> Do we know how long ago it was recorded? If he mentions Kerry, I suppose it's probably not that old. Are there any other clues, such as mention of recent events?
Mention of 1000 US dead in Iraq puts it within the last couple of months.
> We could go back to the time where we just lob a few cruise missiles into aspirin factories, to protect civilians and american soldiers, everytime we get bombed.
So now we're bombing restaurants and barber shops in a country that didn't bomb us?
> Which is particularly ironic when one considers Rumsfeld's history, and how he pushed for the Nixon Whitehouse to let the miltary win it or get out because the political meddling was a doomed path. How ironic his political career has led him to repeat the very mistakes he originally hoped this country would escape.
FWIW, a couple of weeks ago in a conversation about Viet Nam, a retired Army officer described MacNamara as "another Rumsfeld".
> Actually given the content of the message, I don't think it'll have much impact except to remind people that bin Laden is still alive in spite of Bush promising to 'get him dead or alive' then later saying 'I'm not that concerned with him'. Folks will naturally wonder if we would have gotten him if Bush didn't detour us into Iraq.
Most likely it will just reinforce everyone's current political beliefs, and have no impact at all unless the media all spin it the same way.
>... or they're actually hitting insurgents, but because insurgents don't wear uniforms or dog tags, it's really hard to tell them apart from civilians.
If Iraq's women and children are shooting at us, we've got a bigger problem than even the anti-war types realize.
> They're the party of "government growing at a slower rate than the Democrats would."
No, just as with spending the biggest difference between Republicans and Democrats is who gets the advantage out of it. The current government claims to be big on states' rights, but watch what happens when a state wants to legalize marijuana, import medicine from Canada, allow gay marriage or euthanasia, etc.
Also, if the newscast I heard a couple of nights ago was correct, the federal government has hired 800,000 people under the current administration (meaning the job loss figures would look even worse if not for growing government).
> Yes, because the media is always right and always reports accurately especially when they have reliable Iraqi civilians feeding them information. And the media is unbiased of course. I understand what the Israeli's go through with the media reports having now heard how ours and the world's reports what happens here. It's a lot different from reality.
> My guess is that history will prove that the war was worth it, not only for Iraqis but for the world as a whole.
It's far from a sure thing that their next government won't be another dictator or a radical theocracy. With the added advantage of knowing that once the US withdraws, they won't likely come back again.
The history of Iraq's governments does not make me optimistic that they'll end up with a Utopia.
> Don't forget about the 500,000 CHILDREN that died because of the UN Sanction fiasco.
The thing about sanctions is that in the crippled economy the ruling class still skims their share off the top, with the undesirable effect that the pain "trickles down" to ordinary citizens and oppressed groups.
> This number is _extremely_ difficult to calculate. Some estimates say tens of thousands. Some say hundreds of thousands.
Yes, take it with a grain of salt until more information becomes available, especially since it is so different from the other estimates.
> For this report, the sample numbers were EXTREMELY EXTREMELY low: 988 housholds. The potential for error here is astounding.
That's not a particularly small sample size for the kinds of polls and surveys that we see all the time. You don't need a particularly big sample to get reasonable confidence values.
Of course, if you're deliberately fudging the sample to get the results you want, then all bets are off.
> Every article about military firefights ends with a quote from some official saying how the Americans attacked mostly women, children, and the elderly. It's the standard line and it gets old and less believable each time.
So you think Iraqi doctors are categorically lying about what they see coming in their hospitals? I suppose it's possible, but ISTM that they have less reason to lie than, say, the US military and the Bush Administration.
> Lets get some things straight. There's never been a "good" war in the history of the world that didn't *first* start because of a power struggle or a politician's false pretense and was *later* justified by pointing to all the good it did.
As in this case, where the "liberation" angle is emergency spin to cover the lack of WMD in Iraq.
Also re your general point, it's not possible for both sides in a war to be right, but it is possible for both sides to be wrong.
> And why are they still doing air strikes? It's not for fun, it's not just to kill people. If the intent was to kill civillians, they'd pretty much all be dead. They're trying to get at the terrorists.
And you can see how well bombing suspected terrorists in civilian neighborhoods has worked for Israel against the Intifada.
Moreover, the air strikes in Fallujah seem to be hitting primarily citizens. Either they're bombing the city on bad intelligence, or else just bombing it to cow the population.
> Maybe/. should take their American flag off of the politics topic banner and replace it with a flower or something.
How about an inverted flag, the traditional signal of distress.
(FWIW, I've been sticking the "flag" postage stamps on my mail upside down.)
> How about the hundreds of thousands of people who are now free from tyranny in Iraq under Sadam's regime?
It's not clear that they're free from tyranny yet, what with the security sweeps, mass arrests, prison abuse, media shutdowns, and the US bombing barber shops to terrorize the residents of Fallujah into submission.
At least three times that many, plus about 900,000,000 Iranian soldiers in the gratuitous war he started.
But the question is, how come we're invoking that as an retcon justification after failing to discover WMD, when we didn't lift a finger to stop him while he was actually doing it.
