That's an interesting position, Sigma. I've been likening it to having your electrician fixing your plumbing. Our giant military with the tanks and destroyers and fighter jets are the absolute wrong tool for the job at hand. You don't fight a suicide bomber with a tank. To paraphrase I think it was Barry Levinson, our ability to fight a two ocean watt against who? Sweden and Togo? The threat is terrorism. But sadly I'm not sure what the answer is.
True, the giant fucking army isn't there to stop the terrorists, but I did also bring up the people continuously spying on everyone in the name of fighting terrorism. And the TSA, and everything else that is brought up alongside the phrase "post 9/11 world".
The basic point is that "national security" is
scary but not actually a priority the way the economy or healthcare or climate change or for that matter drunk driving are. No country is actually going to attack America, because of the aforementioned giant fucking army. Terrorists might, but how many people have died from terrorism in America, ever? A few thousands? Hell, even if you assume the first fifteen years of this century are representative, terrorists kill about 200 people a year? That's less than... um, just about anything that does actually kill people.
National security in the US has a horribly unbalanced money thrown at it vs. possible benefit ratio. Imagine that somehow all that investment in national security was preventing one 9/11-equivalent attack every year, or roughly 3,000 deaths (which I think is wildly overstating the risk of terrorism). Sure, 3,000 deaths a year sounds bad, except that radon-induced lung cancers kill 21,000 people a year in the US. Radon isn't even the leading cause of lung cancer, either.
I argue that by any reasonable sense of priorities Sanders' lack of a strong position on national security is, at best, seven times less important than his lack of a strong position on radon. If getting rid of all counter-terrorism programs entirely and using the money elsewhere reduced radon deaths by about 15% it would be a net win. That's in the universe where there's a 9/11 prevented every year, mind you; in this universe where as far as anyone knows counter-terrorism does fuck-all the balance is way more skewed.
And sure, deaths prevented are not the only standard that matters when choosing between government programs, but I think it gives a rough idea of the order of magnitude of the problem.
I feel a strong urge to add "#utilitarianism it works bitches" at the end of this postI'd hope he'd get us to do something a bit more effective than twelve-stepping. Maybe get us some of them newfangled drugs we got for treating chemical dependency.
Yeah, but naltrexone or whatever isn't immediately recognisable as a reference to alcoholism treatment the way twelve-steps are, so I went with that for the joke. My apologies to enemies of twelve-stepping.