PS -- "doesn't" should be "don't"
PPS -- Annoying, ain't it?
Actually, I find it helpful. While personality unquestionably has a large genetic component, skills are (IMHO) mostly learned. And my personality is such that I mostly learn from my mistakes (though it would seem much preferable to learn from the mistakes of others, it isn't as effective for me). In order to learn from my mistakes, I first have to notice them.
So, thanks. In some small way, you have contributed to making me a better person in the long run (and perhaps a tad more humble in the short).
To date, there heve been exactly zero scientific studies that point to a genetic component of personality, including the famous twins studies of the late 1990s. Yet there have been literally thousands of studies that point to a cultural component, including those that show that early childhood trauma can result in physical damage to the brain.
This is, to put it bluntly, wrong (search for personality or behavior). For that matter, most people doesn't consider early childhood trauma to be "cultural".
If someone were intending to show a genetic component to personality, he or she would first have to show a physiological component to personality. That has yet to happen. So your analogy of shortness and strongness, which are physiological traits, can not be applied to personalities, which are not physiological. The brain may be genetic, but we are many, many years from proving or even suggesting that personality traits are.
This too is wrong, and sounds a lot like some sort of vitalistic voodoo; in other words, much less scientific than the notion that genes influence personality. It is also inconsistent with what you said above (where you used the causal chain [early childhood trauma] --> [physical damage to the brain] --> [personality]).
--MarkusQ
P.S. "Strongness" isn't a word. I think you were looking for "Strength."
Such recounts have nothing to do with fraud, they're aimed at correcting honest counting mistakes (which are more likely to affect close elections than otherwise).
Supposedly. But do people seriously expect a hand recount of computer tabulated votes to catch counting mistakes? The only reason I can see for doing a hand recount would be to detect fraud, at the cost of introducing a few more errors.
medication errors at nursing homes,...disciplinary actions against state employees, that are becoming restricted...worry that public information could be misused, whether it's by terrorists or by computer hackers hoping to use your credit cards. Security concerns typically won out.
Oh come on, security is not what they are concerned about.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of cases when a politician says that something must be kept secret "for national security reasons" they are really telling that the information would embarrass (or incriminate) them or their political allies. It's about as dumb as saying "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." Or the philanderers who tell their spouse that they are secret agents working under deep cover for the NSA.
For that matter, the whole idea of "security through obscurity" is flawed. Secret emergency plans for schools? What in the heck is the point of having a plan if nobody is allowed to know what it is?
many states only allow for recounts if an election is extremely close
Every time I'm reminded of this fact, I just shake my head in wonder. It has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. The argument seems to be that, if an election isn't close, fraud couldn't have effected the outcome--which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Don't believe me? Consider two case, both using touch screen voting machines: in one, one randomly selected million people vote on the ballot issue "Coke vs. Pepsi," and the outcome is a 49% / 49% split. In the second case, all but sixty eight of them vote "Pepsi", with sixty eight abstentions.
Now ask yourself: in which case would you suspect that the voting machines or tabulators or something had been rigged?
--MarkusQ
P.S. A much better test would be mandatory recount if the results differ from the exit polls by more than a small amount.
A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades.
They cite this as evidence that nothing was fishy, but that all rests on the "no conceivable ties to al Qaeda" assumption, which begs the question. If we reverse that one assumption, we get a very different conclusion, since that would mean that the US based investor and the newsletter effectively pumped a large amount of money out to people unknown--exactly the sort of thing you might do if you wanted to fund sleeper cells. (Think of it this way--if you had some way to throw very large quantities of someone else's money out of a downtown window at a specific time and date, you could use it to fund your cohorts by having a few of them "just happen" to be in the mob below. Not efficient, but then it's not your money).
Further, without quantifying both trades, it's not clear that the institutional investor didn't clean up on the deal as well.
Why does steel and iron react so well to magnetic fields? Is that because of the Fe ions?
I believe steel is not particularly magnetic, and that soft iron is much more so. And the reason has more to to do with the structure of the material (how the crystals interact) than the atoms involved.
And would this still be effective once the wires had been transformed into plasma and being contained by the magnetic fields of the experiment? If so, would the energy of the magnetic field(s) be contributing?
No. First, the crystal structure would be gone, and second, the plasma would exclude the magnetic field (plasmas are very conductive). And third, the magnetic field strength are tiny compared to the other forces involved.
