4 ms·

She offers no evidence that the student hasn't thought long and hard about nuclear weapons. I wonder if she reached that conclusion because he disagrees with h

• hugh3 16y ago
  I assume this is based on a real student whom she interviewed, and that he was unable to satisfactorily justify his belief system when challenged on it. This kind of thing doesn't surprise me -- the students with the most strongly held political opinions are often those who have thought about the issues the least.
  • jacques_chester 16y ago
    That's because when we talk about "strongly held beliefs" we're talking about an emotional and not rational attachment to the idea. Emotionally-held ideas are not examined as they are tied up in self-image.
• dkarl 16y ago
  She isn't trying to make a case against those specific students. They might not even exist exactly as she described them. She merely used three examples to illustrate her argument, and she included one vaguely "conservative" example (the student willing to kill for the government) to balance two "liberal" examples. That's pretty good for a former Republican officeholder writing in the Washington Post. There is only the faintest whiff of partisanship here; don't let it distract you from her argument.
• defen 16y ago
  > "If he supports Global Zero then he couldn't have considered these things." Millions of pounds of Soviet armor rolling across the Eurasian steppe and into Germany.