Of Dead Horses And The Flogging Thereof
It was probably only a matter of time before this sort of nonsense appeared somewhere.
The big worry is that the Iraqi WMDs might be in the hands of the Hezbollah thugs and those could be rather nasty. (Yup, I do still believe they were shipped out and yes, I do indeed believe that Hezbollah mya very well ahve chemical weapons available to it. Not a good thought but one which must be considered when we think about Israel’s current position.)
Scott is right.
[h/t Scott Tribe]
I really thought we had seen the last of that when David Kay issued his report.
Nope. We’ll be hearing about phantom WMD’s for decades to come.
Actually, I know where they are. They’re up Donald Rumsfeld’s behind.
Well.. if the neo-cons get their wish and Syria gets blown off the map and they then discover there was nothing there either.. does anyone think these folks would admit they were finally wrong?
Of course not.. they’d go and accuse some other country or advance some other theory as to where the “missing” WMD’s went… the fact that they werent there to begin with is a non-starter for them.
What sort of retribution should Syria receive for openly supporting Hezbollah?
I hope everyone’s been watching “The Passionate Eye” on Newsworld. “The Power of Nightmares : Examining our perception of a global terrorist network.” Fascinating.
Well it is pretty well documented that 500 older chemical rounds were there and have been found by the coalition. And it is increasingly clear that the survey group was entirely wrong about the mobile labs function as hydrogen producers for weather ballons.
Am I sure there are Iraqi weapons in Syria – of course not. there are lots of Iraqis and lots of Iraqi money transported on the eve of war; but there is no direct evidence that WMDs were transported.
I would love to be able to be as certain as you all seem to be that there were no WMDs. And I suspect that any number of Israelis would love to believe that as well. But given the stakes I suspect a degree of scepticism at such touching, indeed religious, certainty is warranted. Chanting “Bush lied” may confort the Koskids but it is of little help as the rockets rain down.
Speculation based on no evidence is what has led to the current mess, Jay Currie. Why you think it’s a good idea to keep doing that is a mystery.
And it is increasingly clear that the survey group was entirely wrong about the mobile labs function as hydrogen producers for weather ballons.
This is the first time I’ve heard this.
“I suspect a degree of scepticism at such touching, indeed religious, certainty is warranted.”
You have it backwards, Jay.
The WMD sceptics are sceptics; we asked for evidence more compelling and verifiable than Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation, and judged Dr. Blix’s analysis to be more accurate than President Bush’s. We were right.
The religious zeal, I’m afraid, was all on the side of the True Believers in WMD. The new mantra is the Sacred 500, and the zeal with which the True Believers have taken up the chant and now brandish decayed, overlooked, unusable mustard gas shells is one more depressing reminder that ideology always trumps reality among the Bushies.
Just endless variations of “We know the baddies have the WMD’s. We just haven’t discovered that yet.”
Classic delusion. The Bushies really should have just planted WMD’s. I’m sure the Rightwing Wurlitzer could have been deployed to contradict/confuse any forensic evidence that would have proved they were planted, since maintaining the perception (and avoiding the truth) is what it’s all about.
No, seriously guys, take it easy on Jay.
After all, can you guys REALLY prove that there are none? I mean real empirical evidence that proves, without a doubt or gaps, that there are none? See, its just like Evolution – YOU CAN’T PROVE IT SO I MUST BE RIGHT!
What about the million plus children under 5 that aren’t starving to death under the UN and the US Democrat’s ‘Holocaust for Oil’ program? Are you guys feeling nostalgic for the ‘good old days’?
No Jeff, they aren’t starving anymore, they are being blown up.
I’m sure you think there’s a connection between the WMD’s that the Bush administration said were in Iraq that haven’t been found that some now speculate moved to Syria — and a failed international sanctions program.
Here’s a couple of dots
.
.
Wanna connect them for me?
The US has already said that the 500 rounds of chemical weapons they found were not the ones they went to war over, the weapons the US did invade, and continue to occupy, Iraq over included nuclear goodies, unmanned drones with current and deadly chemical weapons stocked, no doubt, by mobile chemical labs supposedly roaming the desert sands, and the like – the hard, cold, reality, is that it was a myth Jay, a myth.
Increasingly clear to who? Those who have a need to justify an illegal invasion and failed occupation? What is the evidence for this statement?