I'm done spoonfeeding information into your closed mind, do your own reading.>
In other words, I suspect, you made it up.
For the record, I spent about fifteen minutes with google, using all the reasonable keyword combinations I could think of, before I posted the question (I don't like looking like an idiot if I can avoid it), and turned up nothing. So that means either:
This "publicly available information" hasn't been put up on the web anywhere
I'm not looking for the right thing (quite possible, since I was just going of your brief description)
You made it up
The first is, to put it bluntly, highly implausible. I'm willing to concede that the second case is a possibility, but if you can't come up with something better than a glib blow-off, I'm going to lean towards the third.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I wouldn't recommend accusing people of being closed-minded, if I were you, especially since the entire thread is readable by everyone. They might get the idea that you were prone to making wild, easily falsifiable assertions, which doesn't really help your case.
I'm still waiting for a response to the substance of my post (e.g., page and/or chapter number for what you claim is in the report). I realize that the argument about strip searching people in their back yards (with or without their dogs) on the adjacent thread took up a lot of time, but we really ought to get back to the main point.
You are right, we should have known that the guys in chemical protective suits were just loading large tubes of Sand onto heavily insulated truck convoys. BTW, this is all stuff thats publicly available knowledge.
Care to cite a source? Preferably one that hasn't subsequently been discredited?
I have to plead guilty as charged. The problem with trying to explain things like this to people who don't want to hear it is that at some point you wind up just feeding a troll. On another thread (not quite as bad as this) we wound up arguing about what constitutes a credible news source, and whether or not CNN and the Washington post were part of a "leftist propaganda machine," which was totally off topic. I probably should have just ignored the bait and asked him why he responded to my parting quip and not the two substantive points that preceded it.
No, its more like you having your large guard dog guarding your cooler, which happens to be empty, and when he asks if he can look in the cooler you say sure, open the cooler, reach in, put your hand under your robe, walk over to the Grill with your dog and put your hand into the grill and close the grill.
Fine, but you left out two parts: one, there's no reason to assume that the cooler was empty; maybe I didn't want him swiping my beer, or maybe I had my Playboys stashed there, or my walet. And two, because the kid doesn't find his ball in my cooler he and his buddies still beat me up and strip search me, and the grill, and my wife and dog for good measure. And then make us pose nude with the dog so they can take embarasing pictures of us.
Sorry, that doesn't wash. He told the inspectors he had no WMD. To any rational person it appears that this was correct. The inspectors certainly didn't think he had any. As they stated at the time, hauling things out in convoys, repainting, etc. would not have been enough to hide a weapons program if he had had one. So the whole interpretation of the convoys is as "jerking us around" is based on the assumption that he did have WMD but managed to outfox everyone, which is an unreasonable assumption.
Look at it this way: Suppose I'm sunbathing in the buff (as if) and the neighbor kid calls over the wall that he wants to look for his ball in my yard. I say, "well, it's not here, but you're welcome to come look, as soon as I put a robe on" am I "jerking him around on the ball issue" because I put a robe on? Yes, if (and only if) I was hiding the ball in my robe. Otherwise, if his ball really isn't in my yard, and he leads an gang of his buddies over the wall to strip search me, he's just a paranoid nut job.
It has nothing at all to do with conservatives. It has to do with large numbers of people who like to think of themselves as conservative, who really don't have a clue what conservativism is about, because they've been told by Rush Limbaugh that it's about "pissing off commie terror-loving liberals". For about 90% of the self-proclaimed conservatives I talk to about this, that's what the conversations almost always boils down to. Liberal-bashing.
Makes sense. It's sort of become a running joke in my crowd (which runs the spectrum from Goldwater conservatives, Rand-thumping libertarians, to neo-Kennedy whither-Camelot liberals*): we'd love to get back to arguing about how a free society ought best be run, and will, once we find ourselves in one again.
The last few years have been kind of an eye opener for us; although we thought we disagreed with each other politically at a pretty fundamental level, it turns out that there is an even deeper level at which we all agree. We've found ourselves gradually coming to exactly the same conclusions regardless of where we stand politically. As one friend put it, if you find yourself in a burning theater, you tend to want to do something about it, and even a Marxist and a plutocrat are likely to agree under those circumstances.
