A Curious Little Blog

I have mixed feelings about whether Biden should have taken China to task for its treatment of the Uighurs (and Hong Kong) in his first talk with president Xi Jinping .  I do not have mixed feelings about how he explained his failure to do so in a town hall:  his responses are reprehensible.  “Culturally there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow,” Biden said.  Yes, we are aware that China has no respect for human life and this is normal for their government, but that is emphatically not a justification for their actions. Biden made it sound like China's human rights abuses are just a natural extension of their history of trying to stay strong and unified.  There is some truth in that, but historical continuity is never considered exculpatory, or even a mitigating circumstance, among Americans ready to denounce human rights abuses in other countries.  I don't always agree with the human rights gadflie...

I am not an isolationist.  I am, however, a lot closer to that position than I was 25 years ago.  Back then, the major threat to the United States was the Soviet Union.  We were in a Cold War, and I thought it was important to fight them and their proxies everywhere. I don't know if my views have changed because we're fighting a different sort of war now, or if it's just because I've gotten older.  Either way, I'm definitely finding more reason to be sceptical of foreign intervention in a whole host of places. I was not a big proponent of the Iraq war.  (Is that how history will know it, as "The Iraq War"?)  Attempts to paint it as a "war for oil" are really hard to take seriously, but I was never convinced that Saddam Hussein and his regime posed an urgent threat to the United States or any of its immediate neighbours.  I was not strongly against the war, as I viewed getting rid of a brutal dictator as a good thing.  My major complaint was t...

You may have heard of the Doomsday Clock , which purports to inform us all how close the world is to a nuclear holocaust. In fact, it is mostly a convenient propaganda tool for those in favour of disarmament at any cost. No one really knows what conditions are likely to lead to a nuclear war, and nuclear physicists are in a worse position to judge than historians or political scientists. It has recently been extended to include the threat of climate disaster, as though to emphasize its political motivations. The Doomsday Clock presently shows us at 5 minutes to midnight, which is closer to catatrophe than it has been since 1984, and one of the closest points in its history (see the wikipedia entry for a timeline). For the first time in my life, I believe they may be underestimating the threat. I don't expect a complete global nuclear war anytime soon, but I think the chance that nuclear warheads will be used in combat is higher than it has been since 1945. The Cold War, espec...