> And how many of those deaths are due to terrorists trying to recapture his legacy.
I would guess that most of the terrorists are trying to set up another radical Islamic state rather than bring Saddam back.
Some of the resistance fighters may be Saddamists (Saddamites?) though.
> I voted the C. Neal / N. Portman write-in ticket this morning in early voting. (Seriously -- I think these two presidential candidates are essentially the same
If you can't tell the difference between Cowboy Neal and Natalie Portman...
> The Economist has supported the tax cuts, But not the increase of government spending.
Indeed. The "tax and spend" Democrats have been replaced by "tax cut and spend" Republicans. All the rhetoric about fiscal responsibility is just a facade for the real debate, "pay now or pay later".
It's hard for the party in power to cut spending, because pork is one of the primary ways for legislators to buy votes.
> Last time I looked there are still plenty of contradictory natural laws that don't fit together in a nice logical and self-consistent manner
Such as?
Or did you mean theories instead of laws? Even most theories are compatible, though of course we haven't been able to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics, and things like string theory only make divergent predictions for extremes that we can't measure at present.
> The fact is darwin did not have the evidence to support his views at the time he espoused his theory.
Neither did Einstein on his most famous theory.
> I have no sympathy for creationists
OK, sorry I misunderstood you on that.
> If we take away time there's no mechanism for evolution at all.
Sure, but we only try to explain the world we find. We find great time, we find evolution, we find no incompatibilities between the twain. Reality trumps "what if" arguments.
> Evolution works by random small blind steps, its as likely to move forward as it is to move backward.
No one claims that every mutation is beneficial. What makes evolution different from coin tosses is that it contains a feedback loop that rewards the "good" mutations and punishes the "bad" ones. There's nothing mysterious here: in the absence of gravity, an apple would be as likely to fall up as it would be to fall down.
Slashdot Mirror
> Who would argue that the American Civil war wasn't worth it?
The sad thing about that war is that England gave up slavery two generations sooner, and didn't have to fight a civil war to do it.
> Every major war in the world for the last 150 years has led to the advancement of rights, liberty, and economic improvement.
Only if you're selective about what you look at. For example, WWI gave us Fascism and Communism, and economic collapse in Germany.
> Attacking Iraq was about bringing a Dictator to justice, because once again we were the only ones willing.
Great! When are we going to take on the rest of the dictators and mass murderers?
> We're in Iraq, we miscalculated the response, we'll fix the problems, and see it through to the end.
The way we saw it through in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia?
There's a reason Saddam thought he could hide until it was over.
> Do we know how long ago it was recorded? If he mentions Kerry, I suppose it's probably not that old. Are there any other clues, such as mention of recent events?
Mention of 1000 US dead in Iraq puts it within the last couple of months.
> We could go back to the time where we just lob a few cruise missiles into aspirin factories, to protect civilians and american soldiers, everytime we get bombed.
So now we're bombing restaurants and barber shops in a country that didn't bomb us?
> Which is particularly ironic when one considers Rumsfeld's history, and how he pushed for the Nixon Whitehouse to let the miltary win it or get out because the political meddling was a doomed path. How ironic his political career has led him to repeat the very mistakes he originally hoped this country would escape.
FWIW, a couple of weeks ago in a conversation about Viet Nam, a retired Army officer described MacNamara as "another Rumsfeld".
> Actually given the content of the message, I don't think it'll have much impact except to remind people that bin Laden is still alive in spite of Bush promising to 'get him dead or alive' then later saying 'I'm not that concerned with him'. Folks will naturally wonder if we would have gotten him if Bush didn't detour us into Iraq.
Most likely it will just reinforce everyone's current political beliefs, and have no impact at all unless the media all spin it the same way.
...that they used the future tense to predict the outcome of the election.
>
If Iraq's women and children are shooting at us, we've got a bigger problem than even the anti-war types realize.
> They're the party of "government growing at a slower rate than the Democrats would."
No, just as with spending the biggest difference between Republicans and Democrats is who gets the advantage out of it. The current government claims to be big on states' rights, but watch what happens when a state wants to legalize marijuana, import medicine from Canada, allow gay marriage or euthanasia, etc.
Also, if the newscast I heard a couple of nights ago was correct, the federal government has hired 800,000 people under the current administration (meaning the job loss figures would look even worse if not for growing government).
> Ummm.. that's almost a billion, I don't think so.
How many times do I have to say "oops" to make up for that one?
> Yes, because the media is always right and always reports accurately especially when they have reliable Iraqi civilians feeding them information. And the media is unbiased of course. I understand what the Israeli's go through with the media reports having now heard how ours and the world's reports what happens here. It's a lot different from reality.
And you learned this fact from listening to...?
> I won't get fooled again.
Also, I'm growing my beard out and I started parting my hair on the right.
> My guess is that history will prove that the war was worth it, not only for Iraqis but for the world as a whole.
