But You Should Probably Read This...

Scroll down. It's about the Coca-Cola ad.

The Great Satan Manufactures Satanic Products

...

If you live in the middle east, invest in Pepsi.

A Brief Sojourn

I'm going to blatantly neglect this blog for a few days, possibly weeks. A random series of non-interconnected events have conspired to make me rather happy. Rather incredibly happy. And, for some odd reason, I don't want to spend as much time gathering invective and throwing it, or talking with people who would do the same.

So, for anyone now participating - carry on, or check back in a few months, because this forum will be moved to a new server, new domain name, and it will not have nearly so much debate as contrasting commentary, and you can accept or reject what you will.

As for me, I'm going to continue with this happiness thing. It's way, way underrated.

Head in the Sand

No disrespect intended, but those who would prefer to make excuses for instead of demand answers from the Bush Administration vis-à-vis torture – they look like this.

Don't worry, it's a comic.

Is This Torture, Too?

The stories cut both ways, it seems.

Is This Torture?

From the Washington Post.

Even if you think it's no big deal to condemn a man to death, is it becoming of a country alleging to spread "freedom" to behave in such a manner?

The Truth and Michael Moore, and Other Odd Couples

Let me begin by saying one thing:

ginobiliginobiliginobiliginobiliginobili

(Let that sink in.)

And now on to Moore. The following was composed yesterday, ere game seven.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Let me state one thing at the outset:

Michael Moore is a genius.
And he is not a liar.

Why, then, do I despise him? Because he is not commited to truth. And yet he isn’t a liar; he’s a deceiver. The difference? Liars tell, and deceivers show.

Take this example, shamelessly pulled from this man, which illustrates the difference rather well:

Jim has a dog for a pet. You have never seen his dog, so you just have to take my word for it that he has a dog at his house. As evidence that Jim has a dog I offer the following facts.

1) There is animal hair all over his couch.
2) There are bowls of food and water in his kitchen.
3) He has a box of Hartz flea collars under his sink.
4) He makes regular trips to the veterinarian.
5) He buys canned pet food once a week.

Pretty compelling evidence of my assertion, right? Well, Jim doesn’t have a dog; Jim has a cat.

It’s pretty damn effective, though, and the conspicuous lack of defamation lawsuits against Moore stand as testimony to either his honesty or his skill in this sort of deceptive manipulation (it’s really hard to prove that a man was engaged in defamation when he makes little to any outright claims; see here and here for definitions of libel and defamation). I aim to show that it’s the latter.

Moore’s tactic is almost always the same: take a case/accusation/claim/what-have-you and selectively report the facts about it so that the case appears to validate his point, when in fact it does not, or doesn’t validate it as strongly as he’d like.

“So?” someone could protest. “Almost all reporters do that!”

Not like this, they don’t.

My favorite example of this is in Bowling for Columbine, in the now infamous Heston speech, “from my cold, dead hands.”

Here’s how it appears in Bowling:

Weeping children outside Columbine;
Cut to Charlton Heston holding a musket and proclaiming "I have only five words for you: 'from my cold, dead, hands'";
Cut to billboard advertising the meeting, while Moore intones "Just ten days after the Columbine killings, despite the pleas of a community in mourning, Charlton Heston came to Denver and held a large pro-gun rally for the National Rifle Association;"
Cut to Heston (supposedly) continuing speech... "I have a message from the Mayor, Mr. Wellington Webb, the Mayor of Denver. He sent me this; it says 'don't come here. We don't want you here.' I say to the Mayor this is our country, as Americans we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don't come here? We're already here!"

Moore has created the following impression: the NRA was blatantly insensitive to the Columbine tragedy, and Heston was/is an ass. Note, however, that he hasn’t said any of these things explicitly.

Here are the things that Moore left out:

1. The “cold, dead hands” speech wasn’t given at Columbine. It was given a year later, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
2. The meeting in Denver, the very one that occurred a mere ten days after Columbine, had been scheduled a year in advance and was required by law (more or less the same law that requires corporations to have an executive meeting once a year to keep their corporation status). The NRA couldn’t move it, as it would require sending out notices to some four million NRA members, any one of which might be coming. So they did the next-best thing – they cancelled all festivities except the meeting required by law.
3. Here is the actual speech Heston gave, which, you will note, is not nearly as insensitive as Moore made it seem. I got this transcript from Moore’s site.
4. The funniest part about this? Heston is wearing two different suits during his “speech,” and talking against two different backgrounds.

Now to Moore’s response, which is here:

I quote, from his site:

From the end of my narration setting up Heston's speech in Denver, with my words, "a big pro-gun rally," every word out of Charlton Heston's mouth was uttered right there in Denver, just 10 days after the Columbine tragedy.

Moore is a genius. He’s right, of course; for his words “big pro-gun ralley” come after Heston says “cold, dead hands.” So he isn’t lying. But his implication is certainly deceptive. He implies that Heston was an ass and that the NRA was blatantly insensitive to the needs of the victims of Columbine. He doesn’t mention at all that the NRA meeting was required by law, or that it had been set up a year in advance, or that most of it had been cancelled except those portions required by law. Those points would hurt the image he’s set up.

(summary here)

Lies? No. Deception, selective editing? Yes. Reprehensible? Well, if you believe George W. Was wrong in implying that the 9/11 attacks came from Iraq (though he never actually said that), then you’d best be consistent and say “yes.”

Let me stress that again – this is the same technique. If you despise one for doing it, you’d better despise the other.

Therein lies what Moore does – put two things close to each other (images, words, etc.) and count on the audience to put two and two together and think it’s one. Let’s take a look at F9/11. The deceptions I’m showing are in no particular order, nor are they necessarily relevant to Moore’s movie as a whole, but they do show that he has sloppy scholarship at best, and uses outright deception at worst.

Moore claims at the beginning of F9/11 that Gore had won, and that Bush stole the election. That can of worms aside, among the evidence he gave in defense of that assertion was a newspaper headline.