The real delusions occur when one’s speculation is used to rationalise or explain a concrete action.
Everyone speculates, but you go loopy when you firmly believe that an action taken is in response to a situation you have no way of knowing really exists or not. That’s fine for nobodies on the Internet, but it’s a different issue altogether for those who can wield tremendous power and for those who elect them.
I became resolutely reality-based after David Kay’s report (even though I had decided the evidence for the Iraq invasion was too weak to justify pre-emption), and I’ll never again even entertain an unsubstantiated claim by the neo-cons and their enablers. If they tell me the sky is blue, I’ll ask to see the raw data and the tools they used to gather it.
The legal basis for the invasion of Iraq was not the presence of WMDs, it was Iraq’s non-compliance with UNSC resolution 1441. Blix found Iraq guilty of non-compliance.
I don’t think anyone is pretending that WMDs were the legal pretext, Sean. The marketing of the war to American voters and, less successfully, to the international community, was most certainly on the basis of WMDs that posed a clear danger to the world.
Blix found Iraq non-compliant with the UNSC. The UNSC did not authorize the American invasion to enforce compliance.
The usual suspects can argue that it did (though why they’d continue to do so now is a mystery to me.) But in any case, the legal pretext provided by UNSC 1441 disappeared completely from public discourse. If it had been so compelling, why did that happen?
Oh right…because it wasn’t compelling.
>Speculation based on no evidence is what has led to the current mess, Jay Currie.
Speculation based on no evidence is the most popular sport on this blog, followed by closely by skepticism over insufficient evidence. It is only the nature of what each person chooses to believe or disbelieve that distinguishes us. For some it might be WMD; for others it might be global warming.
Nice try IrC, but to try and make WMD’s and Global Warming the same kind of believe or don’t believe kinds of issues is misleading, and you know better. The main difference between them is that one is based on speculation, and one is based on scientific evidence, and the backing of 95% of the scientific community, which means it is legitimate.
“The main difference between them is that one is based on speculation, and one is based on scientific evidence, and the backing of 95% of the scientific community, which means it is legitimate.”
I am always impressed when science is done by a vote. At what point would a scientific theory lose “legitimacy”. 90% consensus, 60%, 50+1. Can you imagine what the consensus position would have been like with respect to the existence of the electron much less quantum theory. Science, as opposed to politics, proceeds by experiment and data collection. As Mann et al have largely refused to make their data available it is meaningless to say that there is consensus as it is largely impossible to test the claims which are being “supported”.
IrC makes a rather good point and catches my position pretty precisely. At this point, were I an Israeli military planner, I would be a fool to assume no WMDs. I might devoutly hope there were none but I would have to operate from the position that the case was not proven.
It’s amazing how you all are of one single mind on practically every issue these days.
You’ve become nothing but propagandists marching in lock-step. It represents the debasement of public discourse on a scale I’ve never seen in my entire life.
Quite clearly irrational.
“I am always impressed when science is done by a vote.”
It’s never done by vote, Jay. Agreement on the most likely interpretation of evidence within the scientific community is viewed as a pretty strong indicator of a robust theory, that’s all. Unlike, let’s say, the ever diminishing evidence that Saddam’s arsenal of WMDs represented a threat to anyone but the janitor.
I would never argue against the existence of WMDs, especially since so many of the true believer are occupied full time in redefining the terminology and moving the goal posts backward, from Saddam’s impending nukes to a few rotting, leftover gas shells.
>The main difference between them is that one is based on speculation, and one is based on scientific evidence, and the backing of 95% of the scientific community, which means it is legitimate.
The concensus regarding warming is staked on thin evidence and has become the concensus mainly because the evidence for alternative ideas is even thinner. The latter is a product of the politicization of the funding of research, but regardless the underlying problem remains: even the strongest hypotheses are only weakly supported.
And regardless of that little sidebar, speculation based on little or no evidence, or evidence of questionable value, is still the leading sport here on Stageleft. Among those of you who find yourself constantly opposing my views there’s no reluctance to restrain yourselves from hollering into the echo chamber at the slightest shred of support for your own views.
Irrespective of whether chemical artillery rounds were the WMD the US was looking for, one can be sure they could be used to whip up something improvised and nasty in the wrong hands.
