This morning's front page article in The Washington Post, "Report Cites Al Qaeda Deal For Iraqi Gas," should not come as a surprise. Over the past months, we have had several detailed reports of links between Iraq and al Qaeda. For example, in "The Great Terror (March 3, 2002)," Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker described the relationship between Saddam Hussein's intelligence services and al-Ansar, a bin Laden-affiliated terrorist group in Northern Iraq, which a government official in today's Post says was involved in smuggling the nerve agent out of Iraq. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, David Rose reports on additional links between Baghdad and the al Qaeda network. And in October, CIA director George Tenet flatly declared in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that based on credible reports "Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs."
What all of this means is that the president has been right in saying that the coming war to remove Saddam is part of the overall war on terrorism. Regime change in Iraq and the destruction of al Qaeda are two related fronts in one war, and both fronts should be prosecuted aggressively and simultaneously.
FTFA:
The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts. And since TFA wasn't enough for you, here's more of the same, from long ago:
historian Thomas Bailey observed that "because the masses are notoriously short-sighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. Deception of the people may in fact become increasingly necessary, unless we are willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand." Commenting on the same problem as a renewed crusade was being launched in 1981, Samuel Huntington made the point that "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has done ever since the Truman Doctrine"
I'd say the fact that WE exists is proof of God's existence. That is far easier to believe Yes, far easier.
"Witches did it" is far easier to understand than "a volcano on the other side of world last year released a cloud that hampered the development of a plant in another country on which birds feed in their migration so that' why there's less of them here now".
Myths are easier to believe because they are simpler to understand. That does not make them true.
I don't associate them at all, and I tend to have various newsfeeds running in the background whenever I am doing work. I was in a position to be completely brainwashed by this supposed technique, and yet I wasn't. Could it be because this is all bullshit? You can fool some people some times, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
Posted 9/6/2003 8:10 AM" Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.
Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.
The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.
You're in the 30% minority. Good for you, but don't go thinking it didn't work on others just because it didn't work on you.
qualifies as saying that Iraq was behind September 11th. Try again. RTFA: "If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind," she added. "Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11."
Re:It's one of those persistent myths
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The idea that we attacked Iraq for complicity in 9/11 didn't show up until well after the war had begun, after US troops failed to discover any significant caches of NCB arms. Those that opposed the administration found it to be an effective strawman.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If anyone can dig up a pre-war speech that accused Hussein of plotting 9/11, I'd love to be corrected. The story follows a claim by Condoleezza Rice, the US National Security adviser, earlier this year that some al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said they had been given "some training in chemical weapons development" by Iraq. The CIA Director George Tenet made a similar assertion in a letter to Congress.
"AlQuaeda = 9_11" & "Al Queda + Iraq" != "Iraq = 9_11"; But it's enough to let the scarred, scared minds to come to that conclusion on their own.
Plausible deniability is PARAMOUNT
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What I want to know is, who in the Administration EVER said that Saddam plotted 9/11? I never heard that said. I have heard people who oppose the Bush Administration say that the Bush Administration said it, but I have never heard a quote from the Bush Administration saying (or implying) it. OOOhhhhh, so close! If you hadn't had that last bit of honest thought in there, you could have defended the notion that the Bush administration did not systematically imply that Saddam was behind it. The sponsor of terrorism, the killer of his own people, the clear and present threat to national security who met with Al Quaeda, he was never specifically said to have been the Bond-villain behind 9-11, but he was implied to be involved, systematically, for months. Manipulating thought is a well researched field of study and has many useful applications, from marketing to nation building.
If they just put two and two next to each other and let you think "4" without saying it, then you can come post to slashdot and ask 'who in the administration said "four"?'... But you'll still have "4" in your head, even though no one can quote them saying it.
We haven't fought a victorious full-scale battle on our own since the Civil War.
Spanish-American War, and then the resulting Phillipine insurrection, which we both won. All on our own.
