A second note: I find it difficult to read Dave's posts because I have a blood pressure problem, but I have seen this tidbit: 80% of Europe believes one way, and 80% of America the other.

Dave, if you can find any source saying that 80% of America thinks any of the following, you'll get an apology from me:

1. "It was a good idea to attack Iraq."
2. "Saddam was dangerous."
3. "An American empire is the safest course for both America and the world."
4. "Dead Iraqis are OK as long as there is freedom in Iraq someday."
5. "Bombing Baghdad is equivalent to the American War of Independence."

You think 80% of America agrees with you on those points? I think you're wrong. Most of America just hasn't been paying attention. If we had -- if our media were doing their jobs instead of being the adequately documented corporate shills they are -- then Smirky the Chimp would have been impeached already, and Rumsfeld would be in Den Haag standing trial next to Slobodan Milosevic.

Maybe you think this is polemic, that it's just another stupid liberal venting irrationality. Maybe you're right, and the steamroller of American greatness will flatten me. Go ahead and shut your eyes to the dangerous truth. If America doesn't stay America, it's nothing more than one more empire on the garbage heap of history. It's just a matter of staying out of the way during the death throes.

And one more point:

Well, let me clarify as well then, though I fear this discussion may have already sadly and irrevocably devolved into unproductive and acrimonious meta-discussion rather than the frank exchange of views and facts such a forum should ideally embody. I had hoped for better from you.

If you were presenting new information, or if you were coming out of the position that your opponents are rational, you would have been treated as such. You take a polemic stance, and you'll get heaps of acrimony -- not because we hate you, but because we hate the ideas you are presenting because we've heard them for years from people who are patently lying to us. And you fricking know it. So again I ask, what is the matter with you? Why do you persist in thinking that this crap is good for America? $200 billion dollars down the tubes -- for what? A better Iraq? Even if it were true, what was the cost-benefit analysis on that? Can you honestly say we'd solved all other problems that those $200 billion could have helped, and tweaking the governments of random desert nations halfway around the world was all we could think of to do with all that money?

You, Dave, are stupid. Or you think I am. And I know which is more likely.

Now excuse me, I have to go do some fricking deep breathing before I get a stroke from the mere knowledge that you share citizenship with me. Oy.

Ew. I made the mistake of following the link to his blog.

Dave actually thinks he's supporting freedom. What a ... well, "useful idiot" really is a descriptive term, it appears.

Oh, and (Euro time) let me take this opportunity to wish you all a happy Independence Day.

Dave, fact-based time.

If necessary, I can dig out a newspaper article showing that Blair confirmed their accuracy (but disputing the implications).

Assume they are real. What is your position on (a) Bush deciding to attack Iraq straight after Sept. 11th, (b) Bush lying to the US and the rest of the world about why such an attack was taking place and (c) Blair having to push Bush into going into Afghanistan first?

You've asked for a fact-based dialogue - the latest and most interesting facts are those raised by the Memos. Your comment?

Sorry, post below forgot to mention the three words "Downing Street Memos".

Edited by author 07-04-2005 02:22 AM
Newspaper article:

Many Iraqis interviewed said they believe U.S. officials have too much influence in the nation's important decisions and the government is far too dependent on the Americans for Iraqis to place much stock in their sovereignty.

"This is not a democracy," said Sarah Abdul Kareem, 21, a Shiite. "This is chaos."

And there's an interesting set of graphs here - note that despite the rhetoric about terrorism, about 75% of the attacks in Iraq are directed at the occupying army, and many of the rest at Iraqi forces supporting them.

Michael: speaking personally, none of this shit is worth a stroke. If you've got a blood pressure problem, stay away from this particular discussion -- or distance yourself, cultivate a sense of irony, and don't take it too seriously. It is, after all, just random noise in the wires. You aren't going to cause a major change in state department policy or Downing Street's affairs by posting here.

(I have quite a number of American friends and I once considered moving there -- over a decade ago -- so you don't need to worry about me buying the idea that Dave is particularly representative of anything other than his own particular political sector.)

Edited by author 07-04-2005 03:07 PM
Charlie -- I do think it's important to hammer on these morons occasionally, and I do have a blood pressure problem. I've distanced myself all the way to Europe, and it still gets my goat occasionally.

I know it's noise in the wires in the larger sense; I've been flaming happily since I first got involved in online fraud exposure back in the mid-90's; a good troll is good for a week of entertainment or more!

Baiting the chicken-boner set was fun when it was make-money-fast and 419ers. But then our day-in-the-life-of happened. Suddenly the flaming went deadly serious for me. Suddenly there was this great polarization among people I thought I knew -- some were really as normal as I thought, while others morphed into fascists overnight. Eric Raymond was a case in point. The writer of the Cathedral versus the Bazaar obviously understood democracy. Right? Then I realized the bugger was using the phrase "anti-idiotarian" and meaning it. Jeez! My world crumbled. Obviously people really were stupider than I had thought.

(An amusing aside on 9-11; I had taken our kids (homeschooling that year) to the university greenhouse for a little field trip and heard the wildest War-of-the-Worlds narration on the radio there... Walked over to the student union and saw the most freaking amazing video I'd ever seen. What a day! And I checked very quickly that our passports were in order. I can recognize a Reichstag fire when I see one.)

So yeah, I hammer the soi-disant anti-idiotarian with deadly seriousness whenever one pops up and I happen to notice. Since this thread's devoted to it, I figured the bandwidth usage was OK.