--MarkusQ
* We also have one progressive, but he's a Macaulay/Whigg style progressive, not a neo-Liberal.
And, as an aside, how could he have been "jerking us around" about WMD unless he actually had some?
well I noticed you trimmed that part of my post. So here it is again
For Example: He would Run a convoy from one inspection site to another, and then open the first site for inspection. He would do this on a weekly basis.
So, by that logic, he was also "jerking us around" about flying saucers, the fountain of youth, and Windows Vista, 'cause he didn't have any of them either.
Thanks for the lucid response. While I intended to be offering a supposition in my original post, and not a drawing conclusion as you have assumed, I will let that point slide in the interest of good sportsmanship. The rest of your points are sound, and I accept them without further qualification. Sample bias is always a prime suspect in cases such as this, and I have no basis on which to discount it.
The 9/11 Report substantiated the link between Moussaoui and Hussein.
Oh? Can you give me a chapter/page number? The only references I find are in chapter 2, chapter 4, and chapter 10, and they don't support the contention other than saying that the Bush administration believed it. Most of the mentions (e.g. Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan) and most of the press reports would seem to argue against your claim.
It Also confirmed that there was no credible intelligence PRIOR to the invasion indicating that the WMDs weren't where we expected them to be.
I suppose that UN weapons inspectors, who were trained in such matters and actually went there don't count as credible? There were, as you know, lots of reports indicating that the weapons weren't there--in fact, the vast majority of the intelligence argued against it, which is why the Bush administration have been accused of "cherry picking" the facts to support the policy they had already decided on. But of course, I suppose you can just write them all off as "incredible," as Bush seems to have done.
Further, we went in based on a whole host of other reasons, that are either accidentally overlooked or deliberately ignored... For example, we've been in a HOT shooting war with Iraq for 15 years. He's been jerking us around about WMDs for that entire time.
Nice dodge. There may have been many motivations for the people who sold us this war to have done so, but they can't be counted as reasons why we bought it unless they told us about them. For example, when people were being asked by pollsters "should we go to war with Iraq?" why didn't any of them say "That's a silly question--we're already at war with Iraq"? For that matter, why was there a stink when it was learned that Bush had started (or rather, stepped up) bombing before getting the authorization from congress? If everyone knew that we'd been in a "HOT shooting war with Iraq for 15 years" there wouldn't have been any surprise at all.
You can't seriously claim that We The People authorized this war based on things we weren't told, but that the things we were told had nothing to do with it, can you?
And, as an aside, how could he have been "jerking us around" about WMD unless he actually had some?
You drank the koolaid. Research the facts, and get back to me.
Oh, that's convincing. Every point I made is public record. Unless you care to offer some specific persuasive argument or source to the contrary, you aren't going to convince anyone with that kool-aid drivel. I suspect that most of the people reading this thread will be at least familiar with the headline stories of the last few years, and would likewise welcome new information, if you have any.
There are all sorts of things you could do to blast holes in my argument. Tell me where the WMD are, or explain who it was that I heard telling me about them (a Bush impersonator perhaps?). Substantiate the link between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks--heck, if you could do that, I'll bet the Bush administration would be glad to hire you on at a cushy salary. There are probably hundreds of interesting, substantive ways to challenge my post.
As I mentioned the last time you trolled me, I'm a conservative, not a liberal-hiding-behind-a-codeword. There are plenty of reasons a conservative ought to object to frittering away our military on a land war in Asia based on false statements and propaganda, and in the process running up enormous debts and treating the constitution like last week's junk mail. In fact, it amazes me that any conservative can get behind this sort of "we're going to fix the world 'cause the poor fools are too dumb to fix themselves" nonsense. It's a classic liberal sort of foolishness, and it's just as foolish coming from a so-called Republican like Bush as it is coming from a Democrat.
So are you on active duty, or are you just trying to make it sound that way?
Nuts. When people come back stateside, I guarantee their first thought isn't "gosh, I'm going to go read old newspapers and catch up on months old political scandals."
Being "exposed to the media" doesn't mean that you suddenly get up to speed on any particular topic, and unless someone points them out to you you are unlikely to ever get up to speed on most subjects. Even people who's job it is to stay on top of the news have a hard time doing it and generally only follow a few subjects.
