Comments Posted By Jonathan
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Interesting and tragic subject. I too can relate with Ashley's parents. I helped my father care for my mother when she was dying of mestatasized breast cancer. For the last eighteen months we had to treat her like an infant. I shudder to think of what it would be like to go through that for an entire lifetime. How horrible for both Ashley and her parents.
Before someone else makes the point, I would like to say that in the UK they are having an intense debate on just how heroic an effort should be made to save very premature infants. None of the choices appear to be good and I think that the moral quandaries are similar to those in Ashley's case.
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 07:39
Invisible Pink Unicorn on a pogo stick, the hubris of this statement just boggles the mind:
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 18:13"What we really expect out of the Democrats is for them to treat us as they would like to have been treated."
-Incoming House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio
Saying “well, the righties were snarky so we can be, too†isn’t a defense – it’s an illogical shield. Same goes the other way – their actions have to be judge irregardless of what the “other side†did. The tu quoque logical fallacy is saying “so what? They did the same thing (or worse)!†Not only is it childish, but you lose the argument by losing it.
I'm not using it as a defense, I'm using it as an offense.
You apparently want the left to play nice while the right continues to abuse us. Sorry, the left is not going to play that game any more. You wish for us to be like an abused spouse, who when the abuser promises never to do it again, believes and returns for yet more abuse.
"If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it." -Bobby Knight to Connie Chung, 1988
This is one rape victim that doesn't intend to "relax and enjoy it" any more. Instead I intend to kick the rapist right in the balls just as hard as I can and continue doing so for as long as I have strength. Oh, I'll do so in a gentlemanly manner, but remember, a true gentleman is also a cast iron son of a bitch when offended.
"War is the continuation of politics by other means."
- Karl von Clausewitz- “No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.â€
-Karl von ClausewitzAppraise war in terms of the fundamental factors. The first of these factors is moral influence.
Sun-TzuThe right has been engaging in war for quite some time now, the left remembers that every dog has his day.
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 17:12
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The body of an Associated Press employee was found shot in the back of the head Friday, six days after he was last seen by his family leaving for work. Ahmed Hadi Naji, 28, was the fourth AP staffer to die violently in the Iraq war and the second AP employee killed in less than a month. He had been a messenger and occasional cameraman for the AP for 2 1/2 years.
I think this makes it clear that AP employees in Iraq face considerable risks.
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 08:20
Oops, mea maxima culpa, upon review I see that I actually have three posts here that were not in response to someone else's statements.
Sorry.
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 07:21
The bodies in Bagdhad aren’t exactly new or controversial, they are factual and obvious. The standard marks of the sectarian killings are drilled knees and burns. Only someone who was paying very little attention could miss them, surely?
Or perhaps someone whose ideology requires that they minimize the violence in Iraq for political purposes.
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 07:00Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.
-From the Iraq Study Group Report
There is quite a bit of violence in Iraq, however to reduce such stories to din and believe whatever story you hear because ‘it doesn’t surprise you’ makes you a spineless dolt.
Personal attacks do not enhance your argument and make you appear crass. I rather expect that our host, Mr Moran, would take a dim view of such also.
Perhaps you would like to respond to my previous post wherein I make the point that, according to the Iraq Study Group, violence in Iraq is being under reported by a factor of greater than ten.
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 06:51
If they can’t corroborate, they shouldn’t print. It’s that simple.
From wikipedia:
The Niger uranium documents refers to falsified classified documents initially revealed by Italian intelligence. These documents depict an attempt by the regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis.
On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq had attempted to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating what they called weapons of mass destruction, refered to as WMD, in defiance of United Nations sanctions.
This claim was one of the political justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and led to considerable embarrassment when discredited.
In December, the State Department issued a fact sheet listing the alleged Niger yellowcake affair in a report entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions From the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council."[1] In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush repeated the allegation, citing British intelligence sources. The administration later conceded that evidence in support of the claim was inconclusive and stated "these 16 words should never have been included" (refering to Bush's State of the Union address), attributing the error to the CIA.
Further, in March 2003, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released results of his analysis of the documents. Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerien officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic." The U.N. spokesman wrote:
Google is your friend. ;-)
Now, what was it you were saying about "If they can’t corroborate, they shouldn’t print. It’s that simple."?
Do you hold AP to a higher standard than your own government?
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 06:39
You seem bored. You are posting a lot of items irrelevant to the topic at hand. I would recommend that you get your own blog and post them there at your leisure.
In other words, you have no replies for the points I'm making and you wish that I would go away so that you don't have to have your cohort's inability to adequately respond to me exposed for all to see.
Note that other than my first post on this thread I've been responding to statements made by others.
As I've already written on the bleg thread, I'm physically disabled. I'm insomniac due to the pain I'm in, I don't like the side effects of medications and I use my conversations and research on the internet to help distract me. I can push the pain away by hyperfocusing, but it requires me to have something that interests me in order to do that. I have no interest in posting in an echo chamber and on most righty (and lefty) blogs someone of the opposite persuasion just gets attacked.
Anyhoo.. Thanks for your interest in my condition.
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 6.01.2007 @ 06:22
This doesn’t for one second absolve the AP from anything. In fact, it would provide incontrovertible evidence that AP sees no need in verifying and validating its sources. If Jamil Hussein were to escape – provided that he even exists – none of these would have pinned the AP down for good.
T]here is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.
-From the Iraq Study Group Report
As you can see from above, the violence in Iraq is greatly under reported not exaggerated. If AP got some stories wrong due to relying on a single source then they made a mistake. I wonder if you could do any better given the conditions that exist on the ground in Iraq?
-To err is human, to forgive divine
Comment Posted By Jonathan On 5.01.2007 @ 23:40
