Why do they hate America?

I’d say it’s almost all anti-evolution, stem-cells, etc. The idea “that reality is socially constructed, and that the most powerful get to do most of the construction” is a humanties hot-button. Creationism and religious restriction on research are science hot-buttons.

I’m not purely speculating here. I see this on some techie mailing lists. There’s a pretty deep sense that this administration is dedicated to pleasing religious fanatic’s opposition to science, in way which has a gut-level impact on both sides.

artemis: The answers to your questions are, of course:

(1) nobody was saying it.

(2) not even once = repeatedly.

(3) no, jq cannot clarify – in any sense of the word “clarify” that means anything interestingly different from “obfuscate.”

*But that’s not the point!*

“It now appears that the majority of Americans are anti-American.”

Isn’t it terrible? Of course, President Clinton was always a bit suspect:

“The dam has burst. Former president Bill Clinton’s verdict that the war in Iraq was ‘a big mistake’ is echoing around the world.”
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article327773.ece

But the Wall Street Journal?

“Many adults in the United States are questioning their president’s motives to launch the coalition effort, according to a poll by Hart/McInturff released by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. 57 per cent of respondents think George W. Bush deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq, up 10 points since June 2004.”
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/9842

If I remember another study correctly, it now appears that fewer of our top scientists approve of Bush than believe in God. These folks clearly have very finely tuned B.S. detectors, which may be one of the qualities which got them elected to the National Academies.

Perhaps it’s less the administration’s attitude towards science that offends them than its attitude towards truth itself.

As hard as it may be to believe now, at the time of the invasion something like half of Americans thought that Iraq was behind the September 11 attacks, so there was, and remains, widespread hostility towards those expressing antiwar sentiments. Imprecations I’ve heard during demonstrations include “Communist!” and “Go back to France!”

And the fact that a lot of science has been politicized—anyone who is/was getting NASA funding is pretty pissed right now, stem cell research is bolloxed, etc.

Really? Stem cells, yes, obviously, butI thought NASA was doing OK – its budget was up slightly this year, and they have the new shiny Mars project to run.

If 24% of scientists, and a roughly similar portion of the general public were willing to trust BushCo in the first place, but have now changed their minds, are we to conclude that a) one of every four people was a dupe, but is now critically engaged, b) that they were dupes then, and remain dupes now naively following a surge in pessimism, from which they will shortly drop out, to proclaim fealty once again, c) that they were wise to the lies all along, but supported Bush through fear, callousness, etc, and now that the petard is hoist, are abandoning ship, d) they were never undecided regarding Bush’s competence/fitness, but gave him a chance, and are now deciding otherwise, or e) some other explanation?

Of these, a, b and c are characteristic of idiots, zombies and cretins whose opinions are suspect regardless of which side they’re on. If this is the correct explanation of the shift in opinion, one can take small comfort in knowing just what portion of the population are willing dupes/cretins. Only 1 in 4? My faith in humanity may yet survive!

I just got back from a fairly large scientific meeting. In discussioms with friends I did not hear one kind/supportive word about the Administration. ID played a prominent role in this, no doubt.

Along similar lines, I was heartened to observe a small kiosk in Dulles airport proudly displaying an “I can’t wait for 2008” t-shirt with a big “W” in the barred circle.

reality is socially constructed, and that the most powerful get to do most of the construction.

That’s funny as an intellectual idea I’d always associated that with a lot of left wing thought. The kind of ‘relativism’ Sokal lampooned in his book Intellectual Impostures.

Personally I think that’s a hobby horse anyone can ride, you have irrational or anti-scientific strands of thought on both left and right.

I think the widespread scientific dismay with the Bush administration stems from the fact that the Bush administration is so anti-scientific overall rather than any specific issue (stem cell, ID, etc.) Bush and company selectively confirm reality according to their political ideology – this sort of epistemic methodology should be antithetical to any scientist/skeptic/rational person.

What hume’s ghost said, and you can add the general nausea that many, whether they are religious or not, feel at the insistence of those poor “persecuted” fundamentalist Christians on trying to use the government to cram their peculiar theology, and the disgusting bigotry which they deduce from it, down our throats.