The Pantagraph, Latest Florida Recount Shows Gore Won Election

Moore doesn’t state outright that the headline is an actual headline; he just shows it, and the viewer infers that it was, in fact, an actual headline, when it was in fact an editorial that was carefully manipulated to look like a headline. To see just how “carefully” it had to be done, take a look at this comparison of the original and Moore’s video clip.

How about this one, straight from Moore’s website:

The man who was in charge of the decision desk at FOX on election night was Bush’s first cousin, John Ellis.

Right after Moore says this, he cuts to a scene of Bush laughing.

The implication is, of course, that Ellis helped pull the election for Bush. But the claim is only that Bush’s cousin was at the desk, which is the only fact that Moore defends on his website. Any substantial evidence of a conspiracy is conspicuously lacking. And the facts he leaves out?

1. Ellis was a professional election results analyst with 23 years of experience.
2. Ellis worked previously for NBC for 10 years.
3. Eliis actually called the GHW Bush/Clinton election against his uncle, GHW Bush.
4. Ellis was part of a 4 person team of experts , who required a unanimous recommendation before sending it to Moody (one of the experts).
5. John Moody had the final approval / veto power over the recommendation.
6. The data used by Ellis and his team was delivered from VNS (Voter News Service, which was and always has been the first to report the to-the-minute results from the ballot box - in short, Ellis could only know what VNS told him, and all news networks had equal access to VNS. It was only after VNS first called the election for Bush that Fox followed suit.)
7. All of the other news outlets received the same data at the same time.
8. The other news outlets delivered the same results within 4 minutes of Fox’s report.

Read it in full here.

Moore leaves all this out. None of this discounts a conspiracy, but it does make his implied case – that W.’s cousin was working the election – pretty damn threadbare.

This one’s one of my favorites: vacation times.

Moore claims Bush was on vacation 42% of the time. Here is his quote, and his backup for this assertion, straight from his own site:

FAHRENHEIT 9/11: “In his first eight months in office before September 11, George W. Bush was on vacation, according to the Washington Post, forty-two percent of the time.”

· “News coverage has pointedly stressed that W.'s month-long stay at his ranch in Crawford is the longest presidential vacation in 32 years. Washington Post supercomputers calculated that if you add up all his weekends at Camp David, layovers at Kennebunkport and assorted to-ing and fro-ing, W. will have spent 42 percent of his presidency ‘at vacation spots or en route.’” Charles Krauthammer, “A Vacation Bush Deserves,” The Washington Post, August 10, 2001.

Read that carefully.

Weekends.

I’m not sure what Moore is doing here, or if perhaps he’s hoping no one will read his own site. But no organization, company, corporation, what-have-you in the country that I know of counts weekends as vacation days. Note also that there is a HUGE difference in “vacation” and “vacation spots or en route” (and “layovers,” which is the funniest to my mind, because they’re obviously not vacations) which is what Moore’s evidence actually says. The difference is, of course, is that places like Camp David qualify as vacation spots, but the president works there. That’s where he holds most of his meetings with foreign officials – at this point in the movie, for that matter, is a shot of Bush at Camp David talking with Tony Blair.

Point? Again, Moore’s implication is that the President wasn’t working as he should have been. And that may well be true. But the evidence he gives is selective and misleading. The facts that Moore left out of his movie – that “42%” can only be held up when you calculate any and all time physically out of the office – hurts that assertion.

Try this one – Moore approached members of the US Senate and asked them if they’d like to sign their kids up to fight (I could go on at length about the stupidity of this maneuver in the first place, since the military is voluntary and no one, repeat, no one sends their kids to die. But I won’t). Moore carefully cut out the response of at least one senator:

Kennedy: Sure! How can I help?

But he put the rest of the footage in, making Kennedy look like an idiot. In the final cut, Kennedy gives Moore a quizzical look, and then the scene changes.

Again, his point may still stand, that there weren’t many wealthy soldiers fighting in Iraq, or that the Government had carefully protected their own. But in lieu of using a great deal of evidence from those senators, he chose instead to splice Kennedy’s speech. He chose to deceive rather than make a good argument.

It’s late, and I want to get to the bar in time to get a seat for the playoffs. But I’ll update this as time goes by – I’ve certainly left a lot out, including the pipeline in Afghanistan that never materialized, the bin Laden family saying that Moore got facts wrong, etc.

As for what I’ve posted here, MG – please tell me how this is in any way defensible, or refute it.

Torture, and a Summation of the Pertaining Arguments

First off, I invite MG to take a look at what will be the beginning of a long series of arguments against the reliability of Michael Moore. More will come, as time and need permit.

I'm also going to chime in (later) on the idea that fundamentalist Moslem terrorists do not like the US because of our foreign policy. MG has made a statement to that effect (though he didn't mention Moslem fundamentalists specifically), and I used to believe it myself. But I now think it's wrong, and am firmly of the belief that the longevity of the Moslem memory for crimes against Islam automatically removes any pretense of living in peace with fundamentalist Islam. (Example - the reconquista of Spain is something that many fundamentalist Moslems still get angry about, even though it happened in the 1400s, and only as a response to the Moslem conquest of Spain in the 700s.) The evidence I've seen suggests that the worldview held by fundamentalists is one that doesn't allow for lasing peace with infidels. And if that's true, and if the fundamentalists have the kind of hold on the middle east that the Right would have you think, then the policy of uprooting governments and replacing them with democracies may not be such a bad idea after all.

Anyway, more on that later. On to torture.

Given that the debate over torture seems to have reached a standstill, I'm going to take this opportunity to summarize the arguments thus far and then ask a few more questions.

Let's first remove the tangental arguments that have been made, which I believe are quite irrelevant to the question of torture as a whole:

1. Bush did/didn't condone the torture, and so he is/isn't responsible for what happened.
2. A great many/great few have died, whether as a result of torture or natural causes ("natural" causes including, say, a bullet to the chest, provided it was inflicted during battle).
3. The Geneva Convention does not apply to the prisoners being held.
4. Koran desecration, which is not torture, nor should it ever be considered torture.