“The concensus regarding warming is staked on thin evidence and has become the concensus mainly because the evidence for alternative ideas is even thinner.”
Your response probably got lost in the ether, lrC. But some time ago I asked you for the peer reviewed body of literature that represented your counterweight to the overwhelming (sorry, not “thin”) body of evidence supporting the premise of anthropogenic climate change. I don’t think I ever got your answer: but this very definite statement suggests that you’ve been busy reviewing findings.
So…what are your key scientific, peer reviewed sources, please?
Everything we know about climate amounts to very little knowledge about climate. The accumulated data are sparse relative to the scope of the time and space of climate study, and the models are crude relative to the actual complexity of the natural systems. The evidence is still thin. This is a case in which everything we know about the subject still isn’t very much at all.
Peer review isn’t proof. Peer review is checking someone’s work. Research funding bias isn’t proof either; it’s just a bias which militates against proper scientific evaluation of competing hypotheses.
So would it be correct for me to assume that your opinion is NOT based on peer reviewed scientific literature? Sorta like your opinions on Aboriginal Claims and Treaties aren’t actually based on Claims and Treaties?
IrC has some extremely bizarrre ideas about how knowledge and beliefs are created. I believe IrC works exclusively with the symbolic (either mathematics, or computer programming or both) where concepts are absolute, and quite literally cannot reconcile how real-world evidence has to be presented for others to be convinced of something.
Ever since he started implying that the photos of the dead Lebanese children were faked on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, I’ve decided he’s just a propagandist, trying to disrupt deliberative discussion with unecessary doubt. That is not arguing in good faith.
I kinda find it hard to argue against climate change when people up north are falling through ice that histocially was 4 times thicker. Oh well, maybe they just don’t know how to traverse ice, right? There’s a nice explanation IrC would feel comfortable with, its the fault of the dirty natives!
Anyways, back to the WMD’s that Iraq sent to Hezbollah, in a time when their country was being monitored by the mighty US military and intelligence services. Yeah, that works.
IrC, I’m interested in who you would define as “the wrong hands”. It’s a well known secret that Israel has nuclear weapons (vastly more destructive than old mustard gas canisters, even when “whipped up”), and yet this does not seem to bother you in the least.
>So would it be correct for me to assume that your opinion is NOT based on peer reviewed scientific literature?
No, it would not be correct. What you are clinging to is an idea based on two distinct factors: that most of the peer-reviewed literature supports your belief (true), and that there is enough accumulated evidence to warrant the conclusions you favour (false). It’s the latter I object to, and I’m concerned mostly about the lack of interest in funding and studying alternate hypotheses. Even disproving some of the alternates would help to strengthen the hypothesis you favour, but there’s a reluctance to do that which seems to be strongly correlated with funding and who receives it. It’s unfortunate that proper science has to take a back seat to grant politics. There isn’t enough evidence to justify any conclusions yet, much like one doesn’t call an election race based on the first reported poll. Regardless, an abstract or report doesn’t have to be peer-reviewed to be worth reading and considering, assuming you can follow the discussion and the math.
>IrC has some extremely bizarrre ideas about how knowledge and beliefs are created.
Knowledge implies certainty. Belief implies uncertainty. If we “knew” climate science, we’d be able to predict climate trends and weather accurately over longer spans of time. Right now the limit is about two weeks for reasonably accurate weather prediction. Every once in a while it helps to compare what people are claiming to what they’re actually able to do; we can see by simple inspection that climate science is still in its infancy.
>Ever since he started implying that the photos of the dead Lebanese children were faked on the basis of no evidence whatsoever
Doubt is always necessary where the WWW is concerned. If you’re just going to believe everything tossed out on the web on the basis of whether it reinforces your bias, you might as well sever your spinal cord right now. You’re a sack of meat disguised as a rational being.
>I kinda find it hard to argue against climate change when people up north are
Here are some basic “facts” about climate:
1) The climate is always changing. You can dispense with that straw man.
2) The global climate appears to be generally warming.
3) There is an anthropogenic component to climate change (warming).
Where the debate lies is over what other influences are involved and what are their respective contributions; reducing those uncertainties is a precursor to deciding what can or should be done.
>It’s a well known secret that Israel has nuclear weapons (vastly more destructive than old mustard gas canisters, even when “whipped upâ€), and yet this does not seem to bother you in the least.
