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Through the Looking Glass

  
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
14:51 / 12.03.02
Nuclear weapons are a 'viable option'.
War with Iraq is 'inevitable'.
Prisoners shipped abroad so that torture and intimidation techniques, illegal on US soil, can be freely employed.

Is it just me, or has everything gone totally insane?
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
15:00 / 12.03.02
I wouldn't call it insanity, just incredible greed and stupidity. Which I have come to expect from the U.S. government.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
16:04 / 12.03.02
I think it's not so much that we've passed through the looking glass as that certain comfortable illusions have been violently stripped away... Will expand on this...
 
 
—| x |—
16:14 / 12.03.02
It is less a "through the looking glass", and more a "smashed the looking glass," I think. In other words, it seems to me that there was always insanity here in the world, but now we are unable to ignore it: it confronts us and stares us right in the face. The stress of hypocrisy has finally collapsed some of our illusions and now many of us are left stunned like so many shock victims participating in a horrendous accident.
But what do we do? The "headlines" you write, Nick, do not seem the proper response to the attempt to integrate our shadow into our collective psyche, and yet, how do we persuade the leaders of nations that digging in their heels against their own psychoses is not the answer?
So yes, the world is totally insane these days, but it's nothing new, it is only more apparent that we've yet to be mature enough as a whole to deal with it.

m3

[ed. to correct silly spelling!]

[ 13-03-2002: Message edited by: modthree ]
 
 
Lurid Archive
17:13 / 12.03.02
I think that there is a small note of optimism in all of this. I reckon that people ared on the whole much more aware of global politics after 11/9. True, the US with its slavish bulldog the UK have been more belligerent but don't you think that people are actually noticing? I do.

Public awareness is the only way that things will change and maybe, maybe that is happening.

(Apologies for the over optimism. I'll never live it down...)
 
 
seamonkey
17:22 / 12.03.02
I think its hypocrisy and then some. I mean, between the War on (Some) Drugs and the War on (Some) Terrorism, the US can pretty much ignore the sovereignty of any nation, and the two campaigns seem to be more intertwined than mere "Just Say No" ads tweaked to include images of terrorist financing. (Besides, I always thought that was the CIA's job.) Columbia for example is rapidly turning into a convergence of the two, a war that truly could become our next Vietnam.

Problem is, if we aren't going to adhere to international law, then why should anyone else? Its going beyond even a revival of the Cold War in terms of sheer idiocy (referring to missile defence shield fantasies). Its starting to feel like Roman Empire redux now. I guess PKD was right after all.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
17:28 / 12.03.02
Equally, if the US is going to start talking about lobbing nukes around, what effect is that going to have on prolferation?

If I were a small country, I'd be tooling up as fast as I knew how. Multiple Assured Destruction, anyone?

Shit.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
17:39 / 12.03.02
IIRC, India and Pakistan do not have ICBMs, and wouldn't be able to affect the U.S's MAD equation. Nor would, I imagine, any upstart nuclear power. Feel free to take me to task if India and Pakistan do have ICBMs.

More to the point, could either of these countries, as relatively advanced nuclear power, were they able to deliver their payloads to the U.S., be certain of wiping out a significant portion of the country?

(incidentally, what's China's arsenal like? I see to recall being surprised at how (again) relatively meager it was. Do they have ICBM tech comparable to the U.S.?)

Edited to add link to CIA report on possible foreign missile developments:

The CIA, man.

[ 12-03-2002: Message edited by: todd ]
 
 
MJ-12
17:58 / 12.03.02
quote:Originally posted by todd:
More to the point, could either of these countries, as relatively advanced nuclear power, were they able to deliver their payloads to the U.S., be certain of wiping out a significant portion of the country?

That would entirely depend on one's definition of significant. 5 shipped in devices could essentialy render NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and DC uninhabitable. Fairly significant, i'd say. Doesn't take much.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
18:11 / 12.03.02
No, I'm talking about significant as in, could they wipe out OUR nuclear arsenal and leave us unable to blow them to kingdom come? That's what MAD is all about anyway, not civilian casualties.
 
 
MJ-12
18:11 / 12.03.02
no chance. more specificly with the sub fleet at large, an enemy could fuse the entirety of the continental US, and the US, such as it was could still retaliate. Hence, the "Assured" in assured deterrence.

[ 12-03-2002: Message edited by: MJ-12 ]
 
 
Ria
18:31 / 12.03.02
a backwards/reverse world the US government wouldn't do these things.
 
 
MJ-12
18:34 / 12.03.02
and might not in this one either, but stating so removes the deterrence part
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
03:35 / 13.03.02
Snuck in bombs would be devastating to the US but how would they know who to bomb back?
 
  
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