Tag Archives: The Washington Post

DOES A SHIELD MAKE PEACE?

September 25, 2026 Intellicurious Leave a comment

The Intellitake

One argument · Two sides · One verdict · Daily

Friday, September 25, 2026 · The Missile Defense Debate

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Geography no longer protects America. A shield over the homeland is not a provocation — it is a commitment to peace through strength.

The Thesis — Gen. Mike Guetlein, The Washington Post

THE ARGUMENT

In the Washington Post, Gen. Mike Guetlein — the U.S. Space Force general who directs Golden Dome for America — makes the program’s public case. For generations, he writes, Americans could believe that two vast oceans and friendly neighbors kept major conflict far from our shores; that era of quiet skies is over. His framing, consistent with his testimony to Congress: near-peer competitors, specifically China and Russia, are rapidly expanding and modernizing their strategic arsenals, while the old U.S. missile defense architecture was designed only for rogue-state threats. The shield — a network of sensors and interceptors against ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles — is, in his words, a commitment to peace through strength and deterrence: raising the cost of attacking America until no adversary tries.

THE ANSWER

Veteran nuclear-policy analyst Joe Cirincione, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, states the stability school’s counter-case: any missile defense stimulates an offensive arms race, because the cheapest answer to a shield is more spears — an adversary cannot assume the system will fail, so it must build enough missiles to overwhelm it. That, he notes, is precisely why Nixon and Kissinger paired the first offensive arms treaty with the ABM Treaty in 1972: you cannot limit offense without limiting defense. China’s missile buildup, on this view, is already partly a response to U.S. defenses — and analysts like Laura Grego add the arithmetic: intercepting even a handful of ICBMs could require tens of thousands of space-based interceptors. The shield, the critics conclude, doesn’t end the missile age; it accelerates it.

THE INTELLITAKE

Both sides claim the same goal — deterrence — and prescribe opposites, because they disagree about what an adversary sees when it looks at a shield. Guetlein sees a wall that makes attack futile; Cirincione sees a promise that America means to strike first and block the reply, which makes an adversary build until the wall is irrelevant. This is not a new argument: it is the SDI debate of 1983 and the ABM debate of 1972, rerun with hypersonics and orbital interceptors. What is new is the author — not a columnist but the program’s own director, making his case to the public in a newspaper, which is itself a datum: shields need believers to deter. The unresolved question is the one the 1972 negotiators answered one way and this administration answers the other: is defense the end of the arms race, or its engine?

TODAY’S PROVOCATION

If a perfect shield existed, would you trust your own government more — knowing it could strike without fear of reply?

— THE EDITORS, INTELLICURIOUS —

Intellitakes, News, Opinion

CAN RIDICULE PERSUADE?

September 23, 2026 Intellicurious Leave a comment

The Intellitake

One argument · Two sides · One verdict · Daily

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · The Persuasion Debate

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I have unshakable faith in vaccines. I went to the anti-vaccine conference intending to mock it — and that was wrong. Ridicule helps no one.

The Thesis — Leana Wen, The Washington Post

THE ARGUMENT

In today’s Washington Post, physician and former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen opens with a confession: she arrived at the Grand Hyatt to cover an anti-vaccine conference — keynoted by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — intending to make fun of it. Her verdict on her own intention: “That was wrong.” Wen’s faith in vaccines is unshakable, and the conference’s talking points struck her as the same deceptive claims she has rebutted for years. But the painful lesson of her title is aimed at her own side: ridiculing the people in those seats, she argues, helps no one — least of all the cause of vaccination itself.

THE ANSWER

The maximal case for the opposite view was made by Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik in his notorious January 2022 column, “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary”. Written at Omicron’s peak, it argued that “pleas for ‘civility’ are a fraud” — typically the work of hypocrites seeking to blunt criticism — and that mockery is not necessarily the wrong response to public figures who belittled the disease that then killed them. Denying sympathy, he contended, might be the only way to make such teachable moments heard. Where Wen sees counterproductive contempt, Hiltzik saw a moral pedagogy: some lessons are taught only by consequence, named plainly.

THE INTELLITAKE

Note what this collision is not: a debate about vaccines. Both writers are emphatically pro-vaccine; the dispute is over what contempt accomplishes. And unusually for an Intellitake, history has partly run the experiment. Hiltzik’s wager was made in 2022; Wen writes in 2026, from a conference where the movement his side mocked now keynotes as the sitting health secretary. Whatever four years of scorn were supposed to teach, the class did not convert — it took over the school. Yet honesty cuts both ways: civility’s record is unproven too, and Hiltzik would ask what respectful engagement has won lately. The real question beneath the manners: does persuasion begin with respect — or does normalization? Wen has staked her answer on the first. The last four years are the evidence both sides now have to explain.

TODAY’S PROVOCATION

Think of the last time someone mocked something you believe. Did it change your mind — or harden it?

— THE EDITORS, INTELLICURIOUS —

Intellitakes, News, Opinion

DO ANT WARS EXPLAIN OURS?

