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Sorry for not responding to your posts sooner - all weekend every time I tried to log on to free republic, all I got was a "Site Under construction". I was beginning to think the FBI had blocked me out for being too accurate on my suggested strategies... ;)

Regarding your arguments on NZ's nuclear free policy...Have you ever heard of something called "Rupture"? That's when you're having a conversation with someone and suddenly realize that no communication is occuring. It usually comes from the fact that you are both speaking from assumptions about the world that are far apart. It is possible to establish communication after you realize a rupture has occurred, but it involves backing way up, and trying to sort out those assumptions.
I'm afraid a rupture is what I hear when I read your arguments for the moral superiority of the "nuclear free policy". If you want to put in the effort to try to continue the debate, I am willing. I firmly believe in the value of intellectual debate - it is how both free minds and free societies flourish. A wise man once said,"You can call no idea or opinion truly yours until you have defended it in reasoned debate." I consider the warfare of ideas to be close to a patriotic duty. Especially as it's one type of war that leaves both parties stronger, wiser, and freer than they were.

However, it will be a very long discussion, and may deserve it's own thread. The topic here seems to have drifted off into name calling, and I'm not too sure anyone whould still be interested. What do you think?

I would say something to the "nuclear free" thread. In New Zealand we are currently facing the same sorts of issues regarding genetic research, specifically GE foods. Despite a government-commissioned report recommending that we proceed with caution, but proceed nonetheless, there is a strong voice of opposition. That voice (Green Party especially) says that not only do we not know what we are doing, but that GE is inherently bad.

Although I was still only at primary school when the nuclear shit hit the fan in NZ, I think I would be correct in saying that the attitudes then were the same. I think (I hope) we are going to go the other way on GE - that is, continue to allow GE research. For better or for worse, we went the nuclear-free way in the 80s. That we could now reverse that I very much doubt. Apart from the huge amount of international back-tracking the government would have to do, no government that reversed the nuclear-free policy could possibly survive the following election.

Abolishing "nuclear-free" would be akin to abolishing the all blacks, or coming up with a programme to declare kiwis pests and eradicate them. It has become part of the national identity and I think that the world for the most part has come to accept it, as one of NZ's quirks and as part of our "clean green" tourism image. I take your point about rupture though.