The truth and one that you poor sad lefties will never grasp is that all we know for sure is that we DO NOT know where the WMD’s
are period.

[bwaahhh--oh, this is too easy!]
I do so know where all those naughty, naughty WMDs are, Scottyboy… they’re all in your otherwise-empty head!

This is actually one of the simpler things to explain: people are sheep.

I’m normally much, much nicer about the way I phrase that – I’ll say things like “critical thinking is a difficult skill, and it’s poorly taught”, but this particular example of crummy thinking is still a very sore and raw spot with me. Watching my entire country amp themselves up for war over nothing more than a *giantic* fallacy of the undistributed middle has left me heartsick in a way few other things in my life have.

There is a way to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and also to address the other question you raised about how you get people to deal with what they’ve done and stop doing it.

The only down side is that it will NEVER happen.

It involves an extensive and aggressive campaign of education in the practice of critical thinking. It’s a plain fact that most people simply cannot think properly. Everyone thinks they can, and no one actually can. There are a lot of ways to illustrate this point, but probably the simplest way is just to point out the number of fields of study that are little more than rigorously applied critical thinking – algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, analytic philosophy – and point out how *bad* people usually are at them. How hard they are.

People who don’t know how to think critically can be manipulated into believing almost anything. This can have minor consequences, like people paying more money for Tylenol rather than a generic acetaminophen simply because of the advertising, or it can have major consequences, like the rise of National Socialism.

But the sort of education that helps inocculate people against this will never, ever happen. At least, not in America as we know it. There are two main reasons for this.

First, religious groups would be violently opposed to it. Critical thinking ends up gutting most of the substance of religion right out. Faith and critical thinking are natural opposites, and the better you get at one, the worse you tend to get at the other. No religious group would tolerate it.

Second (and far more important), it would destroy capitalism as we know it. Advertising just wouldn’t work anymore. Nobody would be persuaded to drink pisswater masquerading as beer just because it was being sold by babes with boobs anymore, nobody would base their preference for one car over another on the idea that driving it makes you cool, nobody would invest with certain brokerage houses just because the brokerage firm name carries a certain cache. It goes on and on. Educated consumers are difficult consumers, and there’s no way the people who profit from the sweet deal they have in our current economic setup would sit idly by and let that happen. Which is not to imply some conspiracy theory, but just to state the obvious.

Gah. I’m depressed now. Sorry to be a downer.

When it comes to the higher-ups, Defence Secretaries and that sort of thing, I would very much take a hard-line. Even if I thought that they had good intentions — too bad. With great power comes great responsibility.

But for your fellows? The most important thing is to bring them back to sanity. They can work through their deeper issues later.

It’s still a mystery to me how it happened. 70% of you thought that Saddam was connected to 9/11! I used to share a flat with three others. We were from a variety of backgrounds, but we all used to gape at the TV in disbelief. Listening to your President was like entering an alternate universe. It’s like a spell was cast on the American people — Karl Rove’s Anti-logic Field. We’ll be puzzling over this work for centuries to come.

Maybe if that criminal President of yours is dragged to the Hague, and the media finally lets the American people know just how poorly the rest of the world thinks of you right now, that would be enough. [shrugs] I don’t know. Make sure those Democrats[1] win the house, and chase them down with torches and pitchforks if they don’t make good on that promise of investigations.

[1] You really need a preferential voting system.

I can’t find it in me to care what his motivations were.

Yeah. Good God, yeah… yeah.

By a similar conceit, I intend to pass all of my college classes in the summer by simply saying that there’s no way the teachers can prove I didn’t turn in whatever essays they requested of me, because if they can’t find it, obviously it was stolen.

Try harder please.

I just watched “The Fog of War” last night with a friend. It’s a documentary about Robert McNamara, and his time as Secretary of Defense. He insists that he knew, even at the time, that what he was doing in Vietnam was both pointless and wrong. What he never does is explain why he went ahead and did it anyway – why he didn’t tell Johnson to stuff it and just quit.

History tells us a very different story about McNamara the man – that he brooked no dissent, that he only responded to numerical analyses and he believed that numbers never lied, and that these very qualities made him constitutionally incapable of understanding what was actually going on in Vietnam. In his analysis, the encapsulation of his famous phrase about “winning the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese could be found in the number of new schools and toothbrushes they had – the quantity of western democracy trappings and trimmings we gave them.

He never got it. He says he knew he was wrong; he says his intentions were good. But he never, ever got it – and there were others around, like George Ball, who did get it.

When it comes to the question of his putative good intentions, all I can think about are three million dead Vietnamese, 58 thousand dead Americans, and a country the size of England that took three times the bombardment that all of Europe took during WWII.

I can’t find it in me to care what his motivations were.

But what I do know is that we have done nothing to hold those responsible for the crime that was Vietnam guilty in any way, shape or form. We pardoned Nixon. We shelter Henry Kissinger, despite the fact that it’s pretty commonly known that before he travels overseas, he checks with that country’s state department to make sure they won’t be kidnapping him to bring him before the Hague. McNamara’s enjoying a cushy retirement from the World Bank.

We’ve created an environment in which any crime in the name of nation building is acceptable. We therefore shouldn’t be suprised when any crime in the name of nation building is acceptable.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know that letting the perpetrators off the hook with honor doesn’t seem to have worked so far.

Don’t accuse. Find out what out what the motives were. Then decide wether they were well-intentioned or not.

I’m a young elf, so this the first time I’ve watched this play. You tell me, will it be any help to accuse someone of having bad motives? Everyone has an ego, so everyone wants to be good. I’ve been sarcastic, but I think it’s a fair first assumption. Though sometimes “good” gets twisted as “high paying job and influential friends”. That seems to me like a much bigger problem.

What if the nipple just disappears?

That’s easy! That just means that it recused itsself.

The fact is that when the Left cries out “he’s lying! he’s lying” and yet, everytime they shout “he’s lying” Saint Bush of Kennybunkport is in fact, lying…

Well, then when the villagers decide to ignore the Left’s cries of lying, the problem is with the villagers, not the Left.

Sorry, dude, but when you yee-haw over something that results in as many deaths as the Iraq debacle has, the whole morning-after walk of shame is pretty much mandatory.

Elendil and Jillian…these are both two great comments and illustrate where we’ll have to go if the lessons from this bit of history (which I’m having the delight of witnessing for third time in my life, at the very least) will be learned. Some people do have good intentions and end up being wrong…but worrying more about your career and your income at the expense of other people’s lives is *not* a good intention. Jillian’s right…our bad choices have to have consequences or we never learn.

If the mainstream media is allowed to continue to get away with what it has been doing, then:

1. America clearly does not have a free press, and this is in violation of spirit of the First Amendment.

2. We will be seeing this, once more, again in 10 to 20 years. Worse, people living here and now, will be to blame.