The best indicator that the current Iraq policy has failed is that in the US, many former gung-ho and giddy war advocates have now decided that the war was a mistake and are now desperately casting around for excuses and planning where to lay the blame. And as they do, the policy itself descends into …
Monthly Archive: October 2006
Oct 30 2006
Rewriting the history of the Iraq war-The British take the lead
It seems to be clear even to some formerly pro-war agitators that there is no good outcome that can emerge from the Iraq war. The US military presence in that country is not able to fend off the insurgency against it and stop the spiral into violence. In fact, it is now becoming clear that …
Oct 27 2006
Stupid young men tricks
As readers of this blog must have gleaned by now, I tend to be very wary of blanket generalizations and stereotyping. These tend to be harmful because the differences within groups are usually vastly greater than the differences between groups, making comparisons between individuals in different groups largely meaningless. But there is one generalization of …
Oct 26 2006
Negotiating with terrorists
Recently the ceasefire between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger separatist rebels (the official name being the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE) broke down and there has been a rapid escalation of violence with large numbers of casualties on both sides and, inevitably, civilians bearing the brunt of it and being …
Oct 25 2006
And the sycophancy prize goes to . . .
Some time ago I wrote about the laughably feeble attempts to portray George Bush as some sort of intellectual giant. I mentioned John Hinderaker who had written: “It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like …
Oct 24 2006
Emotional reactions to Darwin
There is no doubt that Darwin’s ideas about evolution by natural selection carry a huge emotional impact. For many people the idea that “we are descended from apes” is too awful to contemplate and is sufficient reason alone to dismiss any claim that natural selection holds the key to understanding how we came about. (Of …
Oct 23 2006
Fighting words
When the dismal history of the Iraq war is finally written, a special chapter of shame should be prepared for the those pro-war columnists and bloggers who, sitting comfortably in their homes and offices in the US, cheerfully egged on this administration to greater and greater heights of folly, cheering the deaths of innocent Iraq …
Oct 20 2006
Slaughter in Iraq-5
(See part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.) In the part 4previous post I stated that peer-reviewed papers have prima facie credibility and if you want to challenge their veracity, the burden shifts to you to do so. If you want to discredit it, you have to produce contrary data or detect a …
Oct 19 2006
Slaughter in Iraq-4
(See part 1 and part 2 and part 3.) The critics of the Lancet study have had just one main argument against it: incredulity. They are like the intelligent design creationists who, because they cannot imagine that life as we know it could have evolved, simply assume that a creator must exist without even looking …
Oct 18 2006
Slaughter in Iraq-3
(See part 1 and part 2.) When I looked at the Lancet study, saw who had done it, how it had been done, and where it had been published, I quickly gained confidence in their number of 655,000 excess deaths since the invasion of Iraq.. The study was based on a survey done between May …
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