That’s funny as an intellectual idea I’d always associated that with a lot of left wing thought. The kind of ‘relativism’ Sokal lampooned in his book Intellectual Impostures.

You are forgetting that Sockal is a left-winger who believes that the relativists have only harmed the real left.

Personally I think that’s a hobby horse anyone can ride, you have irrational or anti-scientific strands of thought on both left and right.

Undoubtedly. Witness for instance, Sociologist Steve Fuller testifying in favour of ID at the Dover Area case. Steve Fuller is a prominent anti-science relativist and left-winger who published the infamous ‘Science wars: who exactly is the enemy?’. But now he appears to be happy collaberating with the religious right.

google ‘anti-war anti-american’: 707,000 results
google ‘lizard conspiracy’: 404,000 results

soru

Scientists and engineers have various political opinions, but they generally believe that technical criteria should actually matter in making a decision. The Bushies have made it clear in case after case that only political criteria matter to them.

jlw’s game does sound like fun, but I’d like to add some empirical observations. In my own field (biology), I have NEVER met a single person who voiced a pro-administration opinion, or indeed anything that couldn’t be described as emphatically left-wing (on an American scale, granted). Whether this is because biologists are nearly uniformly left-wing or because the right-wing minority feels uncomfortable exposing themselves to ridicule, I don’t know, but either way I think it suggests that at least one subset of scientists tends to be left-wing.

As other posters have pointed out, it is simply not the case that people who criticize the administration were “repeatedly” accused of anti-Americanism. What really happened was that people who *excuse the actions of the Iraqi “resistance”* were accused by bloggers and others of being anti-American or “on the other side”, which seems to be perfectly fair. Unless there is some logical requirement that anyone critical of the invasion must therefore endorse the actions of the Sunni militias, and there’s no reason to think there is such a requirement, then what we are talking about is two groups of people: administration/war critics, and Sunni terrorist supporters/apologists. These groups overlap but are not coextensive.

Following Brendan’s advice to search on “on the other side site:instapundit.com”, the first few links that come up are:

1. Glenn linking to an article about the anti-globalization movement and its shift towards anti-Americanism. This has nothing to do with the war in Iraq;

2. Some transcription of a John Pilger interview in which Pilger says that American and British troops are legitimate targets for the “resistance”;

3. A link to an article about ANSWER’s founder, with quotes endorsing the actions of Sunni militias;

4. A link to Kos’ now-infamous “Screw them” comment, with a quote from a reader email claiming such sentiments mean Kos is “on the other side”;

5. A link to a description of a “Books not Bombs” march in Sydney, where demonstrators chanted “Saddam’s our mate”.

It seems fairly clear to me that these quotes all clearly refer to people in the second group, and not the first. Attempts to elide the distinction between the two, as with JQ’s post and brendan’s and john m’s comments, are attempts to claim the moral high ground by misleading people about what those who disagree with the anti-war position said about anti-war critics.

Asg is quite right: every one has to decide whether he/she is American first or human first.

If you are human first, then on occations you’re bound to be anti-American. Pseudo-patriotic scoundrels are correct to point it out, and they’re entitled to express their disapproval.

This, however, has nothing to do with those who disagreed with the rush to war; that wasn’t one of those moments.

John M. said:

It takes a genuinely heroic amount of self delusion to have failed to notice this or contend that it didn’t happen and I made a rule years ago never to engage with crazy people.

Uncle Kvetch said:

I don’t believe they’re crazy, John—just desperate. Understandably so, given the fortunes of the Bush administration.

Otherwise, I agree entirely.

I believe you two have good intentions. But I believe you’re wrong here.

People’s perceptions are so colored by their political views or religious views or worldview or any other form of group identity, that they are really bad at forming accurate impressions of the behavior of people they strongly disagree with. Group identity causes people to start to defend that group irrationally. (Look at the rampant resurgence of extremist conservative American nationalism since 9/11.) They start to get selective in what they remember, and even in what they notice, understand, —even hear— in the first place. It’s a universal tendency in humans; unfortunate, but innate, and best to be actively avoided as much as possible.