When did Israel last use a nuclear weapon to resolve a conflict, and how much conflict has Israel endured since it is believed to have first had a nuclear weapon? The answers are “Never” and “Plenty”. Of course it does not bother me.
No, it would not be correct.
Yes, it would be. Until you provide evidence that is peer reviewed, that is the only conclusion one can come to.
You know, lrC, on one side of the climate change argument, there’s a lot of evidence. On the other side, there’s your ideology.
You’ve contributed a couple of PHI 101 platitudes, and that’s pretty much it. That’s cool. But your views…again…appear to built on nothing. Thanks for the contribution, but honestly, in this discussion, you haven’t put a single idea on the table.
Knowledge implies certainty. Belief implies uncertainty. If we “knew†climate science, we’d be able to predict climate trends and weather accurately over longer spans of time. Right now the limit is about two weeks for reasonably accurate weather prediction. Every once in a while it helps to compare what people are claiming to what they’re actually able to do; we can see by simple inspection that climate science is still in its infancy.
No. Knowledge does not imply certainty and belief does not imply uncertainty.
Knowledge is built up from the following hierarchy (more or less)
1. Data: 55563905595
2. Data in context: Telephone number: 555-390-5595
3. Information: Your mother’s telephone number.
4. Information and experience: I call your mother repeatedly at 9:00 PM. No one answers.
5. Knowledge: “You mother never answers the phone after 9:00 PM. She goes to bed at 8:00 PM”
“Belief” does not imply uncertainty. It’s the exact opposite. A belief is certainty. Within your own mind, what you honestly believe is the only certainty you can entertain. If you think that’s also the only knowledge worth recognising, then that’s solipsism, and is, by definition, irrational.
>You know, lrC, on one side of the climate change argument, there’s a lot of evidence. On the other side, there’s your ideology.
We both know there’s evidence on both sides. What compels you to describe the counter-evidence as my ideology?
>you haven’t put a single idea on the table.
You really don’t understand the whole point of studying competing hypotheses, do you?
>“Belief†does not imply uncertainty. It’s the exact opposite. A belief is certainty. Within your own mind, what you honestly believe is the only certainty you can entertain.
You took the predictable tack. Certainty of belief doesn’t establish certainty of fact. Beliefs are assumptions; certainty of belief is merely conviction – without proof – of your assumptions. Knowledge has the properties of having been verified and being verifiable again.
Certainty of belief doesn’t establish certainty of fact. Beliefs are assumptions; certainty of belief is merely conviction – without proof – of your assumptions. Knowledge has the properties of having been verified and being verifiable again.
Idiot. You, IrC, are an idiot. From now on, I’ll consider you an idiot, an nothing more.
“You really don’t understand the whole point of studying competing hypotheses, do you?”
Fortunately, I do. I also understand the whole point of weighing evidence, both on its merits and on its quality.
You’ve hit the pre-sophmoric mock epistemology level here. I’ll re-engage in the increasingly unlikely event that you actually say anything substantive.
You took the predictable tack. Certainty of belief doesn’t establish certainty of fact. Beliefs are assumptions; certainty of belief is merely conviction – without proof – of your assumptions. Knowledge has the properties of having been verified and being verifiable again.
This is absolute nonsense, not to mention transparent projection. Belief and fact are completely separate. Belief is symbolic and fact (as can best be determined) is a manifestation of the real world. True, honest belief is the only certainty you can entertain. Rational people question their beliefs and infuse their life-long experience with heatlthy skepticism and are open to evidence to refine their beliefs.
I dismissed you long ago as an irrational solipsist. Lately, however, I find your motivation to say what you do increasingly malign.
Speaking of substantive, you guys are just beating the ad hominem bush now.
And speaking of peer review, Wegman’s report is available.
Well I,Taeb think personally that indeedly and almost certainly that we should all just settle down a bit….(with the flogging) Infact I can with all my australian heart that a few flogs will do. If you just hit it a few times it will get the picture of its furture and what it has to do.So now you can all see that if we keep on flogging our horses like this they will stop us and we won’ even be able to give them a little flog now andthen when we feel like it..So once again reading Taebs wisdomnes of comments SETTLEDOWN!!!!!!!!!!!