And I can't think of any occasion where we have won a battle against a half-way decent foe.
D-day? Battle of Midway, June 1942? 'Battle' of the Atlantic 1941-1943?
Wars where you joined-in three years after Canada don't count as "on our own". It's not like Enigma would have been a breeze to decipher without a British guy or two.
We haven't fought a victorious full-scale battle on our own since the Civil War. Kind of hard to lose that one, don't you think? Well, it could have become uncouth and coarse.
"Conspiracy Theories" Funny, but you should realize that the official version of events is a conspiracy theory.
conspiracy (plural: conspiracies)
1. act of working in secret to obtain some goal, usually understood with negative connotations.
2. (law) an agreement between two or more persons to break the law at some time in the future.
3. a plot to overthrow a government or other powers
4. conspiracy- the ability to have the material means and a motive to commit an act against the law
5. a group of ravens
...minus the ravens. Although, the myths say that they predict deaths, so, maybe ravens were involved. Who knows. Anyway, my point is: An official conspiracy theory is, objectively, no better than a loon's. Truth is not a popularity contest, nor derived from office.
So when informing the public about false information, one should avoid using negations?
Instead of saying "Saddam Hussein was not involved in 9/11.", you should instead say something like "It was al-qaida, who didn't particularly like Saddam Hussein, that were responsible for 9/11." Please, the exact same people who said Saddam had WMDs were the ones who told you Al Quaeda was resposible for 9-11, and they provided the exact same amount of proof. Some news agencies kept "alleged" in their reports for a few months, but then eventually dropped it for brevity's sake, and that became 'mental proof' that the "alleged" was never necessary.
Keep them as "prime suspect" in your mind if you want, but do not think "of course they did it", because the people you believed about that turned out to be using the same words as lies not long after, and you know this.
The whole affair is complicated enough to make myths easy! Reality is our process failed. We don't know who won, only who was selected, the rest is history. [irony]Fortunately, the complications prompted people to demand change: MORE complications! Diebold's machines will surely remedy the irregularities introduced by the previous voting machine![/irony]
Go back to a pen and paper, keep it simple, or keep it in the hands of the wizards.
Re:Biggest myths of all have been around for ages.
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Not everyone who professes to be religious believes in a white robed deity sitting on a cloud chucking thunderbolts. To a logical person, the concept of an anthropomorphic divinity is laughable But if the laughable is exactly what is described by your religion, why do you hold on to the belief after you've realized it's not consistent with what your intellect tells you? You reject the surface, but won't touch the irrational core belief.
If your source is laughable on the details, why would you strip the parts you can't defend and keep believing in something less and less defined with each newly removed silly bit? Because that part is more emotional than intellectual? More rule-of-thumb than reasonable?
Do you see where I'm going with this? I won't mind trying to explain this again if you're unclear on it, but it's not something I've been successful in communicating very often in the past, because I'm fighting against the very thing the article described: An unwillingness to let go of an accepted belief, no matter how much is offered to prove it was wrong to begin with.
Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years would have been murdered if they had not claimed publically to fall into this category. The rest would have been simply out casted.
Galileo was forced to say he didn't believe his own eyes, and he did, because he knew what was in store for him if he didn't, not because there was truth to what his would-be torturers wanted him to say. If you can't beat 'em, let them think you've joined them so they don't beat you to a bloody, lifeless pulp.
We all have faith. For example, I have absolute faith that if I jump up I will fall back to earth. That's not faith, that's memory. You learned this as an infant, before you learned language your brain calibrated to the world it perceived and recorded that things fall... things always fall.
If you want a non-smoking restaurant now then start one. You're legally retarded, aren't you? Because you're replying to a post where I specifically called this exact reasoning completely stupid. Since you keep repeating stupid shit even though you've been told it's stupid, that must mean that stupid is smarter than what you're capable of.