When one actually goes out and tries to gather evidence about what’s going on, most of the time one ends up changing one’s viewpoint a lot. One ends up realizing that one’s memory of one’s perceptions are really unreliable. One starts to find out about the selective perception and memory and other human faults. This is why scientists put such a strong emphasis on reproducibility of results, and on strong and reliable study methodology. It’s what makes Orwell’s conception of doublethink in 1984 so plausible. It’s how Eastasia can change to Eurasia in a few minutes in the middle of a political rally.

No one is immune to this.

For you to give up on debate because of this gulf may be understandable—as you’re right that you probably won’t make any progress with a discussion—but it doesn’t make the other side any more crazy than you are, and it doesn’t make you right.

I could get into how to go about talking to them, but this is a comment so I’ll stop here.

Well…yes. It depends on what you mean by ‘accusing someone of being on the other side’ or ‘accusing someone of treason’, really doesn’t it?

Look at this doozy from Christopher ‘the weasel’ Hitchens.

The full quote is here before accusations of quoting out of context come up.

Hitchens starts by pointing out that ANSWER etc. have some highly dubious people with some highly dubious views associated with them (which is fair enough). But he then goes on:

‘Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what’s going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation—these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God’s sake—would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)

The two preferred metaphors are, depending on the speaker, that the Bin-Ladenists are the fish that swim in the water of Muslim discontent or the mosquitoes that rise from the swamp of Muslim discontent. (Quite often, the same images are used in the same harangue.) The “fish in the water” is an old trope, borrowed from Mao’s hoary theory of guerrilla warfare and possessing a certain appeal to comrades who used to pore over the Little Red Book. The mosquitoes are somehow new and hover above the water rather than slip through it. No matter. The toxic nature of the “water” or “swamp” is always the same: American support for Israel. Thus, the existence of the Taliban regime cannot be swamplike, presumably because mosquitoes are born and not made. The huge swamp that was Saddam’s Iraq has only become a swamp since 2003. The organized murder of Muslims by Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan is only a logical reaction to the summit of globalizers at Davos. The stoning and veiling of women must be a reaction to Zionism. While the attack on the World Trade Center—well, who needs reminding that chickens, or is it mosquitoes, come home to roost?’

Now: read that second sentence again, and then follow the train of logic. Surely Hitchen’s point is that even though some of the anti-invasion side pretend to be anti-terrorism, they are ‘really’ in favour of it (if that’s not what Hitch the snitch means i don’t know what he means). In fact, the latter part of the first paragraph attempts to claim (I think) that any criticism of the Jihadists is invalid if the speaker then goes on to criticise the US or the UK .

Since by definition any anti-invasion thinker would do this (because…er…that’s the essence of the anti-invasion case) Hitchens is, in effect, claiming that anyone who opposes the war is on the side of the Jihadists and Saddam Hussein and is therefore on the other side.

As I pointed out earlier, this weaselly rhetoric is rife in the pro-invasion side. Few of them have the balls to say ‘if you disagree with George Bush you are a traitor.’ Instead they argue that since (as everyone knows) this is a two way contest between the US and a ‘Ba’athist-Jihadist alliance’, and that a ‘third way position’ is not possible, the if you are not for the US you are by definition on the side of Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. And are therefore a traitor.

(Note that by his emphasis on Israel, Hitchens implies (he lacks, again the balls to actually come out and say it) that if you opposed the invasion you are an anti-semite as well. Again this trope is rife in pro-invasion rhetoric).

No, it’s not because they are obsessive on the topic of America; that’s simply because they detest hypocrisy of those who habitually demonize official enemies while habitually trumpeting American virtues. That is annoying. So, they are merely trying to compensate, provide much needed balance.

Time to write your favorite Democratic Representative. Some backbone is needed.

I was disappointed to see your and your party’s response to Representative Murtha’s speech yesterday. Your politically-motivated hesitation did you no good, and your present waffling about whether to vote for or against his motion resembles the waffling that accompanied the run-up to war. The Democratic leadership is still far too reluctant to align itself with the reality-based community.