It's far from a sure thing that their next government won't be another dictator or a radical theocracy. With the added advantage of knowing that once the US withdraws, they won't likely come back again.
The history of Iraq's governments does not make me optimistic that they'll end up with a Utopia.
> Don't forget about the 500,000 CHILDREN that died because of the UN Sanction fiasco.
The thing about sanctions is that in the crippled economy the ruling class still skims their share off the top, with the undesirable effect that the pain "trickles down" to ordinary citizens and oppressed groups.
> This number is _extremely_ difficult to calculate. Some estimates say tens of thousands. Some say hundreds of thousands.
Yes, take it with a grain of salt until more information becomes available, especially since it is so different from the other estimates.
> For this report, the sample numbers were EXTREMELY EXTREMELY low: 988 housholds. The potential for error here is astounding.
That's not a particularly small sample size for the kinds of polls and surveys that we see all the time. You don't need a particularly big sample to get reasonable confidence values.
Of course, if you're deliberately fudging the sample to get the results you want, then all bets are off.
> Every article about military firefights ends with a quote from some official saying how the Americans attacked mostly women, children, and the elderly. It's the standard line and it gets old and less believable each time.
So you think Iraqi doctors are categorically lying about what they see coming in their hospitals? I suppose it's possible, but ISTM that they have less reason to lie than, say, the US military and the Bush Administration.
> Lets get some things straight. There's never been a "good" war in the history of the world that didn't *first* start because of a power struggle or a politician's false pretense and was *later* justified by pointing to all the good it did.
As in this case, where the "liberation" angle is emergency spin to cover the lack of WMD in Iraq.
Also re your general point, it's not possible for both sides in a war to be right, but it is possible for both sides to be wrong.
> And why are they still doing air strikes? It's not for fun, it's not just to kill people. If the intent was to kill civillians, they'd pretty much all be dead. They're trying to get at the terrorists.
And you can see how well bombing suspected terrorists in civilian neighborhoods has worked for Israel against the Intifada.
Moreover, the air strikes in Fallujah seem to be hitting primarily citizens. Either they're bombing the city on bad intelligence, or else just bombing it to cow the population.
> Maybe
How about an inverted flag, the traditional signal of distress.
(FWIW, I've been sticking the "flag" postage stamps on my mail upside down.)
> How about the hundreds of thousands of people who are now free from tyranny in Iraq under Sadam's regime?
It's not clear that they're free from tyranny yet, what with the security sweeps, mass arrests, prison abuse, media shutdowns, and the US bombing barber shops to terrorize the residents of Fallujah into submission.
> I could swear the president's right hand man said that they would minimize civilian casualties?
Here's another good one:
The neocons are trying to sell imperialism by portraying it as cheap and painless. Reality hasn't conformed to the plan yet.
> How many of his own people Saddam killed.
At least three times that many, plus about 900,000,000 Iranian soldiers in the gratuitous war he started.
But the question is, how come we're invoking that as an retcon justification after failing to discover WMD, when we didn't lift a finger to stop him while he was actually doing it.
> And how many of those deaths are due to terrorists trying to recapture his legacy.
I would guess that most of the terrorists are trying to set up another radical Islamic state rather than bring Saddam back.
Some of the resistance fighters may be Saddamists (Saddamites?) though.
> I voted the C. Neal / N. Portman write-in ticket this morning in early voting. (Seriously -- I think these two presidential candidates are essentially the same
If you can't tell the difference between Cowboy Neal and Natalie Portman...
>
Also, I'm not convinced that it's fair to lie everything at the president's feet. The Congress has a huge impact on our national spending habits too.
> The Economist has supported the tax cuts, But not the increase of government spending.
Indeed. The "tax and spend" Democrats have been replaced by "tax cut and spend" Republicans. All the rhetoric about fiscal responsibility is just a facade for the real debate, "pay now or pay later".
It's hard for the party in power to cut spending, because pork is one of the primary ways for legislators to buy votes.
I've heard a lot of newspaper endorsements both ways this time around. Does anyone know how much effect endorsements actually have on vote counts?
> Last time I looked there are still plenty of contradictory natural laws that don't fit together in a nice logical and self-consistent manner
Such as?
Or did you mean theories instead of laws? Even most theories are compatible, though of course we haven't been able to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics, and things like string theory only make divergent predictions for extremes that we can't measure at present.
> The fact is darwin did not have the evidence to support his views at the time he espoused his theory.
Neither did Einstein on his most famous theory.
> I have no sympathy for creationists
OK, sorry I misunderstood you on that.
> If we take away time there's no mechanism for evolution at all.
Sure, but we only try to explain the world we find. We find great time, we find evolution, we find no incompatibilities between the twain. Reality trumps "what if" arguments.
> Evolution works by random small blind steps, its as likely to move forward as it is to move backward.
No one claims that every mutation is beneficial. What makes evolution different from coin tosses is that it contains a feedback loop that rewards the "good" mutations and punishes the "bad" ones. There's nothing mysterious here: in the absence of gravity, an apple would be as likely to fall up as it would be to fall down.