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Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

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    #51
    Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

    I think that's all clear enough.

    Was the evidence for WMD in Iraq any worse than the evidence that City Academies are brilliant, or PFI?

    Of course the Blairite "I believed it at the time" is no defence at all.

    Comment


      #52
      Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

      I've found an online version of Frankfurt's "On Bullshit". It actually seems very pertinent:

      This is the crux of the distinction between [the bullshitter] and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

      It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

      Comment


        #53
        Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

        More:

        Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person's normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

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          #54
          Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

          Very good. But isn't that what most lawyers are trained to do?

          Comment


            #55
            Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

            I guess the adversarial system assumes that's exactly what lawyers will do, and makes sure both sides get a roughly equal chance to do it. It's somewhat different when making the case to go to war, I think.

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              #56
              Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

              I'll read all of that later...

              Has anyone pointed out that even if Iraq had WMDs that invading was still not a good idea? Because that's what I thought at the time. I figured he probably did have some chemical weapons, but that attacking would just provoke him into using them and that we didn't have a good plan for occupying the country even assuming the invasion went according to plan.

              I think this needs to be drawn out a bit. The WMD thing was a red herring in more than one way.

              Comment


                #57
                Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                It's somewhat different when making the case to go to war, I think.

                Indeed. But given that both Tone, and his lovely wife, have legal backgrounds it's perhaps not surprising he acted as he did if Frankfurt is right. I guess a decent rule of thumb is "don't vote for a lawyer" (except ursus of course.)

                Comment


                  #58
                  Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                  I think there are plenty of bullshitters who haven't trained to be lawyers.

                  "Liar" is perfectly acceptable shorthand, it seems to me, for what Blair did to get us to war. It's interesting to discuss whether its completely accurate, but it isn't a label he could reasonably complain about.

                  Comment


                    #59
                    Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                    Why on Earth... wrote:
                    For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
                    She, you mean. He's talking about my mother-in-law.

                    Comment


                      #60
                      Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                      TonTon wrote:
                      I think there are plenty of bullshitters who haven't trained to be lawyers.

                      "Liar" is perfectly acceptable shorthand, it seems to me, for what Blair did to get us to war. It's interesting to discuss whether its completely accurate, but it isn't a label he could reasonably complain about.
                      Yes, and the OTF consensus seemed to be that that Cohen guy was being a liar about Hillsborough, when bullshitter might have been more technically accurate.

                      Comment


                        #61
                        Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                        I still don't think we've got to the nub of a difference between the deluded Mbeki and the deceitful Blair. Is it just that we know more about the latter?

                        I think the psychology of it all is very interesting but liar and bullshitter are indeed acceptable shorthands.

                        Comment


                          #62
                          Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                          (By "OTF consensus" I of course mean the position I myself was advocating.)

                          Comment


                            #63
                            Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                            Reed of the Valley People wrote:
                            I'll read all of that later...

                            Has anyone pointed out that even if Iraq had WMDs that invading was still not a good idea? Because that's what I thought at the time.
                            I think this is a bit of a complex issue. It definitely wasn't a good idea for the United States (or the UK) or its citizens, at least not by any reasonable cost-benefit analysis, and it of course was a terrible idea for all the people who snuffed it. But it's difficult to know how Iraq would've turned out absent Saddam's overthrow and the occupation, or down what sort of casualty strewn paths he might ultimately have led them.

                            Despite the indefensible manner in which we prosecuted it, I always though there was something to the Hitchensian view that Iraq was on an unsustainable and volatile course, not because of its strength but because of its weakness.

                            Comment


                              #64
                              Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                              I don't know anyone who is still arguing that life is better for the majority of Iraqis now than it was under Saddam.

                              That's after you deduct the dead, variously estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 up to 2006

                              Even Hitchens isn't pissed enough for that, surely?

                              Comment


                                #65
                                Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                TonTon wrote:
                                I think there are plenty of bullshitters who haven't trained to be lawyers.
                                But there aren't any lawyers who haven't trained to be bullshitters...

                                Comment


                                  #66
                                  Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                  Serious question, but is anyone actually 'covering' the war in any meaningful way any more? What's the situation there right now?

                                  Comment


                                    #67
                                    Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                    "extensive, detailed and authoritative" - in what way was that not a lie?

                                    Comment


                                      #68
                                      Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                      Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" is a thing of rare and surpassing beauty. A genuine highlight of analytic philosophy.