To the first point:

Whether Bush authorized or did not authorize torture is quite irrelevant to the fact that it seems to have happened on his watch. And with a job like the presidency, with that high a profile, you are always responsible for what goes on. My favorite example of this sort of responsibility comes from work, where I've had a few run-ins with a cook who couldn't quite prepare food with the requisite amount of speed. He held everyone up when we got busy. People yelled at him, of course, and his response was inevitably, "I didn't ask for this, okay? My screen just filled up. Give me a break."

To which my response was always, "no." You did ask for this, inasmuch as you decided you wanted to be a cook. Working this hard and taking this kind of crap is part and parcel of what a cook is and does. If you don't like it, go somewhere else, but don't claim that you're surprised that you had to do this kind of work.

Point is, if you're taking the presidency, you shouldn't be surprised by anything that goes on under your watch, nor should you be surprised when you're asked to take responsibility for it. No amount of claiming that it was unauthorized will absolve the presidency from responsibility in the eyes of the rest of the world. And given that politics is very much a popularity contest, as much as it is a contest for who has the best ideas, a scandal like Abu Ghraib is a serious losing blow.

In short, keep tabs on your men. And if you find that they're hurting your cause, stop them.

To the second point:

The issue isn't how many have died from torture, and I don't think we'll get anywhere arguing numbers. One is obviously too many, and even if no one has died, that doesn't discount the use of torture. Numbers are a good reliability indicator, to be sure (i.e., if many have died, it makes torture that much more likely), but given that we have pictures, testimony, etc., I recommend that we address those instances instead of arguing over numbers, which are a great deal more vague.

To the third point:

James is right about the Geneva Convention - inasmuch as Al Qaida was the declared enemy, the Geneva Convention does not apply. The United States, however (as far as I know), hasn't used that argument in their defense. What they have consistently done is denied the use of authorized torture. Bringing in the Geneva Convention at this point is somewhat irrelevant, for if the US is telling the truth, it's not needed, and if the US is lying...well, then the torture is obviously something that the government wants swept under the rug, and therefore arguments about Geneva's applicability wouldn't be of much use.

To the fourth point:

With all due respect to the Moslem community...please. Koran desecration, though it might confine one to an eternity in hell, is not torture. What irks me most about these outcries is the way they appear when placed against the lack of outcries against Saddam Hussein, who desecrated the Koran in the worst way possible - writing it in blood.

In short, no arguments about Koran desecration, please. I'm of the humble opinion that crying about the handling of a holy book is fruitless, and most certainly distracts from questions of real torture.

Thus far, we have sporatic reports of torture going on. I'd like the following questions/statements addressed:

The US government has not made a significant effort to show that it is taking great care to avoid torture. In my opinion, they should, given that a censure of this sort from the rest of the world is something that the US should avoid, if it can. (Note that I haven't even asked anything about the truth of the reports yet.) Anyone who wishes to respond to that, please do so.

The government has not made a great effort to broadcast the utter barbarism of the "insurgents," terrorists, etc. (Check the link at the right to Michael Yon, currently in Iraq, for plenty of examples.) The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the utter lack of pictures showing "insurgents" using civilians as human shields. The maneuver was well-documented, and yet no one thought it wise to take pictures. Something like this would have been a great counter to scenes of carnage reported by Aljazeera. In short, where is the great smear campaign against the enemy that we all know the government is capable of?

And finally, on the truth of the allegations...

Well, comment any way you like on those. But I'd also like suggestions about where the US went wrong, and what we might do now to stop ourselves from falling deeper into trouble. I realize MG has already answered this to an extent (in short, "don't have foreign policy that pisses people off"), but I'd like him to chime in on specific instances, why they occurred, and how they might be prevented.

New Rules, and a Link to Gay Marriage

Though I appreciate the flood of evicende this site has accumulated, I'm not going to allow anonymous posts. If you're going to say something, you need to stick around to defend yourself or provide rebuttals or retractions, and so you may as well have some contact info.

(Read: Derek, send me your e-mail, and I'll put you up as a contributor.)

My thoughts on gay marriage here, as well as responses to some of Derek's points.

In other news, I just wasted three hours typing up a diatribe against Moore that was eaten by this computer.

(insert cursing)

The diatribe will come. Later. For now, only a few questions:

MG - Show me that O'Reilly, Hannity, et. al., are liars (shouldn't be too hard, I imagine). And take a quick look at the sidebar, where we've provided a list of known idiots who are not to be trusted (will be updated as circumstances permit). If you've got a suggestion, show him/her to be a dumbass, and he/she will be added, provided no good defenses appear.

And one more for MG -

"I can't argue with this sort of person anymore. It's literally offensive."

Offensive or not, you need to respond to at least one thing:

So we took 65k+ prisoners, and 108 of them died, including deaths by natural causes. Count me as not shocked that 108 of 65k+ people died. Take a random sample of 65,000 Americans, and I'll be you'll find that a year later more than 108 of them have naturally died.

That doesn't discount deaths by torture. But the number appears to be overblown, which means it's deceptive at best. Please respond.

And James:

Need response on Michael Smith's definition of "fixed," which appears to refute yours.

(And go Spurs.)

Depends on the Definition of "Fixed"

Here you have it, from the horse's mouth. Michael Smith, the British reporter who broke the Downing Street Memo story explains what "fixed" means in England:

There are number of people asking about fixed and its meaning. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it. The intelligence was fixed and as for the reports that said this was one British official. Pleeeaaassee! This was the head of MI6. How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. That translates in clearer terms as the intelligence was being cooked to match what the administration wanted it to say to justify invading Iraq. Fixed means the same here as it does there.

Responses

Go Pistons!

I’ll start with Wazoo, who doesn’t seem too far off the deep end, and maybe get to some of James.

"For each person we torture, 10 recruits sign up for al Qaeda" needs a citation.