Representative Murtha got to the pith of the matter. War is a horror. You do not send soldiers to war without a compelling reason. No such reason motivated the Iraq war. At that time an intelligent, undeluded person could only conclude that such a war was much more likely to do harm than good. So, the leadership of the Bush administration—which, oddly enough, included only one combat veteran—made three unforgivable decisions: to send soldiers to fight a needless war, to invent a compelling reason for doing so, and to ignore (whether it was from incompetence, from a desire for political gain, or from darker motivations is beside the point) the best interests of the nation they were elected to lead.

Democratic fortunes have not improved, as I hope you have noticed, as a result of anything you have done. Rather, they have improved because even a master of representation such as Karl Rove cannot obscure reality forever. “Facts,” as Ronald Reagan once attempted to say, “are stubborn things.” Incompetence and ideological policymaking have been spinning off error after error for five years now, and the resulting blunderous heap has grown so colossal that not even Mr. Rove can convince most people that it does not exist.

Stand by John Murtha. Vote for his resolution. You underestimate the political power of doing what makes sense for this country and its citizens. By doing so, you expose yourself to Mr. Rove, but you align yourself with the future, and against illusions. At times this country prefers illusions, but I do not think that this is one of those times.

Has everyone forgotten Karl Rove’s speech earlier this year?

No, but quite a few people are willing to pretend they have.

Seth Finkelstein –

And what does “properly taught” mean? What I would it mean by it is that evolution should be presented as the scientific explanation, but that the teacher should acknowledge that some prefer intelligent design. And that some, including many in the Catholic church, if I understand their doctrine, do not see a fundamental contradiction between intelligent design and evolution. (And the same is true for religious leaders of many other churches.)

And I have not seen a single bit of evidence to show that either George W. Bush or John F. Kerry disagrees with what I said above — though both dodged the question when Science magazine asked this.

Seth, try to open your mind on this point. If, for example, George W. Bush had worked to include intelligent design in the Texas curriculum while he was governor, don’t you think you would have heard a story about that by now?

And if there is a difference between the statements by Bush and Kerry, can you point it out to me?

(BTW, for those who like to keep track of such things, Senator McCain did explicitly agree that intelligent design should be taught in schools.)

What I would it mean by it is that evolution should be presented as the scientific explanation, but that the teacher should acknowledge that some prefer intelligent design.
We’re talking about science class here, right? The “preferences” of the scientifically unlettered have no standing in science and consequently no business being discussed in a science class. End of story. To pretend otherwise is to be either an ignoramus or a weasel. Or an ignorant weasel.

I should point out that I’m not asserting that Bush, like most politicians, doesn’t lie. He has, repeatedly, in ways that really piss off conservatives, like the phony numbers on how much his medicaid drug benefit would cost, or whether he’d veto the BCRA. But the poll in question does nothing to establish that Bush’s unpopularity among engineers, (I’m one, and I don’t like him either.) is due to dishonesty, rather than lousy policies.

Um, Walt, how exactly does the Instapundit quote fit John Quiggen’s characterization? How, for that matter, does the Powerline quote do so? Quiggen says “we were repeatedly told that *anyone* who disagreed with the rush to war, or criticised the Bush Administration, was ‘anti-American.'” Could you find me some quotations that make precisely that claim — that *anyone* who criticized the Bush administration was anti-American?

And, as I said much earlier, Quiggen might want to define “repeatedly.” I’ve seen some comments suggesting that my skepticism is either ignorant or disingenous because, basically, “everyone knows” that the pro-war side claimed that anyone who criticized Bush was anti-American. If that were the case, someone ought to be able to provide links to, say, ten or twenty examples rather quickly.

OK, jq – it’s short and curlies time. ‘Cause that’s what I’ve got you by.

You wrote that “if you “Google ‘anti-american’…adding ‘steve burton’…you’ll find blogs propagating the meme [‘that to oppose the war is to be “anti-American” or “on the other side” or even a traitor’] where steve writes or comments, notably *Right Reason*…”

So *Right Reason* is a “notable” example of “blogs propagating the meme” in question?

Utterly and shamefully false.

Not once. Not ever. Not even close.

I have posted a full reply at *Right Reason*.

I do not expect an apology. But I, and my very distinguished colleagues at *Right Reason* sure as heck deserve one.