I cannot even imagine what the point of your original post was To point out how stupid his argument was. You can't lose your rights by simply walking by a sign at the entrance of a shop, that's just not how it works. His entire argument is based on this premise, which is simply flat out wrong.
not quite as sinister as it appears. Well, from your quote, this appears to be a sorting mistake on the website which is being corrected by the responsible party once it has been informed of their error.
Now how are going to get a good flamewar going with this kind of rational attitude? The people want to pick a bad guy and to ridicule him, either the author who wants his rights respected or the publisher who wants to collect money for their output... if they're both in agreement over the error and they make it right, then we can't pick sides and argue endlessly! We might *gasp* have to go back to our own jobs!
let the market economy support what it needs and deny what it doesn't need? Because there is no money to be made into curing diseases, only in providing lifelong treatments.
If they want him to "save the record business", the first thing they better do is lose the RIAA That is either some super deep koan zen shit, or you just don't realize that the RIAA is the music business. The RIAA are the proverbial "they" who want him to save their biz.
And yet Sony has walked away with less than a slap on the wrist.
Replace "Sony" with "Al Queda" or "North Korea" in the same story and see how it reads. Amusing, isn't it? Now now, don't be silly. Al Quaeda and NK are nowhere near as powerful as Sony;-)
BTW, i just read an article about Rubin (was it linked here yesterday?) that said he had never heard of Simon Cowell from American Idol up till last year or whatever. Now...not saying that Simon Cowell is anything great, but for a top record producer to have never heard of someone that familiar to everyone else... If I could only be so lucky:(
If a police officer simply walks up to you and demands that you identify yourself, there is no legal reason for you to comply. True, but if he has a reason (like "you fit the description of a suspect"), you have to give name and adress. I'm not 100% on the valid reasons... I guess your better judgment must be employed.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
December 12, 2002
MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS
FROM: WILLIAM KRISTOL
Subject: Iraq - al Qaeda Connection
This morning's front page article in The Washington Post, "Report Cites Al Qaeda Deal For Iraqi Gas," should not come as a surprise. Over the past months, we have had several detailed reports of links between Iraq and al Qaeda. For example, in "The Great Terror (March 3, 2002)," Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker described the relationship between Saddam Hussein's intelligence services and al-Ansar, a bin Laden-affiliated terrorist group in Northern Iraq, which a government official in today's Post says was involved in smuggling the nerve agent out of Iraq. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, David Rose reports on additional links between Baghdad and the al Qaeda network. And in October, CIA director George Tenet flatly declared in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that based on credible reports "Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs."
What all of this means is that the president has been right in saying that the coming war to remove Saddam is part of the overall war on terrorism. Regime change in Iraq and the destruction of al Qaeda are two related fronts in one war, and both fronts should be prosecuted aggressively and simultaneously.
FTFA: The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts. And since TFA wasn't enough for you, here's more of the same, from long ago: historian Thomas Bailey observed that "because the masses are notoriously short-sighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. Deception of the people may in fact become increasingly necessary, unless we are willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand." Commenting on the same problem as a renewed crusade was being launched in 1981, Samuel Huntington made the point that "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has done ever since the Truman Doctrine"
"Witches did it" is far easier to understand than "a volcano on the other side of world last year released a cloud that hampered the development of a plant in another country on which birds feed in their migration so that' why there's less of them here now".
Myths are easier to believe because they are simpler to understand. That does not make them true.
Posted 9/6/2003 8:10 AM"
Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.
Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.
The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.
You're in the 30% minority. Good for you, but don't go thinking it didn't work on others just because it didn't work on you.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If anyone can dig up a pre-war speech that accused Hussein of plotting 9/11, I'd love to be corrected. The story follows a claim by Condoleezza Rice, the US National Security adviser, earlier this year that some al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said they had been given "some training in chemical weapons development" by Iraq.
The CIA Director George Tenet made a similar assertion in a letter to Congress.
