Why Does Porter Goss Hate America?

Anybody who still thinks Bush’s excellent little adventure in Iraq was either moral or wise is clearly never going to learn from any experience.

The sad thing is that this means the next time their favourite politicians sell them a load of unmitigated horseshit they’ll cheerfully buy again.

Actually, I think that Goss’s hating America is not primary here, but an epiphenomenon of the true cause of his analytical waywardness: doesn’t Goss have a degree from one of those decadent Western universities?
Now, that would explain it.

Sad, isn’t it? The jihadists fell into Bush’s trap. No, wait…

Hell, even Negroponte is bailing out of this mess. Not even a neoconservative can think that somewhere there must be a pony in this pile of $#!+.

You know, it’s perfectly reasonable to claim he and Carter are on “the other side”. It’s a fair argument. The only question is: where is this line drawn by Powerline and others?
My guess is that it’s a line surrounding a tiny couple of cranks, and I have no desire to be on their side.

derrida derider:“Anybody who still thinks Bush’s excellent little adventure in Iraq was either moral or wise is clearly never going to learn from any experience.

“The sad thing is that this means the next time their favourite politicians sell them a load of unmitigated horseshit they’ll cheerfully buy again.”

I do not now think, nor have I ever thought, that the war against Iraq is or ever was “moral or wise” or legal either. However, I have not always been right as I think I am on this issue. I’m sure I’ve gotten some things as wrong as “[a]nybody who still thinks Bush’s excellent little adventure in Iraq was either moral or wise” have. I have learned things, and hope I still can. I cannot say that no one who “still thinks….etc.” will never learn, or that they will always stand ready to “cheerfully buy again…another “load of unmitigated horseshit.” (Actually, there are a lot of horses in my area, and one can get the material you mention at virtually no cost, and it’s good fertilizer, even if it’s not totally unmitigated, but I digress)

I don’t think experience alone is a how one learns about questions of “morality or wisdom” Discussion and argument about the experience is also required. If we want the people of whom you speak to change their minds we have to argue with them and try to persuade them to do so. And when we argue we expose our own beliefs to challenge, which is good because we learn as well, even if we don’t persuade those with whom we disagree.

“When we consider either the history of opinion, or the ordinary conduct of human life, to what is it to be ascribed that the one and the other are no worse than they are? Not certainly to the inherent force of the human understanding; for, on any matter not self-evident, there are ninety-nine persons totally incapable of judging of it, for one who is capable; and the capacity of the hundredth person is only comparative; for the majority of the eminent men of every past generation held many opinions now known to be erroneous, and did or approved numerous things which no one will now justify.

“Why is it, then, that there is on the whole a preponderance among mankind of rational opinions and rational conduct? If there really is this preponderance—which there must be unless human affairs are, and have always been, in an almost desperate state—it is owing to a quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.

“The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.

“The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers—knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter—he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.”

John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty.” Chapter II,Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion, p.8 (The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.)

Accessed at: Bartleby.com

http://www.bartleby.com/25/2/2.html

Tom, you can just link the relevant section. No need to post large chunks, in bold – remember, bold text has twice the bandwidth cost :)

Tom, you can just link the relevant section. No need to post large chunks, in bold – remember, bold text has twice the bandwidth cost :)

Ladies & gentlemen, please read the fine print:

Please only hit the “Post” button once. Although there may be a delay while the page reloads, something is happening, we promise.

Nobody’s really mentioned this…but I think ‘treason’ is about to get a shot in the arm in terms of a new enforcer on the block – John Negroponte

http://bloogeyman.blogspot.com/2005/02/everything-is-ponteing-to-trouble.html

Better start looking over your shoulder….

Bold might not have twice the bandwidth costs, but it does have less than half the effect. There’s no way my eyes can put up with reading more than a few words at a time in bold. And to double post it…

aphrael asks: why do you think bold text would take up twice the bandwidth?

Simple! Because whenever you send bold text across the ARPAnet, the way it’s transmitted is this. First the “server” mainframe transmits a line of text, encoded as “bytes,” each representing a single alpha-numeric character, to the “client” teletype. Then it sends a carriage return (ASCII [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] x0A) character without the usual line-feed (ASCII x0D). Then the “server” transmits the same line of text a second time, and this time it terminates the line with both a carriage return and a line feed, which drops the teletype down a space on the page, so it will be ready for the next line of text.

At the teletype end, where you the ARPAnet user, or “browser,” sits waiting to read the transmission, the type head moves from the left side of the platen to the right, banging out printed characters as it goes, then the print head returns to the left and bangs out the characters a second time. Thus the “bold” characters, having been printed twice, show up on the printed page as extra dark.

Clearly bold text requires almost exactly twice (twice less one) “bytes” to send than ordinary text. It hardly seems like it would amount to a significant cost difference – after all, with modern technology one can send hundreds, even thousands of “bytes” for only pennies! But believe me, on a high-traffic “web site” such as this one, the cost of all that bold text does add up. And that’s not counting the wear-and-tear on the platen at the teletype end, nor the cost of those replacement typewriter ribbons.

So take it easy on the bold text, all you “web-sters”!

With my comment above, I seem to have hit a trifectca of sorts-i.e., pasting too much text from the article I cited; excessive employment of bold text; and (to cap it all off) double posting the offending comment (This last offense at was unintentional.).

I apologize for all of the above. To those who commented on this matter, I appreciate your feedback, all your points are well taken, and I’ll try to avoid such mistakes in the future.