Just common sense. I know the conservatives hate the expression – “this is why they hate us” but it’s true. There’s nothing unpatriotic about exploring our foreign policy to determine what we might be doing to piss people off. Propping up brutal dictatorships like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and yes – IRAQ with money and weapons is what started it all. The realpolitik of the necessity of oil (and I’m not such a bleeding heart that I don’t appreciate that our economy rests on getting access to oil, I’m not suggesting an alternative per se), had us ignoring the plight of the people in the region. Now we’re paying the price. I would proffer that it’s unpatriotic to not look at the situation critically. And don’t come at me with “blame America first” politics. Bill Maher has a bit about how liberals love America, but like a wife – sometimes you can have disagreements, but you always love her. Conservatives love America like Mommy – she can do no wrong. Newsflash – sometimes we do bad things. Bad policy decisions doesn’t undermine the absolute brilliance of our Founding Fathers and our Constitution.

Anyhow, the 10 recruits was a made up number. And it’s probably unprovable since we actually have no idea the level of the insurgency. But there is this quote:

Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, said the insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.

"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create three."

Moving on:

"Maybe you’ve read the Bill of Rights? How about the part about cruel and unusual punishment?" The Bill of Rights refers to American citizens, which at once rules out most of the guys at Gitmo.

Of course. I just meant that we are a country of ideals. One of our ideals was human rights, and suddenly when our back is against the wall in a scary, dangerous war, we sell out our founding principles? That’s not the sort of country that Jefferson etc. had been imagining.

"And killing faggots! Don’t forget the dirty, dirty faggots!" What?

Hyperbole. Bush uses gay marriage as a wedge issue to get good people to vote against their own interests. The poor exploited WalMart worker who could use some government protection from the evil overlord votes for Bush because of the “dirty dirty faggots.”

"There happened to be one document that they were unable to accurately source, but it was also never proven false (on Rathergate)." It's (nearly) logically impossible to prove something like this false

So don’t refer to it as a forgery then. My point is that there was nothing untrue in the story, the media just attached itself to a mismanagement of the niggling details rather than focus on the overall truth of the story. Take another example, the Newsweek bullshit. Newsweek screwed up, for sure. But in what way? The “wrong” part of that story was that the Koran desecration was going to appear in a government report. It wasn’t going in a report. But, the Koran desecration had still happened. But Bush would have you believe that it hadn’t happened at all because of a nuanced “Inside Baseball” media mistake.

Moore has been a documented deceiver since way before F9/11,

Show me.

How the media could be right-leaning when "80%+" voted for Kerry (need a citation too, James).

This would be an example of “how to lie using statistics.” How reporters vote is irrelevant. I can vote for democrats and still be an executive at WalMart. What’s important in media bias is the stories they print and more importantly the stories the editors authorize. Bush has been a bully with the media. If you write a story that’s critical of Bush, he denies you close access and leaks. Reporters live and die on access to the higher-ups. It’s more important to them that they make a name for themselves in their careers than who actually wins elections. Furthermore, the right-wing media machine has been screaming “liberal bias” for three decades. Starting some time in the 90s, when the machine really started picking up steam, the news agencies started self-editing to avoid the screaming echo chambers. You can’t write a story without pointing out the other side, no matter how absurd that side might be. Anyway, go to Media Matters for America for examples every single day, with backup evidence. Don’t let O’Reilly just tell you that they’re lying without reading what they have to say. Oh, and here’s a short list of stories that haven’t made it to the big time because they’re too afraid of Bush:

missing $8 Billion from the Coalition Provisional Authority (that’s a lot of body armor, innit)

Tom DeLay’s massive ethical violations

voting irregularities in Florida in 2000. In Ohio in 2004. Both states where the Secretaries of State were regional Bush/Cheney chairpeople.

The military lied about the “heroic” battle scenes of Pvt. Lynch and Pat Tillman.

Yes, the Downing Street Memo, which is a smoking gun, no matter what you think. It wasn’t what “some guy” thought they were saying. It was a transcript of a meeting between Blair, one of his top ministers and the HEAD of British intelligence. And it isn’t just about the intelligence being “fixed,” it was that Bush lied to us when he said he was trying to solve it peacefully. And that no one in the UK had the impression that we had done any post-war planning, which by the way, you might have noticed isn’t going so well. "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise." The authors add, "As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

Who outed Valerie Plame?

Bush fired the guy who wanted to tell the truth about how much that Medicare giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies was going to cost.

How was it that Jeff Gannon was in the White House day after day on a day pass, sometimes when there weren’t even press conferences, when a real journalist like Maureen Dowd was denied access?

Whatever, the list goes on and on. Actually my coeditor mentioned a number of things in his comment where Bush has removed items from scientific reports that didn’t support his political worldview. Any investigative reporter worth his/her salt would be all up on those stories. But not at the expense of losing access to the White House.

I don’t have the time to go into James right now. But I guess I’d ask him how he knows that Kerry joined the Navy to dodge going to war? (or for that matter, how that’s worse than Bush joining the National Guard and then going AWOL?). Second, as far as Kerry being a pussy or whatever, did you see that Kerry released his military records? Did you see what it said?

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service.
...

Indeed, one of the first actions of the group that came to be known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was to call on Kerry to sign a privacy waiver and release all of his military and medical records.
But Kerry refused, even though it turned out that the records included commendations from some of the same veterans who were criticizing him.

Funny. I wonder why they would change their stories? Could it be that they were lying during the campaign?

Michael Moore

Until someone provides evidence of anything false in Fahrenheit 9/11, no one is permitted to use the name "Michael Moore" as synonymous with lying. Disagreeing with him doesn't make him a liar. Neither does his penchant for using dramatic devices in storytelling.

Now, if you ask me for evidence that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh are liars, I'm all over it.

Duh

I forgot the most important question I wanted to ask, and the most obvious one at that:

To James:

MG´s presented some citations on people killed at Gitmo. We need some kind of response from you - either a refutation, or modification of your first position, or admission, or what have you.

Editor's Notes

I've made a few adjustments to James' post, to clean it up a bit and support the right team.

(Go Spurs. And Ginobili.)

And the links in Emery's comment are fixed.

A few things to keep us on the right track, and some questions from the editor:

For James:

These terrorists operated in direct contravention of the rules of war.
They didn’t wear identifiable uniforms. They targeted civilians. And so on. Under the Geneva Convention, they are not prisoners of war and have no legal protection.

