START

Somebody wrote that the START treaty is largely symbolic, meaning it doesn't really have that much "practical" effect. I always disagree when people talk that way. Symbolic means the sum of the hopes and fears of "all the years" for me: from the time when human life began until the present. I don't understand why people want to denigrate symbols which are the creation and refinement of thousands of years of intelligent tinkering.

Like I said earlier, people felt like they had to create the word "meme" because we had gelded the word "symbol". Intelligence is a community of communication. Symbolic is what we do. There is no wall between "real" and "symbolic": by real we usually mean brute matter and by symbolic we mean the creations of intelligence... and the creations of intelligence are always more beautiful and more appalling than mere brute matter.
So don't belittle nothing. Every step in the right direction is worth more than a million years wandering in the slough of despond.