No, they didn’t claim “anyone” who criticized the Iraq war was a traitor, just Jimmy Carter and all participants in anti-war protests. I guess Pat Buchanan is off the hook.

Steve, as fifi says, a post by one Daniel Bonevac on your front page is currently propagating the meme, by enthusiastically citing Anne Coulter and Glenn Reynolds. But don’t let that stop you being outraged…

Guys, best just to admit that John Quiggin was wrong in describing Steve Burton and Right Reason, and should back down, no? It’s a minor point, not central at all to who is *right* about the war in Iraq or who is correctly charaterizing the tenor or right wing criticism of war opponents. It’s an intellectual honesty moment that costs you nothing. Take it.

Mr. walt pohl: evidently, John Quiggin and you both cared enough to post comments about the issue.

He cared enough to make stuff up. You cared enough to resort to obscenity.

My mom, on the other hand, does, indeed, not care.

fifi, engels:

Last May 5th, Daniel Bonevac (a philosophy professor at the University of Texas) posted to our site a first-hand account of an appearance at UT by Ann Coulter. He wrote that “in her talks and in her book Treason, she points out that criticisms of Republican administration foreign policy has *sometimes* taken anti-American forms. Glenn Reynolds has nicely summarized the point: of *some* on the left, it’s fair to say, ‘They’re not anti-war; they’re just on the other side.'”

Since the word “Iraq” does not occur in this post, it did not come up in my previous search, so I did not include it on my list. My mistake.

But do you really want to hang your hat on this? Does “sometimes” mean “always?” Does “some” mean “all?” Are these two sentences adequate grounds for claiming that *Right Reason* is a blog that propagates the meme that to oppose the war is to be “anti-American” or “on the other side” or even a traitor?

Seriously?

jq: I will keep in mind, for future reference, that you consider any attempt to distinguish between “some” and “all” to be “weaselly.”

(Hmmm…how does this work, in practice…*some* Germans are fascists, *all* Germans are fascists…*some* Arabs are terrorists, *all* Arabs are terrorists – whatever, it all comes to the same – and to disagree would be weaselly…Hey! this is fun! and *so* easy! You can check your brain at the door!)

Ah, me. One more debt I owe to the left.

This is starting to sound like the tedious arguments over whether Bush, or any other administration spokesman, declared that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. They did, but no one was on record using the magical phrase as such. That argument was frustrating to those of us who understand the use/mention distinction, as is this to anyone familiar with logical quantification.

It’s amusing as hell to find war apologists criticizing others for emphatic rhetoric while insisting on their right to repunctuate presidential utterances to mold them nearer to deniability. Dare we call it sophistry?

For what it’s worth, here’s a link calling any opposition to the war unpatriotic. Are memories so short that the the temper of 2003 has been forgotten?

Also this piece has examples.

Our host has referred to it as socially constructed reality. Wikipedia explains it thus:

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

No amount of hand-waving, damage control, apologetics or spin will alleviate the general recognition that the United States lied to everyone about the rationale and the urgency of this nasty little war. At this point its defenders are split between anger and denial, with miles to go before they grieve.

You’re one sick puppy, Mike.

If you’re so keen on liberating people abroad – why don’t you just buy yourself a ticket and AK47 and go join some militia over there, like John Walker Lindh? Go and spread whatever you feel like spreading, little napoleon.

The thing that always astounds me with the American right (as far as one can generalise about the ‘right’ and ‘left’ at all) is the way in which the rest of the planet’s distaste for their views is not at all seen as evidence that they might be wrong.

Personally, if the rest of the world has one opinion and I have another, it at least causes me concern that I might be wrong.

Fair enough, anything can be exaggerated to the level of absurdity.

OTOH, whatever it is that takes self-righteousness and phony moral indignation of the official line down a notch – it can’t be all that bad.

had it been the case that the catastrophe currently unfolding in the Gulf, and many other problems, was caused by world leaders’ vitamin deficiencies, then it would not be the sign of an obsession to point this out.

It’s true that there are areas where US policy genuinely is a major factor in what happens, probably the biggest one (outside the invasion of Iraq itself) being the fact that the current rulers of Saudi Arabia would be spending more time with their yachts if it wasn’t for US/UK arms and training. That’s a case where the much-abused term ‘proppped up’ genuinely applies.