How would you respond to the following protests:

1. The United States targeted civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so arguably "targeting civilians" is not ipso facto contrary to the rules of war;
2. The US, before it was the US, did not wear identifiable uniforms when fighting the British (unless "earth colors" qualify), and so arguably a lack of consistent uniforms is not contrary to the rules of war either, and;
3. Given that the United States knew beforehand that it was fighting an unconventional enemy ("terror" rather than a country), and still declared war on Iraq the country, how are the "insurgents" not proper representatives of that country?

(I'm currently of the humble opinion that the Geneva Convention still qualifies.)

For MG:

Same question, how would you respond to the following protests:

1. "For each person we torture, 10 recruits sign up for al Qaeda" needs a citation. I ask only because the reading I've done suggests otherwise. The attitude suggested by this man is aptly summarized in the Iraqi saying, "if death comes to greet you at your door, introduce him to your brother" (long, long post; quote is near the bottom).
2. "Maybe you’ve read the Bill of Rights? How about the part about cruel and unusual punishment?" The Bill of Rights refers to American citizens, which at once rules out most of the guys at Gitmo.
3. "And killing faggots! Don’t forget the dirty, dirty faggots!" What?
4. "There happened to be one document that they were unable to accurately source, but it was also never proven false (on Rathergate)." It's (nearly) logically impossible to prove something like this false. To successfully do it, you'd have to show that there was no way that such a document could be physically created at the time it claims it was, which is pretty much impossible. But what can and has been done is to show that the Killian documents have traits that are nearly non-existent with other contemporary documents.

(To me, the funniest thing about the Killian documents was O'Reilly defending Rather, in a column I'd link to were the site free.)

For Emery:

Again, same question, the following protests:

1. You mention economic hardship, and the Bush Administration's hand in it. Though I don't doubt for a second that he's made it worse, you paint the situation as if he's caused it all. Inflation was present well before Bush and Co. took office, with the result that, mathematically speaking, it was nearly impossible to work hard enough to keep up with the dropping value of the dollar. Blaming Bush is an easy out that diverts attention towards the administration, while masking the roots of the problem, which will not go away when Bush does.

For Emery and MG:

1. Both of you have mentioned (inadvertantly) the allegations against Kerry during the election. I'm assuming you mean the Swift Boat Vets. If so, here's my question: why was the Left so up in arms about the Swift Boat Vets and their accusations and utterly silent about Michael Moore? (Perhaps they weren't, but I have yet to come across one.) Moore has been a documented deceiver since way before F9/11, all the way back to Roger and Me, and no one but the Right uttered a peep about him. I ask only because the condemnation of one without condemnation of the other smacks heavily of partisanship, whether Right or Left, and much less of a commitment to the Truth.

(And speaking of the Swift Vets, I have yet to hear a good explanation of the reason why their loyalties were so sharply divided: almost without exception, those in Kerry's own boat favored him, and those in other boats did not. That seems too odd to be coincidental.)

James, again:

I'm really curious about your answer to the following issues raised by MG:

1. Downing Street Memo, and what it says about the "bad information" that Bush acted on;
2. Whether or not you're actually "pro-dead children," and the pros and cons of socialized medicine, and;
3. The Swift Boat Vets, and whether or not they're the bastards they're purported to be.

MG, Emery, these from James:

1. The "Missing Explosives" story, which is summarized here (and which did disappear after the election):
2. How the media could be right-leaning when "80%+" voted for Kerry (need a citation too, James).

That's all I can think of. Will chime in on gay marriage later.

New Topic

I have a legitimate question for conservatives that has always bothered me. Help me out.

How exactly does gay marriage undermine the "institution of marriage" more than "I Want to Marry a Millionaire," "The Bachelor," Newt Gingich's three divorces, (not to single him out, just an example), quicky wedding chapels in Vegas and elsewhere, or Jack Ryan tricking his wife into going into S&M Clubs against her will, (again - just an example)?

Really. I honestly don't understand.

Let´s At Least Make This Organized

For a quick reference, this is what Dick Durbin actually said, aptly summarized here.

(And a quick plug - I´m a huge fan of the guy that does this blog, though his views are usually far more left-leaning than mine. But he´s fair. )

I think Durbin´s words and the spin that´s been put on them is a good subject for debate, and if this turns into a new...thread...for lack of a better word (since Blogger doesn´t seem to allow it), I will act only as a moderator.

So I´ll say this once, and only once - do not break the rules. If you do, I promise to unceremoniously kick you off.

MG - this means you:

and your comment about Durban displays for all, James, your own ignorance. I bet you don't even know what he actually said. I bet you only know what Rush and Sean and Bill told you to believe he said. And that's exactly the ignorance I'm talking about.

So far, you don´t know if James knew what Durbin actually said. Nor do you know if he listens to Rush, or Sean, or Irish O´Reilly. And using these assumptions, you´ve proceeded to draw the following assumption about James:

"You´re ignorant." (Or, for a more direct quote, "quack quack quack.")

That´s a direct violation of Rule #5, lumping people together with controversial figures or known idiots. Don´t do it.

Bottom line, if you´re too angry or lazy to make informed insults, go somewhere else.

That said, Emery has raised a number of hairy issues, particularly about propaganda during the Clinton Era. I´m pretty sure both James and Emery disagree on who is/was lying during that time, so I´d like to hear each one sound off about the propaganda machine at time, and how it has evolved into the system (or lack thereof, depending on who you are) that we have today.

And one last thing - since I won´t be chiming in except to ask clarification, I´ll just give my opinion now.

I don´t think Dick Durbin deserved at all the kind of treatment he got. To zero in on one point of a speech - an inadvertant comparison to Pol Pot, etc. - and use that to imply that the entire tenor of his speech was "America Sucks" is nothing short of lying. Because that´s not what he was saying. The point was, and in my opinion, quite clearly, "America is better than this. We shouldn´t stoop to the levels of the evils we used to fight."

However...

He´s a senator, and as a senator, he should have known that, unless he had a really, really good case, he´d be throwing himself to the wolves, and particularly ravenous wolves at that. And yet he did, with a speech that had one relevant citation.

