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Jan. 23rd, 2008 | 10:50 am
Google news reported that the center for public integrity released a database of false statements by the bush administration about Iraq. I didn't see the link to the actual web site in the CNN article, so here it is.
War Card
I'm going to go crawl back into fantasy land and ignore the vast suck that is the real world.
War Card
I'm going to go crawl back into fantasy land and ignore the vast suck that is the real world.
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from:
markcronan
date: Jan. 23rd, 2008 10:22 pm (UTC)
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from:
alienghic
date: Jan. 23rd, 2008 10:34 pm (UTC)
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To be fair, figuring out which requires knowing their intent, which is basically impossible to discover.
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from:
markcronan
date: Jan. 23rd, 2008 10:38 pm (UTC)
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Sometimes, humans make mistakes. Sometimes even big mistakes. I think the move to make this mistake (which is most of the list is, one mistake listed as many separate ones) into a lie is politically motivated, not factually.
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from:
theinfamousmom
date: Jan. 24th, 2008 01:26 am (UTC)
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"But maaaaaaaaaaaaa, everyone else is saying it!"
See, this is why we ought not to overload governments with true believers (religious or otherwise). Because that kind of noncritical thinker will fall for anything without once asking the important question: But what if that's not true?
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from:
markcronan
date: Jan. 24th, 2008 03:02 am (UTC)
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If we followed your way of thinking to it's natural conclusion, you have an entirely paralyzed government. Everyone else says X? Assume X is false. Your own people say X? Still assume X is false. So, under what circumstances could one act on X? Only once you achieve 100% positive confirmation...which is not possible. So, you can never act on the best information available.
And yet, if they had been right, they could have been stopping a nuclear attack. And you would be saying "Why didn't you do something about it, you had plenty of evidence concerning it, why were you waiting to "think about it" more?" if they had not done anything.
Most of the time, when everyone agrees X is true, it's worth acting as if X is true. Sometimes you're going to be wrong, and that should be an OK thing. Because it's better to sometimes risk mistakes than to be paralyzed by indecision and an inability to ever draw conclusions because you could always investigate it a little more to get more certainty.
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from:
theinfamousmom
date: Jan. 24th, 2008 07:37 pm (UTC)
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That simply does not apply in this case. There were plenty of people trying to tell Dim Bulb Dubya and Chicken Hawk Dick that there just flat-out weren't any WMD's in Iraq. But Shrubby Boy wanted to go swagger out and prove he
washad a bigger prick than Daddy, so off he went.Mission accomplished, my heinie.
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from:
markcronan
date: Jan. 25th, 2008 09:35 pm (UTC)
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There were not "plenty" of people. There was a small minority of people telling him different, and a vast majority of otherwise competent and experience people, both within his administration, and both from his own political party and from the opposition party, and in foreign nations that are our allies, that were with that majority as well.
The evidence of WMD was frankly more of a consensus of experts than the evidence of man-made global warming is a consensus of experts - more dissenters from "manmade global warming" theory than there were at the time dissenters from the "Iraq is making WMD" theory.
But hey, he's clearly not your favorite guy (Bush), and I am not going to persuade you to view it differently. So let's just end it with "reasonable minds differ on the motivations involving our invasion of Iraq" and leave it at that.
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from:
alienghic
date: Jan. 24th, 2008 08:20 pm (UTC)
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What about Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, who both headed Iraq Weapons inspections programs, and both said. No, Iraq doesn't have WMD. The heads of two different inspection programs--the guys who went around in Iraq, opening up records, digging in the desert looking for proscribed weapons, inspected factories and labs--both said: No, no weapons.
The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament
IRAQ & THE WMD SCANDAL: Hans Blix: Blair made a fundamental mistake
Remember where some of that "intelligence" came from: Number 10 officials now admit that the second dossier, which was largely culled from a 13-year-old thesis by a Californian PhD student, is damaging the Government's case for war against Iraq.
There's also the disturbing: The purge at the CIA
I've also heard allegations, which I'm currently to lazy to go look up, that the Bush administration, liked to require as a condition of employment that people agree with the administration's policies in order to get hired/keep your job.
Finally, there's the Sunk Cost Effect.
For instance, for a typical adult human, if they spend a lot of time defending a belief system, it becomes significantly harder to see contradictions to that belief system.
See for instance, Scientology's masterful exploitation of this fallacy.
The reason we're still sitting in Iraq is because of the Sunk Cost Effect. Even though we're hemorrhaging soldiers and money, if we walked away, it would mean admitting that all the previous resources were "wasted". As a result it becomes impossible to rationally evaluate the likelihood that future resource commitments will succeed.
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(no subject)
from:
markcronan
date: Jan. 25th, 2008 09:44 pm (UTC)
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Here is some of the evidence at the time:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/
Notice just how many foreign intelligence agencies agreed at the time that Iraq was pursuing WMD?
As far as adult humans having a hard time seeing contradictions to their belief system, I believe you and I have discussed that issue at some length before...on the topic of global warming. How when someone points out an expert demonstrating a flaw in the current manmade global warming theory, your instinct is to defend the theory rather than actually consider the new evidence in a serious way objectively.
I don't know what more to say at this point other than I think folks are attempting to rewrite history to eliminate the fact that the overwhelming majority of experts did in fact think Iraq was pursuing WMD. I don't think it's a good thing to support the rewriting of history, particularly when the motives are political.
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from:
alienghic
date: Jan. 26th, 2008 02:59 am (UTC)
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There are several differences between the Iraq WMD case and global warming (GW), for WMD, the attempt was to prove the non-existence of WMD. GW is trying to make predictions from current observations.
The collapsing Arctic Ice sheet, and CO2 measurements vs temperature from the ice core samples strongly suggest the climate is changing because of increasing CO2 levels., the fact that the CO2 levels started changing about the time humans start burning coal, is strongly suggestive that there is a relationship between the two Historical trends in carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature, on a geological and recent time scale
So what if it isn't human caused? Even if there are natural causes for the climate change it still doesn't mean that climate change is safe.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth's climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates
We really should be both reducing CO2 emissions and working out ways to live in a world with a significantly different climate.
Cant take any more of the GW talk, I'm to pessimistic and am jumping humanity is going to make itself extinct.
Conversation is closed, I'm going to go play MMOs and try to forget.
Edited at 2008-01-26 03:00 am (UTC)
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Impossible to Discover
from:
dilinger
date: Jan. 30th, 2008 03:52 pm (UTC)
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What what, it's not toture, they said so.
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