Political Correctness; Hurting or Helping?

[Angry Irishman]

"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those that speak it." George Orwell

I'd say the truth is often not PC and this quote explains the majority of PC bullshit. There is also a difference between someone like Trump and someone who speaks the truth.

 

[werepossum]

Nuclear weapons have the potential to kill more than 100,000 a pop. The hydrogen bomb is a fusion bomb and it has 100x the blast of fat man and little boy. In a major city a single bomb could kill millions. These weapons if used in significant numbers could set back humanity 100 years. Even a single blast in a major city would tank the entire world economy and catalyze a cycle of reprisals of epic proportions.

Whatever deterrent value they have isn't worth the fact that given enough time, the likelihood is that this will ultimately happen. Particularly since regimes like N. Korea, Iran, and who knows what other nut jobs in the future will have use of them. I just hope I'm dead before it happens because I don't want to see it.

A lot of people believe that World War 1 and 2 were also great setbacks for humanity and difficult on the world economy. Weaponry giveth and weaponry taketh away. Absent nuclear weapons we would likely have had another world war by now, and odds are it would be much more lethal than the last which claimed the lives of tens of millions. That is the nature of warfare and humanity, and the same factors that make nuclear weapons such calamitous devices also mitigate against their use, at least by Western nations. It's also worth pointing out that the USSR did not use them to prevent itself from disintegration, China did not use them on Vietnam, Israel has not used them on the Arabic nations, and India did not use them on Pakistan when each faced a foe without nuclear weapons. Certainly nuclear weapons present a major danger in the hands of nations such as Iran or North Korea, both as EMP weapons and as city killers, but at least somewhat balancing that is that every such nation knows that using nuclear weapons would result in its total destruction as a functioning nation - even if that meant a like nuclear destruction of civilians, assuming that conventional weapons could not utterly reduce it.