(To which, had I been speaking to him once I heard this, would have sprung forth the following words:)

Are you out of your goddamn mind?

Take the worst-case scenario: the reports are true, and far worse than we imagine. Given government´s tendency to cover up their mistakes (read: Ruby Ridge), if Durbin went in with anything but a knockout punch, he was pretty much guaranteeing himself to infamy and his position to loss. If you´re going to win something like this, you need to hit first, hit fast, and hit hard. Get more reports, specify what changes you want, etc., but don´t walk on the senate floor and hope that all listening to you will be charitable and heed your words with the care and consideration that logic and cool-headedness demands.

That´s it. Let the games begin.

My Last word on Intelligent Design

Actually, it's someone else's words, but, whatever. I think I've said about all that needs to be said and I'd just be repeating myself forever. So, read this and, uh, I dunno, stop bothering me. :)

Thank to mg for the link.

Global Climate Change

a.k.a Global Warming. I haven't been here in a while, and it appears that I have some work to do. First, I should disclose that I work amongst a bunch of environmental scientists, although I am not a scientist myself. But I'm far from a tree-hugging hippie. Tree MOLESTING, maybe, but no hugging.

That having been said, on to James' post:

This is ridiculous. I mean really. ANWR - at least the part of ANWR we would be drilling in - is a barren waste land, not a cathedral.

So, because you wouldn’t want to visit, that means we should drill the holy poop out of it? So I guess the “caribou herds, polar bears, grizzly bears, muskox, dall sheep, wolves, wolverines, snow geese, peregrine falcons” etc. are shit out of luck? So that we can, what, stave off paying an extra fifty cents a gallon for a month or so. In about 10-15 years when production is up and running? And if you think that oil drilling is clean and sanitary and can be done with little or no environmental impact, you're wrong.

He just wants to reduce U.S. energy consumption, and it is a convenient rationale to bring in other people who wouldn't normally support his deep green position.

Yes, this would truly be a tragedy.

And the idea that China will switch over to uneconomical hybrid cars simply because the U.S. has the "bully pulpit" is similarly absurd. We had the bully pulpit in 1989, and they still massacred the demonstrators at Tiennaman. They don't care about what we think about their internal policies. They certainly aren't going to wreck their economy to keep U.S. enviro activists happy.

A hybrid car is less economical than a gas-guzzling SUV? Puh-lease. The main reason hybrids are so expensive right now is that demand is high and supply is low. In the next few car model years, more hybrids will be built, and the price will gradually go down. And, you’re mixing your quotes up. The “bully pulpit” reference was to the Bush administration convincing Americans to buy more fuel-efficient cars, not China. I believe his point on China is that American demand drives most of the production in the world, and drives world demand. If Americans demand hybrid cars, the world will make hybrid cars, and the world will then buy hybrid cars. And how exactly are hybrid cars going to “wreck their economy?” If the production of hybrids increases and the price decreases to the point that hybrids cost as much as any other car, China will end up spending less on oil than they otherwise would. I think importing less and exporting more is a good thing, no?

Check out my article on the ES site

I have no idea what you’re talking about

Take this article. Science was basically lying to advance the Global Warming line. Environmentalists don't come at Global Warming from a neutral, fact finding framework. They view human activity as inherently evil and sinful and wrong, and want to contain it in any way possible.

Good old Benny Peiser is an anthropologist, not a climatologist or an environmental scientist. He seems to be really interested in comets, though. And, also, his “study” has been picked apart here, here, here, here, and also here. I guess I could also let the author of the study Benny Hill, er, Peiser purports to refute respond:

I stand by my work, which was published in a peer-reviewed refereed journal--indeed, one of the leading peer reviewed scientific journals in the world. If Mr Peiser has something that he thinks contributes to the discussion, then he should do the same--submit it for peer review, rather than trying to have the issue adjudicated in the mass media.

And I doubt “sinful” is a word most scientists would use, except maybe for effect, and they would never apply it to something as broad as “human activity.” Maybe to wasteful, stupid human activity, like driving a multi-ton paramilitary vehicle through downtown Manhattan. And getting 10 feet to the gallon while doing it.
In short, here’s the “consensus” on global warming:

The current scientific consensus on global warming is summarized by the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and endorsed by major national science academies. In their Third Assessment Report, they concluded that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities".

Does every scientist have exactly the same theory or opinion about climate change? No, of course not. There is, however, a consensus among the majority of scientists. Do I really need to go into the evidence for global warming?

There is no reason to force people to buy expensive hybrids just to make environmentalists happy. There is a lot of other things that money could go towards, instead of needlessly expensive vehicles: medical care, education, reuben sandwhiches, high speed internet access, you name it. It is a bad idea all around.

How about buying a hybrid to make yourself happy? Or to help out the people around you? To pollute less and use less fossil fuel? To cut down on the amount of chemicals we all have to inhale every day of our lives?

And I agree that hybrids are “needlessly expensive.” They could be made a lot cheaper if the government would give people the kind of tax breaks they give for Hummers. Currently, you get a $1000 tax rebate for buying a hybrid. Next year it’s $500. The year after that, nothing. Nice priorities. And, as for your list of things the money saved could go to, I suppose you could say that if we all drove hybrids, we could take the billions of dollars we would save on gas and oil and reinvest it in all those things. Plus our air would be cleaner and our world would be in better shape.

Read

Michael Yon, soldier in Iraq

Riverbend, in Baghdad Burning

Very diametrically opposed. And I´m confused as hell. Someone please help.

Rebuttal, Concessions, and Thinking About Iraq

In an effort to keep this concise, I´m going to divide my response to MG between this post and comments. Anything I disagree with that´s not especially relevant to MG´s point appears in the comments section. The only thing that I will address here is his comments on Iraq and religion. I´ve tried to summarize his points for ease of reading; if I´ve misqoted or misrepresented, please let me know.

I´ve made a few concessions to MG in the comments section, most notably about Abu Ghraib, in which case I think he´s right.

