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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (135390)	6/2/2004 7:01:11 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I've seen those numbers and many people besides me have questioned those estimates: capitulation was probably at hand anyway and with a blockade, the Japanese would have had no way to acquire materiel for on-going conventional combat. So, the question remains: when we went from scrawny kTon devices to MTon city killers, the risk to people worldwide went up or down (Japanese and American inclusive) and by how much? I remember living under the nuclear umbrella there were some days there where safety was a pretty abstract thing. The rule with weapons is that if you can do it, so can somebody else. A duel with hand grenades in an elevator leaves no one standing. Best not to go down that path.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (135390)	6/2/2004 11:06:55 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

When thinking about Al Qaeda, I find it useful to think of them as a version of the Inquisition, a "purifying" force in our own religion that killed many thousands, maybe millions, of "witches" and various heretical sects, like the Cathars, the Albegensians, and the Knights Templar, although certainly not the 95 million some claim, and the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of the Huguenots (20,000 in France over the course of three days.) The Islamists are not to be analogized, meaningfully, to any economic theorists, except that, of course, Islam is a comprehensive philosophy that includes rules about economics, such as interest rates. But that's really beside the point. It's religion. They practice their version of "old time" religion and they want to get back to the fundamentals. I think it says something about us that we can't look that in the face without feeling uncomfortable. We believe in religious tolerance, it's part of who we are. What happens when a culture based on religious tolerance meets a culture based on religious intolerance? Can we tolerate them without being destroyed by their intolerance? Maybe not, unless we don't tolerate them.