But what I am talking about in this particular case is those people who, for example, think the key relevant thing about, say, the Iran/Iraq war is the way the US supplied satellite photos to one or both sides.

Millions of men, thousands of tanks, minefields, suicide squads, chemical weapons, but the core of the narrative is not about them, but some glossy 9″ photos that may or may not have affected the thinking of one or two generals making tactical decisions that would have given one side or the other a marginal advantage.

It’s all rather like that threatened WWII Battle of Britain flick where the hero is an american volunteer…

soru

“they actually – and enthusiastically- advocated a position that would have perpetuated the reign of a fascist mass murderer.”

As someone who opposed the war, my position would have resulted in the continuance of Saddam Hussein’s rule. His state was responsible for, say, ~30,000 deaths a year? (random guess, using the 300,000 killed in Shia uprising in 1991, 15 years ago, and adding 10,000/year for good measure. Estimations are sensitive to the time frame considered: anytime more recent than 1991 yields a *much* smaller rate of deaths/year, likely in the 4 digit range, starting it in 1980 to include the Iran/Iraq war yields ~50,000-70,000/year).

Those are pretty much the upper bounds. (Reports of the 300,000 dead in 1991 are probably exagerrated. And blaming all the dead from the Iran/Iraq war on Saddam is a stretch.) Given that there were spikes, average deaths/year isn’t a great measure. I would have been more inclined to support an intervention *during* one of these spikes. Things were relatively calm, and he posed no threat to neighbors.

OTOH, the current US war on Iraq has killed ~100,000 people. Contributed to civil unrest that has destroyed the country and killed innocent men, women and children.

Given that future scenarios should be heavily discounted from uncertainty, IMO, it’s not at all evident that this war has helped anyone. It’s far far more likely that the war has caused much more death and destruction than *not invading*.

(In the best of estimates, I’d guess that a graph of “deaths under a Saddam regime, no invasion” would cross the graph of “deaths from US invasion and civil collapse” about ten years out. That’s under a fairly rosy scenario. It’ll take over twenty years to know.)

But even if life for the Iraqis does get *better* around ten years post-invasion, I’d still believe the war was wrong, and should have been opposed. You don’t gamble with people’s lives. Imminent harm or self-defense are the only justifications for war, and neither applied.

The thing that always astounds me with the American right (as far as one can generalise about the ‘right’ and ‘left’ at all) is the way in which the rest of the planet’s distaste for their views is not at all seen as evidence that they might be wrong.

Personally, if the rest of the world has one opinion and I have another, it at least causes me concern that I might be wrong.

Does this same reasoning characterize your feelings about Jews? Just curious…

Alex…….I think what Dan was alluding to was the bottom line of the pro-invasion side: not just the belief that if you opposed the invasion of Iraq you are personally responsible for Ba’athism and 9/11, but also that if you opposed the invasion you must be an anti-semite. Didn’t you know that? ‘Everyone’ in the increasingly detached from reality right wing blogosphere knows that…….

I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re suggesting?

Well, for thousands of years, the entire world has disagreed vehemently with the Jews about a great many fundamental things, including whether Judaism is a valid and morally tolerable religion, whether the Jewish people are a net benefit or net detriment to the world, and even whether the entire group deserves to continue living. By your reasoning, then, it seems the Jews ought to have simply taken the hint and disappeared off the face of the earth some time during the Middle Ages, to say nothing of sixty years ago–right?

Not that I consider it a bad idea for individuals to take into account the views of others when forming their own opinions, of course. But I believe the analogy breaks down entirely when applied to nations rather than individuals. Indeed, every nation on earth harbors consensus views that make it unique in the world–that’s why we’re not all one nation. And until we’re all sure we’ve hit upon the one true magic formula for perfect nationhood, a little diversity of national belief may not be such a bad thing.

Dan, perhaps I should make my point clearer.

The fact that a majority thinks that something is true doesn’t make it true. Rather, when you have a large group, none of whom have any kind of priveleged epistemological viewpoint (which is key), then it seems reasonable to suggest that the majority is /more likely/ to be correct than a minority.