Other than that, here´s the point I will be arguing, and how I think it pertains to MG:

It is important to be as accurate as possible when talking about something where the moral high ground is highly and vehemently disputed - i.e., the Iraq War. Any failure of research, foolish arguments, or blatant dishonesty that appears in discussions about the War, especially when used to prove a point, is wrong, and doubly so because it turns off those who might be convinced of the truth.

In short, I don´t have to agree with the War or think that the WMD´s existed to say that what MG is saying is wrong, utterly wrong, and in very poor judgement. I´m talking about this in particular:

Why can’t Bush be blamed for this? Should the rules of war somehow include something about laying down all arms if you are fighting against the United States? That “collateral damage” should be the fault of the people who are killed for not leaving their homes and becoming refugees in Syria? Bush invaded a country that didn’t attack us based on lies. Now a minimum of 100,000 innocent civilians are dead. If Bush hadn’t invaded, those people would be alive.

Your underlying point, if I'm interpreting you correctly, is this:

The deaths in the Iraq War, because they came as a response to Bush's invasion, are to be blamed on Bush.

This isn't what you said at first. Your original words were, and I quote, "Bush has killed more innocent civilians than bin Laden by more than a factor of 10" (from the comments on Ben's post). I'm glad to see you've at least changed your phrasing. So here's my question:

Of those 100,000 innocent civilian deaths, why is it that you have no problem absolving the Iraqis who are directly responsible, while placing all the blame on Bush, who is indirectly responsible?

I bother to ask because, though you may be right about Bush being to blame, if you make that argument by claiming that he is solely responsible for 100,000 deaths that would not have happened had he not invaded, you're going to be written off as an idiot. And justly so, because the argument is foolish. If it is acceptable to make the invader solely responsible for all subsequent deaths (since you have absolved the 'insurgents'), then the following people are responsible for the following atrocities:

1. The armies that came to liberate Jasenovac concentration camp in WWII are responsible for the subsequent slaughter of its inmates as the guards, eager to cover up evidence of war crimes, killed everyone left alive. If the army hadn't invaded, those people wouldn't have been killed.
2. The 9,000-15,000 dead during the Auschwitz Death March are to be blamed on the Red Army, because had the Red Army not tried to invade Auschwitz, the Nazis would have no need to evacuate everyone and destroy evidence of atrocities.

This is obviously not how it works. Now, as a disclaimer, I'm not suggesting that Iraq was anything near as bad as Auschwitz, or Jasenovac, or that we invaded because we knew of these kinds of atrocities (the comparison, quite frankly, is almost insulting to Holocaust survivors). The point is, however, that in an effort to denounce Bush and the Iraq War, you've made a serious lapse of judgement and logic: you've placed all the blame for a morally ambiguous war on one man, George Herbert Walker, and you've made a claim you cannot possibly back up:

Now a minimum of 100,000 innocent civilians are dead. If Bush hadn’t invaded, those people would be alive.

You don't know that. For all you know, they might have been dead in mass graves (or these ones, or these ones) or they might have been killed by Uday or executed on Qusay´s orders, or they might have performed poorly in a sporting event and suffered in Uday´s Iron Maiden.

These things are obviously lamentable, and I´m not claiming that they were the reason we went to Iraq. Because they´re not. But MG has either ignored them or not heard of them, and neither option is good for someone who is claiming that Bush is responsible for 100,000 deaths, deaths that would have been prevented had we not invaded. You don´t know that. The only reason you´ve stated it that way is to make your moral ground appear higher. You´ve phrased the situation, MG, so that it sounds like the US invaded a peaceful utopia. That´s not only wrong; it´s absurd to the point of blatant scholarly irresponsibility. Iraq was a brutal country, and we removed a brutal dictator. We can argue at a different point whether or not we did so based on lies, but to the average citizen that doesn´t have to live in fear, our false pretenses for war are probably irrelevant. And I say this knowing that, at the very least, not all the news from Iraq is bad.

What´s the point? Well, if you´re going to make an argument denouncing the Iraq War, you´d better be sure your moral outrage has good reason. And your moral outrage, MG, has made Bush responsible for these deaths. And these ones. And these ones. MG, this is absurd. You are blaming Bush for the deaths that Iraqis have inflicted on other Iraqi civilians. They car-bombed children, for crying out loud. Children.

(I realize you´ve claimed that a whole new set of photos are to be released that include the sexual abuse of children. If you´re right, I´ll be as pissed off as you are, but you´re going to need a helluva good citation to make me believe that. Please furnish one.)

Should the rules of war somehow include something about laying down all arms if you are fighting against the United States? That “collateral damage” should be the fault of the people who are killed for not leaving their homes and becoming refugees in Syria?

Rules of war...I don't care who you're fighting. Using civilians as human shields is always unacceptable. And the collateral damage is coming from both ends, MG - the US and the blunderbuss-hunter Iraqi resistance. You´ve completely absolved the Iraqi resistance of guilt, though perhaps not intentionally, when trying to make a case that, had you stuck to the facts, you could not make.

This kind of argument really, really tends to piss people off. Michael Moore is my favorite example - a man who could have made excellent attacks on George W. decided to bullshit his way through a movie that, if you do your research, is impossible to defend. In fact,

Open challenge: tell me one thing that Michael Moore got right in F9/11.

Now proving MM wrong doesn´t make George W. somehow a good guy. But, given human nature, when we hear something that is plainly wrong and a tad deceitful, we are inclined to go after it and correct. Sometimes to the detriment of the real issue at hand, which is the examination of the war, what we should do, and where we went wrong. In my humble opinion, MG, you´re hurting your own cause.

More to come, but this is long enough.

Jesus' Sword

OK. An actual post.

Historically, choosing science over religion hasn´t yielded universally fantastic results. The worst slaughters in recent history have been perpetrated by self-professed athiests.