"AlQuaeda = 9_11" & "Al Queda + Iraq" != "Iraq = 9_11";
But it's enough to let the scarred, scared minds to come to that conclusion on their own.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2577521.st
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42876-2
The sponsor of terrorism, the killer of his own people, the clear and present threat to national security who met with Al Quaeda, he was never specifically said to have been the Bond-villain behind 9-11, but he was implied to be involved, systematically, for months.
Manipulating thought is a well researched field of study and has many useful applications, from marketing to nation building.
If they just put two and two next to each other and let you think "4" without saying it, then you can come post to slashdot and ask 'who in the administration said "four"?'... But you'll still have "4" in your head, even though no one can quote them saying it.
Spanish-American War, and then the resulting Phillipine insurrection, which we both won. All on our own.
D-day? Battle of Midway, June 1942? 'Battle' of the Atlantic 1941-1943?
Wars where you joined-in three years after Canada don't count as "on our own".
It's not like Enigma would have been a breeze to decipher without a British guy or two.
conspiracy (plural: conspiracies)
1. act of working in secret to obtain some goal, usually understood with negative connotations.
2. (law) an agreement between two or more persons to break the law at some time in the future.
3. a plot to overthrow a government or other powers
4. conspiracy- the ability to have the material means and a motive to commit an act against the law
5. a group of ravens
Instead of saying "Saddam Hussein was not involved in 9/11.", you should instead say something like "It was al-qaida, who didn't particularly like Saddam Hussein, that were responsible for 9/11." Please, the exact same people who said Saddam had WMDs were the ones who told you Al Quaeda was resposible for 9-11, and they provided the exact same amount of proof.
Some news agencies kept "alleged" in their reports for a few months, but then eventually dropped it for brevity's sake, and that became 'mental proof' that the "alleged" was never necessary.
Keep them as "prime suspect" in your mind if you want, but do not think "of course they did it", because the people you believed about that turned out to be using the same words as lies not long after, and you know this.
Reality is our process failed. We don't know who won, only who was selected, the rest is history. [irony]Fortunately, the complications prompted people to demand change: MORE complications! Diebold's machines will surely remedy the irregularities introduced by the previous voting machine![/irony]
Go back to a pen and paper, keep it simple, or keep it in the hands of the wizards.
If your source is laughable on the details, why would you strip the parts you can't defend and keep believing in something less and less defined with each newly removed silly bit? Because that part is more emotional than intellectual? More rule-of-thumb than reasonable?
Do you see where I'm going with this? I won't mind trying to explain this again if you're unclear on it, but it's not something I've been successful in communicating very often in the past, because I'm fighting against the very thing the article described: An unwillingness to let go of an accepted belief, no matter how much is offered to prove it was wrong to begin with. Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years would have been murdered if they had not claimed publically to fall into this category. The rest would have been simply out casted.
Galileo was forced to say he didn't believe his own eyes, and he did, because he knew what was in store for him if he didn't, not because there was truth to what his would-be torturers wanted him to say. If you can't beat 'em, let them think you've joined them so they don't beat you to a bloody, lifeless pulp.
You learned this as an infant, before you learned language your brain calibrated to the world it perceived and recorded that things fall... things always fall.
It's not faith, it's observed fact.
Now how are going to get a good flamewar going with this kind of rational attitude? The people want to pick a bad guy and to ridicule him, either the author who wants his rights respected or the publisher who wants to collect money for their output... if they're both in agreement over the error and they make it right, then we can't pick sides and argue endlessly! We might *gasp* have to go back to our own jobs!
Replace "Sony" with "Al Queda" or "North Korea" in the same story and see how it reads. Amusing, isn't it? Now now, don't be silly. Al Quaeda and NK are nowhere near as powerful as Sony
I'm not 100% on the valid reasons... I guess your better judgment must be employed.
So I don't mind at all that I do not take his insane premise into account.