Of course there can be reasons why the majority are still wrong – and, I’m sure, often are. And of course, I agree that diversity can be good, to a point.

Compare it to science: That the majority of scientists believe in global warming seems to provide a good presumption in favour of it. Thats not to say that they can’t be wrong, or that there should be no diversity in scientific thought, or that the problem is therefore solved and people can stop studying the issue.

I could spell it all out, but hopefully you can see that what I’ve said does not imply some extreme version of ‘majority rule’ (which in turn might imply some of the dangerous things that you mention): I just think it provides a small incentive for certain groups to just double-check their assumptions once more.

Before the Iraq invasion became a “Mission Accomplished”, while it was still an ongoing event, 7 out of 10 Americans thought Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. Connected in a directly-responsible-for-it kind of way. These numbers have subsided, a little.
Finding the people who perpetrated that lie might be kind of hard now, such is the perfection of the dark art of propaganda and subliminal coercion in our time.
But it was done, and done intentionally, and not by “bad intelligence” or incompetence or even simple greed.
The problem seems to be getting the politicians who should be most accountable to say specifically and clearly why it happened. Why they lied.
But then that would mean they’d have to commit publicly to what they can’t possibly admit. So there we are.
The reason the pro-invasion side purport – though never quite overtly – as Brendan says, that “if you opposed the invasion you must be an anti-semite” is many on the anti-invasion/occupation side think the invasion was in some part undertaken to bolster the security of Israel, and anyone critical of Israel is automatically anti-semitic. Ipso facto.
This may help to explain Dan Simon’s bizarre semi-inference to Alex Gregory.
It’s a touchy subject and unfortunately, as things head toward their inevitable conclusion, it only grows more so.

Dan Simon’s seemingly bizarre ramblings are worth reading, incidentally, for a insight into the thinking of the ‘unreality based community’. In the above post he apparently turns Alex’s argument on its head and seems to be arguing that the more people disagree with you the more likely you are to be right (or at the very least, the more people disagree with you, the more you should ‘stick to your guns’ and refuse to compromise).

This of course has been an argument used many times in the past: most noticeably by the Afrikaaners in South Africa and Loyalists in Northern Ireland. In all these cases, when you break the argument down into its basics, it’s really nothing more than the old chant of Millwall supporters: ‘Everyone hates us: we don’t care, we don’t care’.

The influence of religion on this world view goes without saying but is far too large a topic to deal with in a short post. Clifford Longley’s ‘Chosen People’ is a good start (Nicely summed up here ).

Alex: Science doesn’t work by “majority rule”, but rather by the scientific method. Since scientists are all using the same method, they tend to achieve consensus around their conclusions. But when they don’t, only a very poor scientist would reach a scientific conclusion in his or her field of expertise based on majority rule rather than direct application of the scientific method to the data at hand.

The same applies even more strongly to moral judgments, for which there is no consensus even on the correct method to use. To a Jew, for example, the billions of people who use Christian teachings or Koranic wisdom as their moral guide are simply not relevant when approaching moral questions. Hence, the fact that almost the entire world thought Jews to be morally depraved monsters for much of their history was–in my view, quite rightly–discounted.

Likewise, Americans are entitled to discount the views of large numbers of other nations when considering the morality of their own foreign policy. Which particular nations to discount will, of course, be a matter of debate, but if America’s moral approach is sufficiently unique–and perhaps it is–then discounting all of them is not necessarily foolish at all.

Uncle Kvetch: North Korea is a poor example–its policies are determined by its dictator, not by its people. As I explained, nations and individuals are not analogous with respect to this issue.

Brendan: You’d already made a fool of yourself by inventing an elaborate misinterpretation of my comments out of whole cloth, and proceeding to berate me for it without pausing to consider that you had no clue what I (let alone you) might have been talking about. I’d have thought you might have been a little more circumspect about misinterpreting my comments a second time….

Rollo: Would you care to explain just how or why a massive American military campaign would be “in some part undertaken to bolster the security of Israel”? I find that claim to be at least somewhat counterintuitive.

“The same applies even more strongly to moral judgments, for which there is no consensus even on the correct method to use.”

