a
> patience game. One this administration is congenitally unable to
> process. It doesn't fit the branding they've pushed lately as uber-macho.
> When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
>
Did this process work anywhere? It sounds like the opposite of
"don't feed the trolls".
> I feel for you and yours. Your agitation for action is understandable.
> I advocate drying up the weaponry funds by taking out the profits.
>
They lost some drug profits, not because drugs are legal, but because
they don't control the synthetic drug trade - from what I've heard,
we will remember with nostalgia the good old days when teens smoked
marijuana and snorted coke: these new drugs are one level more evil
than MC.
[I think this message has reached the highest Echelon count:
nukes, drugs, terrorism, Iraq, KP... Did we miss anything?]
> Clearly the "war on drugs" as it has been waged since... Nixon {!}
> are failing whereas Holland has an actual working system that
> minimizes harm.
>
I will do the minimal thing; there's an election in a month, and I
will probably vote for those that have these ideas.
>> BTW, I didn't have data when I wrote, but this Sunday's newpaper
>> had a study showing that the drug dealers are losing income from
>> Coke and Marijuana, and they are compensating it with bank robbery
>> and flash kidnappings - just as I said.
>
> Well, then the correct procedure is to harden those areas and beef
> up enforcement.
>
Easy to say, hard to implement. The police system takes a huge
share of the drug trade.
> You can't just shrug and say there is no winning,
> because there are victories. You just cited one, but industries
> like gangs demand feeding and until the machinery is starved into
> downscaling it will grow like a cancer. Marginalizing this crowd is
> the only way to make them into mere nuisances instead of dire
> threats. Is it starve a cold and feed a fever, or other way around?
>
If you want to use Medicine methaphors, we can't kill the disease
by killing the patient :-)
Alberto Monteiro
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