Christopher Hitchens Smears Bishop Berkeley

So what's your point?  Bishop Berkeley would not support an early United States withdrawl from Iraq?

That criticism of the war usually ignores the incredible brutality of Saddam and Sons, perpetrating horrific acts worthy of Mengele, and narrows the focus to our inability to find WMDs--concluding instead that there were never any WMDs, or that it seems plausible that a mass-murdering megalomaniac would voluntary dismantle his arsenal.

Wars are fought sloppily, they are wrought with moments of terrible decision making and technical screw-ups. The word FUBAR and SNAFU didn't materialize for no reason at all.

During the first Gulf War we were mesmerized by the new technology of warfare that was so precise it would destroy the intended building and leave all other buildings intact. In five years of this war we still haven't lost what would amount to a two-day total number of casualties from WWII, nor does it match what Saddam did to the Kurds. In other words, as unpopular as this war is, is it being fought at a level of expertise that is qualitatively different than any war fought in history.

So aside from saving the Bishop from what might be a poor analogy--or a tongue-in-cheek analogy--(which you could also do by invoking modern knowledge of optics and PET scans, or by siding with Adorno in his debates with Karl Popper), Hitchen's point that opponents of the war are also cherry-picking historical data is valid.

I'm not disagreeing with that. Just doing my part to revive Berkeley.

[Adding at 5:28]: Sorry, I read through quickly and missed the line about our inability to find WMD vs. their non-existence. I'm am disagreeing with that. Berkeley (correctly understood), again, is relevant.

Sorry.  But to revive Berkeley, I suggest laying on top of him and giving him the breath of life, like Elisha did. 

Of course, you'll have to prepare yourself for the event that this may not work and will end up being totally gross instead of totally miraculous.

:-) 

OK, Naftali, the lovefest's over and the universe will now be put aright;

"That criticism of the war usually ignores the incredible brutality of Saddam and Sons, perpetrating horrific acts worthy of Mengele, and narrows the focus to our inability to find WMDs--concluding instead that there were never any WMDs, or that it seems plausible that a mass-murdering megalomaniac would voluntary dismantle his arsenal."

Wow, what a congeries of falsehood and inanities. First, I don't know of a single serious critic of the war who denies or minimizes Saddam's brutality. Perhaps you can name one. I do, on the other hand, know of at least one of the war's architects who not only gave the prick a pass but actually enabled his crimes-the name Rumsfeld mean anything to you?

Second, we had substantial prewar testimony from inspectors (and from Condi Rice, you'll recall) regarding  the impoverishment of Saddam's weapons program. After the invasion, extensive searching produced nothing. So, yes, it is conceivable that there may yet be an undiscovered cache of anthrax somewhere, but absent any credible reason to believe so, you put yourself in the position of the guy who claims that we just haven't discovered the moon landing set concealed in Steven Spielberg's basement yet as he blabs on about how we've all been fooled by NASA. We call this variety of epistemological reasoning "paranoid".

Thus I refute you, to continue the Berkeley metaphor, except I present an actual argument, as opposed to poor Dr. Johnson's frustrated missing of the point.   

Without doing some serious cutting and pasting, I'll just refer to your paragraphs by number, which will allow you to gently weep over your illogical assumptions and rhetorical tricks.

3rd paragraph: This was a nice touch, using the phrase 'single serious critic'. Well, name names. Because evidently we both agree that at the very least there are unserious critics who do this. I was going by the news, AP, NY Times, that just don't do very many stories on Saddam's atrocities. Hitchens is the only writer who consistently refers to these. Also, I am (and there's no way for you to know this, it hasn't come up in our knifings, I mean conversations) very critical of the State Department and US policy makers. But this is one decision I believe they got right, although in the normal clumsy way they tend to do things.

4th paragraph: Also very slick rhetoric. If there was substantial (here's the key word you left out, check your closet, it may have fallen out of your pocket) unequivocal prewar testimony, why were all of those Democrats lined up in favor of the war? These reports are written in the most equivocal CYA syntax imaginable. Even after reading a report many times, you'll still have no idea what they are saying. It's bureaucracy at it's finest, or lowest, depending upon your point of view.

The credible reason to believe that there might be WMDs somewhere is Saddam himself. I just don't see him sitting around the dinner table lamenting that the whole corruption, intimidation, torture thing is getting kind of old, that maybe he should just retire, you know Uday, it's just not like it was in the old days.

And then you just call me paranoid. Like the Kurds, I'm paranoid of Saddam. Yeah, sure. No reason at all to think a dangerous, evil man will continue to be dangerous and evil.