It seems to me that there is a fair degree of consensus (or there would be if it actually came up) between non-believers on moral methodology.

Perhaps the problem is in fact the religiousness of America, which causes the lack of humility. I’ve a distaste for both, so its all moot.

However, I don’t think this is the place for a debate on religion and ethics of this scale, so I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree here.

I’m going to risk ‘making a fool of myself’ yet again, by pointing out a number of assumptions and (dare I say it) mistakes in Dan Simon’s post. Talk about a glutton for punishment!

‘Hence, the fact that almost the entire world thought Jews to be morally depraved monsters for much of their history was—in my view, quite rightly—discounted.’

Actually, this is false and very obviously false. Most of the world (the Chinese, Japanese etc., all the various people of the Indian sub-continent, most people in South America (not least the indigenous inhabitants), almost all the population of Africa, not to mention almost all ‘indigenous’ peoples over the world) have, throughout the vast majority of their existence on earth, never even HEARD of the Jews, let alone known enough to ‘hate’ them. ((Let’s not forget, that the European invasion of the Americas didn’t even begin until 1492, by which time European Christians had been killing Jews for over a millemium. Africans were unable to taste the wonderful benefits of Christian civilisation until the Europeans started to slaughter them in the 18th and 19th centuries). The fact is, rather than being some weird irrational virus of ‘anti-semitism’ which swept the world for no reason, extreme hatred of Jews was located almost entirely to Western Europe, and was confined almost exclusively to Christians. Again, this was not for some irrational reason but had its roots in the anti-semitism of the New Testament, and was kept alive by the various ideological battles that monotheistic religions tend to fight, and for political reasons (i.e. to have a scapegoat). It’s true that Islam did not have a terribly progressive view of Judaism (as the Koran shows) but it was (until very recently) infinitely more ‘Jew friendly’ than Christianity.

So the analogy breaks down because it is not in fact true that the ‘whole world’ hated the Jews. Dan labours under the misapprehension, widely held amongst his ideological brethren, that the ‘whole world’ consists entirely of white Christian Europeans, Americans and Australians.

Incidentally: ‘To a Jew, for example, the billions of people who use Christian teachings or Koranic wisdom as their moral guide are simply not relevant when approaching moral questions. ‘ is, again, self-evidently false as many (perhaps most, for a religious person) moral issues concern how to deal with people from a different moral/religious world, and so, in practice, Christian and Koranic teaching is highly relevant when approaching (some) moral teachings. This was particularly true of the Jews who, for most of their existence, did not have a homeland and so were dealing with non-Jews every minute of every day.

“This is starting to sound like the tedious arguments over whether Bush, or any other administration spokesman, declared that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. They did, but no one was on record using the magical phrase as such. That argument was frustrating to those of us who understand the use/mention distinction, as is this to anyone familiar with logical quantification.”

The “living Constitution” has metastasized into “living” State of the Union speeches, too, it appears. A President can state that we should attack a nation even though the threat isn’t “imminent”, and that gets interpreted as declaring the threat to BE imminent, to the point where he’s later declared a liar when it turns out it wasn’t.

Who’s condoning ignoring the law? I’m pointing out that the guy simply did not say that Iraq was an imminent threat, and it’s sophistry to claim otherwise. Did our invasion flout article 51? Donno, you could argue it either way, given pre-existing resolutions and a war which was only suspended, not ended. Hasn’t got much to do with whether Bush asserted Iraq was an imminent threat by saying we shouldn’t wait until it was, though.

Brett,
a President can state that we should attack a nation even though the threat isn’t imminent, but then this president is advocating an international crime: article 51 only allows for individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.

Consequently there are two possibilies:
1. Bush argued that Iraq indeed was an imminent threat,
or
2. Bush argued that Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat and that nevertheless the US should attack Iraq thus committing an international crime.

I don’t remember him ever suggesting that he intended to break the international law.

However, I do remember him and his minions suggesting on multiple occasions that Iraq is a grave threat (and, IIRC, the word ‘imminent’ was too mentioned or confirmed by his spokesman).

I think the conclusion is quite obvious.

Then he was advocating an international crime. Why twist his words to avoid that conclusion?