And as for sticking to the point, your original post was a red heiring to begin with. The survey results aren't speculation: the vast majority of the service personnel surveyed stated that we invaded to retaliate for Saddam's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Yet almost everyone back here knows that he had no involvement whatsoever with 9/11. How do you propose to explain this discrepancy?
And shortsighted individuals who claim that our only reason for being in Iraq is WMD and Oil tend to piss me off.
Shortsighted? Point blank, as a fact, the only reason that the US agreed to send troops to Iraq was that the Bush administration told us that they knew that Saddam had WMD, that they knew where they were, and that if we waited for the smoking gun it would likely be "a mushroom cloud" (that's a quote). They also told us that Saddam was connected to 9/11, that he had the ability to attack within 45 minutes, that there was no need to plan for the "occupation" since we would be welcomed as liberators, and that the costs would be minimal because the oil fields would pay for it. If they had not told us all these things, none of which, as it turns out, were true, We The People would not have given them permission to invade.
Get this through your head: the only reason the US invaded Iraq was that we were told a bunch of un-truths. If it pisses you off, join the club, though you might want to direct your anger at the people who made the original statements, rather than at the ones who point them out.
Do you realize how awkward it is to tell someone that's been putting their life on the line for their country, and is going back to do it again, that they're a sap that's been suckered into invading a country for no good reason apart from political expediency? That they might die, not for the good of humanity but for a for a lie? I've had a very hard time doing it, and I doubt most families care to spoil a visit with politics.
If they're going to learn the truth, it will be gradually over there through the media, gossip, etc. or as painful culture shock after they come home at the end (like with 'Nam).
Interesting. I have no idea if her claim is true or not, but it is at least consistent with another oddity that I noticed a few weeks ago, when the poll results showed that a majority (IIRC) of the US service personnel over there thought that we were in Iraq "because of what they did to us on 9/11," despite the fact that pretty much everyone over here (apart from a few trolls) now knows there was no connection at all between Iraq and 9/11.
When I heard that my first thought was: how could they not know this?!?
But perhaps there is a simple explanation after all.
Slashdot Mirror
PS -- "doesn't" should be "don't"
PPS -- Annoying, ain't it?
Actually, I find it helpful. While personality unquestionably has a large genetic component, skills are (IMHO) mostly learned. And my personality is such that I mostly learn from my mistakes (though it would seem much preferable to learn from the mistakes of others, it isn't as effective for me). In order to learn from my mistakes, I first have to notice them.
So, thanks. In some small way, you have contributed to making me a better person in the long run (and perhaps a tad more humble in the short).
--MarkusQ
To date, there heve been exactly zero scientific studies that point to a genetic component of personality, including the famous twins studies of the late 1990s. Yet there have been literally thousands of studies that point to a cultural component, including those that show that early childhood trauma can result in physical damage to the brain.
This is, to put it bluntly, wrong (search for personality or behavior). For that matter, most people doesn't consider early childhood trauma to be "cultural". If someone were intending to show a genetic component to personality, he or she would first have to show a physiological component to personality. That has yet to happen. So your analogy of shortness and strongness, which are physiological traits, can not be applied to personalities, which are not physiological. The brain may be genetic, but we are many, many years from proving or even suggesting that personality traits are.
This too is wrong, and sounds a lot like some sort of vitalistic voodoo; in other words, much less scientific than the notion that genes influence personality. It is also inconsistent with what you said above (where you used the causal chain [early childhood trauma] --> [physical damage to the brain] --> [personality]).
--MarkusQ
P.S. "Strongness" isn't a word. I think you were looking for "Strength."
Ballots that are rendered unreadable by the machine for whatever reason (malicious or otherwise) are still likely to be human readable.
What exactly would such a ballot look like in a touch screen voting system?
--MarkusQ
Such recounts have nothing to do with fraud, they're aimed at correcting honest counting mistakes (which are more likely to affect close elections than otherwise).
Supposedly. But do people seriously expect a hand recount of computer tabulated votes to catch counting mistakes? The only reason I can see for doing a hand recount would be to detect fraud, at the cost of introducing a few more errors.
--MarkusQ
medication errors at nursing homes,...disciplinary actions against state employees, that are becoming restricted...worry that public information could be misused, whether it's by terrorists or by computer hackers hoping to use your credit cards. Security concerns typically won out.
