WANKITY-WANK-WANK... WANK WANK

Andrew Bolt ridicules John Quiggin's "modest proposal" that Britain and France might convince Iran to terminate its nuclear weapons program by themselves disarming:

Would such a regime, having ignored reason, really be so moved by seeing Britain and France disarm that it gives up building its own bombs? Next Quiggin will say disarming the police would make mobsters give up their guns, too.

According to Quiggin, Bolt completely missed the point of his post. Bolt's mistake is to respond to what Quiggin wrote instead of to what he claims he meant:

Judging by his response to this post, Andrew Bolt hasn’t read Swift lately. [1]

Actually, Bolt’s article reads as if he didn’t look at the post at all, but reprinted something he found at Tim Blair’s or some similarly irony-challenged site, without going to the original source to check his quotes. Since that would be a violation of journalistic ethics, let’s charitably assume that the phrase “a modest proposal” didn’t ring any bells with him.

The point of the post was not to seriously advance a policy option that (as is patently obvious from the post itself as well as the title) has no chance of being put into practice, but to get people to think about why countries like Britain and France feel the need to have nuclear weapons, and what impact that has on proliferation in general.

1 Unlike readers here, who’ve already made this point in comments.

Oddly, none of Quiggin's commenters mentions Swift or eating Iranian children; obviously Bolt isn't the only one to miss the ultra-subtle point. The fact that Quiggin has felt it necessary to post a clarifying follow-up tells me the problem is the writing, not the reading. Ironic, no?

Update: Mr Lefty at BOLTWATCH sides with Quiggan:

Strangely enough, even the US having nuclear weapons doesn't make me feel particularly safe. I can't think of a way it could use them that would make the world better. Particularly not against the terrorists. (Well, if I were a hard-core RWDB, I guess I might consider wishing that the US would just nuke any country with terrorists in it except the one I'm living in - a bit like a terrestrial Death Star, to keep the "systems" in line - but I'm not, and I doubt that RWDB view would be shared by too many.)

I can think of a way to use nuclear weapons to make the world a better place.