Sherry Darling
New Yorker
A-W, a couple of points. I appreciate very much your stance that "neutrality" is morally bankrupt in certain situations. However, logically and facutually, I see a couple of problems with your arguement.
1. Your framing of the problem as "action or inaction" is a false dillemia.
2. Re your assert that more weapons= more security and more peace is contradicted by statistical data. Check out Dennis Sandole's Capturing the Complexity of Conflict. He conducted himself and cites numerous other studies which verify that the nations with the most weapons initiated the most violence (attacks on other nations, specifically, not civil wars or crackdowns on protests, etc).
Mark Twain put it beautifully: "To the man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail."
As a thought regarding this thread generally, I'd like to reemphasize Hiphop's point about the way this game has totally changed with the advent of WMD. Because they make the stakes of war so much higher, ethically we should all demand much much higher standards of rationale for going to war.
1. Your framing of the problem as "action or inaction" is a false dillemia.
2. Re your assert that more weapons= more security and more peace is contradicted by statistical data. Check out Dennis Sandole's Capturing the Complexity of Conflict. He conducted himself and cites numerous other studies which verify that the nations with the most weapons initiated the most violence (attacks on other nations, specifically, not civil wars or crackdowns on protests, etc).
Mark Twain put it beautifully: "To the man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail."
As a thought regarding this thread generally, I'd like to reemphasize Hiphop's point about the way this game has totally changed with the advent of WMD. Because they make the stakes of war so much higher, ethically we should all demand much much higher standards of rationale for going to war.