September 21, 2026 Intellicurious Leave a comment

The Intellitake

One argument · Two sides · One verdict · Daily

Monday, September 21, 2026 · The Nature of War Debate

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A world war is raging at this moment, with millions dying every week on fronts that never make the news. The soldiers are ants — and their war may explain our own.

The Thesis — Mark W. Moffett, The Washington Post

THE ARGUMENT

In the Washington Post, Smithsonian entomologist Mark W. Moffett — who earned his doctorate under E.O. Wilson — opens with a jolt: a world war is raging at this very moment, millions dying each week along battlefronts that never make front-page news. He means the Argentine ants, whose wars, he argues, cast surprising light on human conflict. As Moffett documented in The Human Swarm, one of their supercolonies stretches from the Mexican border past San Francisco, with others along some 2,000 miles of European coast — and where rival supercolonies meet, the borders are battlefronts. His larger claim: ants and humans are the rare species that form anonymous societies, strangers cooperating under shared markers — chemical for them, cultural for us — and with sharply marked societies come sharply defended borders. The us-versus-them that fuels war, on this view, runs deeper than politics.

THE ANSWER

Rutgers anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, after four decades studying war’s origins, argues in “War Is Not Part of Human Nature” (Scientific American) that the biological story fails on the evidence. Humans have an obvious capacity for war, he writes, but no hardwired propensity: homicide is not war — war is social, groups organized to kill other groups — and if it expressed an inborn tendency, the archaeological record should show it everywhere, always. It doesn’t: whole regions, including the American Southwest and Great Plains, show no evidence of war until roughly 2,000 years ago. On this view, war emerged with changing social conditions in recent millennia — an institution, not an instinct. Ants may be prisoners of their chemistry; we are not.

THE INTELLITAKE

Nobody disputes that the ants are at war; the fight is over whether the analogy travels. Moffett’s case is structural: ants and humans solved the same problem — cooperation among strangers — and inherited the same shadow, the defended border. Ferguson’s case is historical: a true instinct doesn’t skip whole continents for millennia. And the stakes are the largest imaginable. If Moffett is right, hostility to outsiders is the standing price of anonymous society, and peace is a discipline we must maintain against our grain. If Ferguson is right, war is an invention — and what was invented can, in principle, be unmade. Read Moffett for the vertigo; read Ferguson for the reprieve; then decide which one you find harder to believe.

TODAY’S PROVOCATION

When you feel that flash of us-versus-them — at a border, a stadium, a comment section — is that the ant in you, or a habit you were taught?

— THE EDITORS, INTELLICURIOUS —

Intellitakes, News, Opinion

IS RELIGION REALLY DYING?

September 20, 2026 Intellicurious Leave a comment

The Intellitake

One argument · Two sides · One verdict · Daily

Sunday, September 20, 2026 · The Death of Religion Debate

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The death of American religion is a myth of bad measurement. Faith is not declining — it is churning, uncounted, and hiding from the surveys.

The Thesis — Johnson & Kidd, authors of “The Death of Religion?”, in The Washington Post

THE ARGUMENT

In this weekend’s Washington Post, Byron Johnson and Thomas Kidd — whose new book The Death of Religion? directly challenges the “nones” narrative — argue that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated misreads what changed: a generation ago, unchurched Americans still called themselves Christians; today they answer candidly. The nones overwhelmingly believe in God and pray, self-identified Christians still outnumber nones, atheists, and agnostics combined more than two to one, and — citing Gordon Melton’s studies — the decennial congregational census undercounts congregations by at least 25 percent, missing the “others”: nondenominational, Pentecostal, and immigrant churches like those that doubled metropolitan Boston’s congregations between the 1960s and early 2000s. Yes, the mainline is collapsing — Episcopalians fell from 3.4 million to 1.6 million while the U.S. population nearly doubled — but that, they say, is nominal religiosity becoming a thing of the past, not the death of faith. Not decline — churn.

THE ANSWER

Sociologist and former pastor Ryan Burge — whose own congregation closed in 2024, and whose earlier book The Nones built the very framework Johnson and Kidd now challenge — agrees the nones have plateaued. But in his book The Vanishing Church (reviewed last month in America), he argues that headcounts miss the real crisis: the hollowing-out of the moderate middle. Aging centrist congregations are closing faster than young people replace them, leaving American religion an all-or-none proposition — conservative evangelical or nothing — and millions of moderate and liberal Christians religiously homeless, at a cost to community and democratic life. Faith may persist; the places that housed it are vanishing.

THE INTELLITAKE

Johnson and Kidd concede Burge’s central fact in words stronger than his own: progressive denominations, they write, are in “a virtual state of collapse.” Both sides agree the middle is going; the whole fight is over what that middle was. Johnson and Kidd say it was nominal — a label shed without loss, its place in the marketplace claimed by storefront Baptists and Nigerian Pentecostals. Burge says it was the moderate believer and the bridging institution — the politically mixed pew that nothing in the marketplace replaces. Same instrument, same corpse, two causes of death. Whether American religion is churning or in free fall depends entirely on which autopsy you believe.

TODAY’S PROVOCATION

If your childhood congregation closed tomorrow, would you go looking for another — or quietly become a none?

— THE EDITORS, INTELLICURIOUS —