The point isn’t whether atheists or religious nuts like Bush and bin Laden kill more people. World leaders have been slaughtering people for centuries and will most likely continue to do so for centuries. My point was that religious doctrine can be hijacked by the slaughterers to justify their horrors. I’m certain that it wasn’t Jesus’ plan to set up the Spanish Inquisition, but they did it in His name. I’m sure that when Jesus said that bit about the sword, he wasn’t thinking of the Crusades. Oh, and the Crusades are a perfect example of hijacking religion to achieve political ends. The leaders of those campaigns were interested in land acquisition, not religious conversion. They only used religion to bring the people along, much like Bush’s phantom WMD.

"Former regime elements and insurgents have made it a practice of using civilians as human shields, operating and conducting attacks against coalition forces from within areas inhabited by civilians."

Point is, Bush can not only not be blamed for these, but one would think he´s more justified in rooting out bastards who do these kinds of things

Why can’t Bush be blamed for this? Should the rules of war somehow include something about laying down all arms if you are fighting against the United States? That “collateral damage” should be the fault of the people who are killed for not leaving their homes and becoming refugees in Syria? Bush invaded a country that didn’t attack us based on lies. Now a minimum of 100,000 innocent civilians are dead. If Bush hadn’t invaded, those people would be alive. Take Truman’s use of the Bomb. Maybe he did end up saving other lives by decimating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there’s no question that we’re still responsible for the deaths there. Lucky for Truman’s conscience, he can rest easy knowing that at least they attacked us first. And somehow I get the feeling he didn't rest easy.

To your last point that Bush is justified to attack them because they are bad, I have two points. 1) When did the US become the world’s police? And 2) If he’s into rooting out bastards, shouldn’t he be going into Darfur, where Bush’s own people have declared that a genocide is taking place?

On torture chambers - the US fucked up there. Truly. But Saddam´s were worse. Does that justify ours? Hell no. But the fact that you mentioned ours as if we were the only ones at fault suggests that you´re not looking at the whole story. We made our soldiers stop, or at least made a show of it. Saddam didn´t even pretend. Hardly the moral high ground, but ignoring it doesn´t help your case.

Who says Saddam’s were worse? I don’t know that arguing over who tortured more people is a productive conversation, but I’ve not read anyone argue that our torture chambers are ok because his were worse, especially if what we need to have to get this done is to maintain a high moral ground – not a slightly higher moral ground that one of the most brutal dictators in the middle east.

Second, if you think the torture chambers are shut down, you’re not paying close enough attention. All they’ve shut down is the taking pictures of the horrors. Furthermore, don’t fall into the trap of blaming it on a “few bad apples.” They set this up from the beginning, starting with memos from the White House:

An Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, addressed to Gonzales, said that torturing suspected al Qaeda members abroad "may be justified" and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogation" conducted against suspected terrorists.

The document provided legal guidance for the CIA, which crafted new, more aggressive techniques for its operatives in the field.

A whole new set of photos are going to be released soon as well. These photos are going to include the sexual abuse of children. And before you go blame the messenger, remember that it’s the fault of the person doing the crime, not the person who tells the story of the crime.

I do know that Jesus did not preach tolerance. ¨"I came not to bring peace, but a sword." The problem here isn´t that we´re "interpreting scripture differently" - the problem is that some interprit it badly, some well, and some, in your case, not at all.

Jesus didn't preach tolerance? He didn't preach peace? How about the Beatitudes? Blessed are the meek? Blessed are the peacemakers? That sounds like preaching peace to me. Turn the other cheek, he said. He changed eye for an eye to turn the other cheek. That was the point of His time here on earth. To change from the old-school old testament rules to the new and improved new testament rules. As a sidenote, all the conservative Christians want to have the Ten Commandments put up in every school and courthouse. But if they want to post Christian doctrine in our municipal buildings, I think they ought to post the Beatitudes. I mean, explain what laws are derived from "honor your mother and father" or "no graven images." It's legal for me to tell my mom to fuck off and to have a Buddha statue in my home.

And perhaps that's the point. We have to use logic and science to derive our laws, not someone's particular interpretation of their particular religion. It's not that I'm striving to have a country of no religion, it's that this country was established to welcome any religion. If our system of justice were truly derived from the Ten Commandments, then Hindus would not be welcome here, because they use graven images and they place other gods before yours. The rule of law must be based on logic - universal and easily understood. Not based on one person's interpretation of an ancient text. It's part of living in a pluralistic society open to all.

Updates

Links have been updated in Ben´s latest post. Visit them here:

Wikipedia on ID

I´ve a new question to guide the debate:

Most of the controversy over ID, aside from the obvious religious associations, seems to come from the fact that ID is not, by the latest definitions of science, actually science. "Science," as it is currently defined, accepts only naturalistic and materialistic explanations for events. ID accepts that there might be something else.

Here´s the question - what good reasons do we have for sticking to the current definition, or revising the definition, or any other options available?

I ask because the "only materialistic and naturalistic explanations" definition is very, very new (historically, anyway), originating specifically for the purpose of eliminating even the possibility of creators.

For a while, it was a great boon to science, because it kept scientists doggedly on one track, and they discovered a great deal. Now, however, they seem to have reached the end of the line. It may be prudent to expand the definition of science.

There´s obviously a host of objections one can make here ("scientists have not reached the end of the line," "that historical analysis is flawed," "the definition of science has never changed," etc.) Have at it.

And one more thing, to get the ball rolling - Emeryroolz made the following statement a few weeks ago:

“It's the legitimate ID theorists you should be paying attention to, the ones who have a serious scientific problem wth the current scientific explanation. Why should they not be allowed to speak?”

Because they have nothing to speak about yet. Again, no research, no data, no evidence, nothing. Why should we waste school time for American kids, who are already light years behind most of the rest of the world in science, on a bunch of religious nonsense? And say what you want about ID NOT being tied to religion. The ONLY reason it's being forced on us now is because RELIGIOUS people want it, because it's compatible with THEIR religion. Evidence and facts be damned!

I shall now chide Emery for bad research. Read the following two articles, one favorable to ID, the other not:

Dembski asking five questions

Mark Issac answering at least one of them (about SETI)

The point here is not so much who is right, but that ID is taken seriously enough to warrant a serious response by serious scientists. ID theorists most definitely do have something to speak about yet, Emery.