Oh come on, security is not what they are concerned about.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of cases when a politician says that something must be kept secret "for national security reasons" they are really telling that the information would embarrass (or incriminate) them or their political allies. It's about as dumb as saying "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." Or the philanderers who tell their spouse that they are secret agents working under deep cover for the NSA.
For that matter, the whole idea of "security through obscurity" is flawed. Secret emergency plans for schools? What in the heck is the point of having a plan if nobody is allowed to know what it is?
--MarkusQ
many states only allow for recounts if an election is extremely close
Every time I'm reminded of this fact, I just shake my head in wonder. It has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. The argument seems to be that, if an election isn't close, fraud couldn't have effected the outcome--which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Don't believe me? Consider two case, both using touch screen voting machines: in one, one randomly selected million people vote on the ballot issue "Coke vs. Pepsi," and the outcome is a 49% / 49% split. In the second case, all but sixty eight of them vote "Pepsi", with sixty eight abstentions.
Now ask yourself: in which case would you suspect that the voting machines or tabulators or something had been rigged?
--MarkusQ
P.S. A much better test would be mandatory recount if the results differ from the exit polls by more than a small amount.
From your link:
A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades.
They cite this as evidence that nothing was fishy, but that all rests on the "no conceivable ties to al Qaeda" assumption, which begs the question. If we reverse that one assumption, we get a very different conclusion, since that would mean that the US based investor and the newsletter effectively pumped a large amount of money out to people unknown--exactly the sort of thing you might do if you wanted to fund sleeper cells. (Think of it this way--if you had some way to throw very large quantities of someone else's money out of a downtown window at a specific time and date, you could use it to fund your cohorts by having a few of them "just happen" to be in the mob below. Not efficient, but then it's not your money).
Further, without quantifying both trades, it's not clear that the institutional investor didn't clean up on the deal as well.
--MarkusQ
Why does steel and iron react so well to magnetic fields? Is that because of the Fe ions?
I believe steel is not particularly magnetic, and that soft iron is much more so. And the reason has more to to do with the structure of the material (how the crystals interact) than the atoms involved.
And would this still be effective once the wires had been transformed into plasma and being contained by the magnetic fields of the experiment? If so, would the energy of the magnetic field(s) be contributing?
No. First, the crystal structure would be gone, and second, the plasma would exclude the magnetic field (plasmas are very conductive). And third, the magnetic field strength are tiny compared to the other forces involved.
--MarkusQ
I'm done spoonfeeding information into your closed mind, do your own reading.>
In other words, I suspect, you made it up.
For the record, I spent about fifteen minutes with google, using all the reasonable keyword combinations I could think of, before I posted the question (I don't like looking like an idiot if I can avoid it), and turned up nothing. So that means either:
The first is, to put it bluntly, highly implausible. I'm willing to concede that the second case is a possibility, but if you can't come up with something better than a glib blow-off, I'm going to lean towards the third.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I wouldn't recommend accusing people of being closed-minded, if I were you, especially since the entire thread is readable by everyone. They might get the idea that you were prone to making wild, easily falsifiable assertions, which doesn't really help your case.
I'm still waiting for a response to the substance of my post (e.g., page and/or chapter number for what you claim is in the report). I realize that the argument about strip searching people in their back yards (with or without their dogs) on the adjacent thread took up a lot of time, but we really ought to get back to the main point.
--MarkusQ
You are right, we should have known that the guys in chemical protective suits were just loading large tubes of Sand onto heavily insulated truck convoys. BTW, this is all stuff thats publicly available knowledge.
Care to cite a source? Preferably one that hasn't subsequently been discredited?
--MarkusQ
*sigh*
I have to plead guilty as charged. The problem with trying to explain things like this to people who don't want to hear it is that at some point you wind up just feeding a troll. On another thread (not quite as bad as this) we wound up arguing about what constitutes a credible news source, and whether or not CNN and the Washington post were part of a "leftist propaganda machine," which was totally off topic. I probably should have just ignored the bait and asked him why he responded to my parting quip and not the two substantive points that preceded it.
Thanks for the reality check.
--MarkusQ
No, its more like you having your large guard dog guarding your cooler, which happens to be empty, and when he asks if he can look in the cooler you say sure, open the cooler, reach in, put your hand under your robe, walk over to the Grill with your dog and put your hand into the grill and close the grill.