                                      The Purple Cow wrote:
                                      As LLR (implicitly) suggests, it's hard to see what role the Crazy Christians had in the Iraq war.
                                      At least three members of the Bush cabinet believed in 'the Rapture'.
                                      So what? The rest of the quote acknowledged the number of Bush-administration policies which *did* stem from Oogedy-boogedy nonsense; my point was that the likes of John Ashcroft had little if anything to do with the Iraq War.

                                      Comment


                                        #69
                                        Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                        As an aside, seeing as Mbeki's AIDS denialism was mentioned, his henchwoman as health minister -- she of beetroots and African potatoes instead of ARVs -- died earlier today.

                                        Manto Tshabalala-Msimang

                                        Comment


                                          #70
                                          Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                          Nefertiti2 wrote:
                                          I don't know anyone who is still arguing that life is better for the majority of Iraqis now than it was under Saddam.

                                          That's after you deduct the dead, variously estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 up to 2006
                                          If you believe the larger claims about how many people because of sanctions (1.5 million, I think) then it actually is an improvement, isn't it?

                                          Not that it excuses, etc. etc.

                                          Comment


                                            #71
                                            Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                            That's specious bullshit though. (and goodness knows what the chap whose moniker you've borrowed would make of the uses you're putting to it).

                                            I'm talking about people directly killed by, you know, being killed, bullets, explosives, that kind of thing.

                                            The people who have died as an indirect result of the effects of the war lack of access to medical care and so on. I have no idea of the estimates there

                                            It's ahrd to calculate that sicne there hasn't been a functioning state in Iraq for most of the last few years. It's been run by the junior wing of the Republican party. And all they seem to be capable of doing is praying.

                                            Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Study, published by the Lancet says that the crude mortality rate before the invasion was 5.5 per 1000. afterwards it was 13.5 per thousand on average, until 2006

                                            Comment


                                              #72
                                              Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                              I prefer to think of it as playing devil's advocate rather than specious bullshit, but, you know, I'm not fussy (speaking of usernames though, why are you now Nef2? What happened to Nef1?)

                                              Seriously, though - are you saying that dying from bullet wounds/bomb shrapnel worse than dying from inadequate medical facilities? I don't get that reasoning (or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point).

                                              Re: casualties. The higher end of the casualty estimates for the Iraq war that you cited include both violent deaths and those from other causes (e.g inadequate access to medical care)...they come from the epidemiological surveys trying to measure "excess death rates", not counts of individual deaths...deaths from being blown up, shot, etc. are definitely at the bottom end of that range. And though the state may be malfunctioning, individual hospitals are not - they still issue death certificates to family members in most circumstances, which is the thing that makes the wide gap in death estimates so puzzling.

                                              Comment


                                                #73
                                                Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                                No it's quite simple. One "just" includes the violent deaths (those are the figures in the 100,000 range) the others (like the Johns Hopkins study I just linked to )try to measure the higher death rate from after the invasion. (comparing it to the time when sanctions were already in force)

                                                Suggesting the Iraqi death rate has gone down post invasion sounds to me like one of the slipperiest techniques of government disinformation.

                                                Nefertiti2 started posting away from my ususal computer, then has began to take over from nefertiti becaue the password is easier t recall.

                                                Comment


                                                  #74
                                                  Warmonger: Any lie would have been good enough

                                                  Right. Well, first off I did preface the initial remark with "if you believe the larger claims" of pre-invasion death rates. Which I don't, as it happens. I'm with you, I suspect the death rate has gone up considerably. I was making a point that perhaps the pre-invasion death totals were vastly over-inflated by those interested in getting rid of sanctions.

                                                  Second, the "puzzle" with the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study that gave those very high estimates for excess deaths is that despite it having been conducted using the best available epidemiological cluster-sampling techniques (which even the British government, which wanted the findings discredited, had to admit was the case), there was a huge discrepancy wrt death certificates. The Lancet study found that something like 90% of all households reporting a death could produce a death certificate to prove that someone had died. But the problem was that if you multiplied this out, it implied that something like ten times as many deaths certificates had been issued than was in fact the case.

                                                  A lot of people tried to poke holes in those studies - and some of the criticism was wildly off the mark. But the missing death certificates is one thing that the Lancet study have never been able to adequately explain.

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