I'm currently living in Hungary (wife's homeland) and, as always, I love being the expat. Hungarians don't really care about the whole damn thing; their attitudes towards America haven't changed. But then they always did have an unerring tendency to back the losing side in any war... Ever since they fought the Turk to a halt, anyway. So when I step outside, America and the recent unpleasantness fades into a relieving abeyance. Very healthy, from the standpoint of your distance criterion.

I can't, however, cultivate a sense of irony. The nation I grew up loving turns out to have been a sham. Because if the American ideals I learned as a child were really taken seriously by more than a vanishing fraction of Americans, none of this could possibly have happened. We're torturing random people off the street and buying captives to keep in cages to show the bread-and-circuses crowd how successfully we're finding those terrorists, and nobody gives a shit. (For certain values, of course, of "nobody" -- there's a vocal minority online, but that rarely penetrates the public consciousness.)

Yeah, I know the State Department isn't reading this, and I don't really care about Downing Street because I figure that's your watch, not mine. But Dave will read it. And I want Dave to know, in no uncertain terms, that at least one American -- a real live red-state Hoosier who grew up Baptist and playing softball -- thinks that he is a goddamned idiot for falling for the lies of a bunch of slick Washington con-men. He's a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders, and he has the unmitigated gall to think I am his intellectual inferior because I can open my eyes.

Nothing to do with you, Charlie (it's obvious you're OK with Americans-as-opposed-to-American-government, like the majority of people anywhere) and everything to do with this pathetic loser who is dirtying the meaning of what it is to be American. There's no room on the Internet for stupidity (well, obviously this is rhetoric), and there's no room in America for people who don't get American values. And it's very important to me that Dave understands that. He needs remedial civics, bad. Starting with reading the Declaration of Independence.

The blood pressure is more of a literary crutch, actually. Last time I measured it, it was way down. Living in Europe makes me lose weight, and that, combined with my delightful distance from all that crap, makes me a low-pressure version of my former self. Before that, I was in Puerto Rico for eight months -- the same kind of distance pertained to that situation, plus the weather was great, although the utter automotive dependence of PR made me gain weight there.

So thanks for the kind note, Charlie, and if you like, I'll tone it down. But in point of fact I'm not actually likely to succumb any time soon.

Well, it looks like I might owe an apology to the wingnut I was arguing against before.

Iraq *is* showing signs of independence...

An Iran-Iraq military alliance. Well done, America.

Oh, and the next time you see someone mentioning that the Iraqi resistance is winding down, point them towards this.

This was a very amusing microessay, somewhat in the style of Ken MacLeod, partly because of how it touches base with truth often enough to maintain willing suspension of disbelief. As someone who doesn't know enough History, I suspect that the Cheney-Rumsfield-Wolfowitz-Feith etcetera cabal chose to make the USA an empire without deciding WHICH empire. Bablyonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Roman, Holy Roman, Spanish, British, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, whatever. We'll cross that Rubicon when we come to it. The role of Halliburton makes me suspect a fondness for Leopold's Belgian empire. Pity that they didn't read Gibbons. Or, for that matter, Asimov. George W. Bush as one of the more feeble emperors at Trantor. Or maybe as Denethor, blaming his secret Palantir for bad intelligence.

Disappointing to see you falling for the story that the Iraq invasion, or even the Afghanistan invasion before it, had anything whatsoever to do with liberal intervention. The twits who cheered for it because they though it did were irrelevant, and would have been just as irrelevant if they'd opposed it as I did. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Edited by author 12-02-2005 03:42 PM
Del, what kind of "Liberal" do you think I'm talking about? Read for context: the term "Liberal" has meant different things in different decades, and I think the capitalization of "Democracy" in the mouth of a purported Trot (and a Straussian one at that!) ought to have clued you in ...

Update: And the "God bless America" bit at the end, come to think of it. Come on, you know I'm an honest atheist, right?

A pedant writes - for Turkey, it was the Treaty of Sevres, not Versailles.

Oddly enough, when I was trying to analyse what the British state was up to in 1998, I called the resulting pamphlet 'Back to the Future', and epigrammed it "We're not going forwards to the twenty-first century, we're going backwards to the nineteenth century." And I had something to say about 'liberal interventionists' which has, tragically, stood the test of time. It's here: http://www.red-star-research.org.uk/rpm/maxingun.html

As for GWB, I was pondering the other day that in fact he's some kind of alien, taking part in an alien reality TV show. "We took Yggswggl4447, the thickest YgstYupgl we could find, gave him a body makeover, and put him in charge of a type 4 planet's most powerful nation! With hilarious consequences! Updates each day!"

Yup - he's Jade off Big Brother. Let's hope that the Interstellar version of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, or possibly the Galactic Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Semi-Sentient, get here soon.

Edited by author 12-02-2005 06:44 PM
Hi Chris!

You are familiar with the Simulation Argument -- that we are in fact software entities living in a history sim being run by a vastly transcendent descended intelligence? Nick Bostrom has a fascinating paper in which he argues that if you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events ... who do we know of who isn't particularly bright but who seems to be at the centre of a pattern of this sort?

As David Brin puts it, the worst case scenario is that the simulation argument is true, and we're living in an egocentric simulation that exists solely for the amusement of whatever entity is playing the role of George W. Bush.