Fine, but you left out two parts: one, there's no reason to assume that the cooler was empty; maybe I didn't want him swiping my beer, or maybe I had my Playboys stashed there, or my walet. And two, because the kid doesn't find his ball in my cooler he and his buddies still beat me up and strip search me, and the grill, and my wife and dog for good measure. And then make us pose nude with the dog so they can take embarasing pictures of us.
And I still don't have his stupid ball.
--MarkusQ
Sorry, that doesn't wash. He told the inspectors he had no WMD. To any rational person it appears that this was correct. The inspectors certainly didn't think he had any. As they stated at the time, hauling things out in convoys, repainting, etc. would not have been enough to hide a weapons program if he had had one. So the whole interpretation of the convoys is as "jerking us around" is based on the assumption that he did have WMD but managed to outfox everyone, which is an unreasonable assumption.
Look at it this way: Suppose I'm sunbathing in the buff (as if) and the neighbor kid calls over the wall that he wants to look for his ball in my yard. I say, "well, it's not here, but you're welcome to come look, as soon as I put a robe on" am I "jerking him around on the ball issue" because I put a robe on? Yes, if (and only if) I was hiding the ball in my robe. Otherwise, if his ball really isn't in my yard, and he leads an gang of his buddies over the wall to strip search me, he's just a paranoid nut job.
--MarkusQ
It has nothing at all to do with conservatives. It has to do with large numbers of people who like to think of themselves as conservative, who really don't have a clue what conservativism is about, because they've been told by Rush Limbaugh that it's about "pissing off commie terror-loving liberals". For about 90% of the self-proclaimed conservatives I talk to about this, that's what the conversations almost always boils down to. Liberal-bashing.
Makes sense. It's sort of become a running joke in my crowd (which runs the spectrum from Goldwater conservatives, Rand-thumping libertarians, to neo-Kennedy whither-Camelot liberals*): we'd love to get back to arguing about how a free society ought best be run, and will, once we find ourselves in one again.
The last few years have been kind of an eye opener for us; although we thought we disagreed with each other politically at a pretty fundamental level, it turns out that there is an even deeper level at which we all agree. We've found ourselves gradually coming to exactly the same conclusions regardless of where we stand politically. As one friend put it, if you find yourself in a burning theater, you tend to want to do something about it, and even a Marxist and a plutocrat are likely to agree under those circumstances.
--MarkusQ
* We also have one progressive, but he's a Macaulay/Whigg style progressive, not a neo-Liberal.
So, by that logic, he was also "jerking us around" about flying saucers, the fountain of youth, and Windows Vista, 'cause he didn't have any of them either.
--MarkusQ
Thanks for the lucid response. While I intended to be offering a supposition in my original post, and not a drawing conclusion as you have assumed, I will let that point slide in the interest of good sportsmanship. The rest of your points are sound, and I accept them without further qualification. Sample bias is always a prime suspect in cases such as this, and I have no basis on which to discount it.
--MarkusQ
The 9/11 Report substantiated the link between Moussaoui and Hussein.
Oh? Can you give me a chapter/page number? The only references I find are in chapter 2, chapter 4, and chapter 10, and they don't support the contention other than saying that the Bush administration believed it. Most of the mentions (e.g. Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan) and most of the press reports would seem to argue against your claim.
It Also confirmed that there was no credible intelligence PRIOR to the invasion indicating that the WMDs weren't where we expected them to be.
I suppose that UN weapons inspectors, who were trained in such matters and actually went there don't count as credible? There were, as you know, lots of reports indicating that the weapons weren't there--in fact, the vast majority of the intelligence argued against it, which is why the Bush administration have been accused of "cherry picking" the facts to support the policy they had already decided on. But of course, I suppose you can just write them all off as "incredible," as Bush seems to have done.
Further, we went in based on a whole host of other reasons, that are either accidentally overlooked or deliberately ignored... For example, we've been in a HOT shooting war with Iraq for 15 years. He's been jerking us around about WMDs for that entire time.
Nice dodge. There may have been many motivations for the people who sold us this war to have done so, but they can't be counted as reasons why we bought it unless they told us about them. For example, when people were being asked by pollsters "should we go to war with Iraq?" why didn't any of them say "That's a silly question--we're already at war with Iraq"? For that matter, why was there a stink when it was learned that Bush had started (or rather, stepped up) bombing before getting the authorization from congress? If everyone knew that we'd been in a "HOT shooting war with Iraq for 15 years" there wouldn't have been any surprise at all.
You can't seriously claim that We The People authorized this war based on things we weren't told, but that the things we were told had nothing to do with it, can you?
And, as an aside, how could he have been "jerking us around" about WMD unless he actually had some?
--MarkusQ
You drank the koolaid. Research the facts, and get back to me.
Oh, that's convincing. Every point I made is public record. Unless you care to offer some specific persuasive argument or source to the contrary, you aren't going to convince anyone with that kool-aid drivel. I suspect that most of the people reading this thread will be at least familiar with the headline stories of the last few years, and would likewise welcome new information, if you have any.
There are all sorts of things you could do to blast holes in my argument. Tell me where the WMD are, or explain who it was that I heard telling me about them (a Bush impersonator perhaps?). Substantiate the link between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks--heck, if you could do that, I'll bet the Bush administration would be glad to hire you on at a cushy salary. There are probably hundreds of interesting, substantive ways to challenge my post.
But this wasn't one of them.
--MarkusQ
As I mentioned the last time you trolled me, I'm a conservative, not a liberal-hiding-behind-a-codeword. There are plenty of reasons a conservative ought to object to frittering away our military on a land war in Asia based on false statements and propaganda, and in the process running up enormous debts and treating the constitution like last week's junk mail. In fact, it amazes me that any conservative can get behind this sort of "we're going to fix the world 'cause the poor fools are too dumb to fix themselves" nonsense. It's a classic liberal sort of foolishness, and it's just as foolish coming from a so-called Republican like Bush as it is coming from a Democrat.
So are you on active duty, or are you just trying to make it sound that way?
--MarkusQ
Nuts. When people come back stateside, I guarantee their first thought isn't "gosh, I'm going to go read old newspapers and catch up on months old political scandals."
Being "exposed to the media" doesn't mean that you suddenly get up to speed on any particular topic, and unless someone points them out to you you are unlikely to ever get up to speed on most subjects. Even people who's job it is to stay on top of the news have a hard time doing it and generally only follow a few subjects.
And as for sticking to the point, your original post was a red heiring to begin with. The survey results aren't speculation: the vast majority of the service personnel surveyed stated that we invaded to retaliate for Saddam's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Yet almost everyone back here knows that he had no involvement whatsoever with 9/11. How do you propose to explain this discrepancy?
--MarkusQ
And shortsighted individuals who claim that our only reason for being in Iraq is WMD and Oil tend to piss me off.
Shortsighted? Point blank, as a fact, the only reason that the US agreed to send troops to Iraq was that the Bush administration told us that they knew that Saddam had WMD, that they knew where they were, and that if we waited for the smoking gun it would likely be "a mushroom cloud" (that's a quote). They also told us that Saddam was connected to 9/11, that he had the ability to attack within 45 minutes, that there was no need to plan for the "occupation" since we would be welcomed as liberators, and that the costs would be minimal because the oil fields would pay for it. If they had not told us all these things, none of which, as it turns out, were true, We The People would not have given them permission to invade.
Get this through your head: the only reason the US invaded Iraq was that we were told a bunch of un-truths. If it pisses you off, join the club, though you might want to direct your anger at the people who made the original statements, rather than at the ones who point them out.
--MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
Do you realize how awkward it is to tell someone that's been putting their life on the line for their country, and is going back to do it again, that they're a sap that's been suckered into invading a country for no good reason apart from political expediency? That they might die, not for the good of humanity but for a for a lie? I've had a very hard time doing it, and I doubt most families care to spoil a visit with politics.
If they're going to learn the truth, it will be gradually over there through the media, gossip, etc. or as painful culture shock after they come home at the end (like with 'Nam).
--MarkusQ
Interesting. I have no idea if her claim is true or not, but it is at least consistent with another oddity that I noticed a few weeks ago, when the poll results showed that a majority (IIRC) of the US service personnel over there thought that we were in Iraq "because of what they did to us on 9/11," despite the fact that pretty much everyone over here (apart from a few trolls) now knows there was no connection at all between Iraq and 9/11.
When I heard that my first thought was: how could they not know this?!?
But perhaps there is a simple explanation after all.
--MarkusQ