Thus, if you would only use your ability to reason for the forces of truth, then you would.....agree with me.

Oh yeah, the elephant in the room that you overlooked. Wasn't I just clarifying Hitchen's position. Didn't I do that? Admit it, go ahead, I did clarify his position.

In order of your comments:

1. You are not seriously suggesting that the US media has been derelict in adequately portraying Saddam's bestiality, are you? That we must rely upon the pathetic tippler Hitchens for an accurate picture of his atrocities? I'd bet my bottom piaster that the average American has no other descriptor for Saddam than "murderous dictatorial thug". Do you doubt this? Do you imagine that the average US citizen knows if he was Shia or Sunni, knows what his economic policies were, has any understanding of his political history, etc. No, for most of us, Saddam=torture freak. Could this be due to the press's dereliction of duty regarding the reporting of his crimes?

2. Nothing slick at all. The question of why all those Democrats were lined up to support the war is an excellent one, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the merits of the case for the vaporous WMDs. If it had, why did those same Dems continue to support the war even after each sham excuse for the barbaric attack against Iraq fell, one after another? (And yes, I know they presented an anemic and largely rhetorical "opposition", but their hearts were revealed in their continued funding of the war and their support of the ancillary assaults on our freedom the war gave cover for.)

For a fuller explanation of the behavior of this pusillanimous "opposition" party, see Nader, Ralph.

By the way, evidence needn't be "unequivocal" to be persuasive; I'd say that most of the time, "robust" or "convincing' will do-wouldn't you? No straw men, please. Fire hazard.

You do suggest a novel standard for underwriting substantive political beliefs; the depth of your adversary's malevolence. Since Saddam was a monster, any charge against him, even if no shred of empirical evidence supports it, may be presumed true.

Which leads to the "paranoid' remark. If you're capable of reading my comment carefully, you'll note that I was making a point about epistemology; that is, you claimed that there may well be WMDs not discovered, despite a rather robust search turning up nothing. Is it really so hard to see the relationship between this posture and the paranoid who will not let evidence get in way of his idee fixe? "I saw the Martian over there" "We checked-no Martian."  "He's hiding under the rock" "We moved the rock-no Martian." "They carry invisibility tablets", and so on.

Of course it's logically possible that we missed them. But all the evidence says no. Do you have any reason to doubt the evidence? Well, yes, Saddam was the sort who'd have weapons and hide them so well that no one could find them. What conceivable observation would shake your obsessional belief? From where I sit, none.

As I said, paranoid. 

QED 

Actually, in the second section of the Groundwork, Kant wrote, "Whoever wills the end, inasmuch as he wills rationally, wills also the indispensably necessary means to it..."

That is what makes hypothetical imperatives "analytic," as opposed to categorical imperatives, which are "synthetic": the concept of willing some hypothetical end already contains within it (i.e. without the need of an inferential middle term) the notion of willing the means to achieve that end. Joffe is just expressing the contrapositive of Kant's claim, and is therefore justified in calling it a "Kantianism."

[Whoops, that's what I deserve for going too confidently outside my specialization. --DK]

1. You just proved my point, that there has been very little written about Saddam and the atrocities he committed. There are plenty of Iraqis, (if they haven't been blown to bits by the 'insurgents' looking out for their interests to end the occupation by blowing up the natives) missing an ear, a hand, a tongue, you know--the kind of truthful details that would make us actually understand the depth of Saddam's depravity. Didn't CNN make a deal with Saddam, not to report the brutality in order to keep a bureau open? (The answer is yes, as if you didn't know.)

2. You're going to have to define barbaric if the things Zarqawi did are not on top of the list. The barbarism--if you define it as pointless and willful slaughter of civilians-- was done by those fighting the US. Anyway, you toss out a definition, which should fly like a lead kite.

I'm saying that the way those reports are written, you can't even get to robust or convincing. There is concrete evidence definitely for, followed by a clause of caution in drawing a conclusion. It's like reading a book report from Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.

If you're going to look for empirical evidence, then look for it. No one checked Syria, or Lebanon, which would be my first two guesses. Looking in Iraq is like the old joke about the guy looking for his car keys. I don't consider the search to be robust at all. I think Saddam just outsmarted us while the US diddled for 6 months going through the Security Council--which had been corrupted by Saddam. There is plenty of possible evidence that could change my mind, besides a good thorough search of Syria and Lebanon. I'd be very interested to see what kind of records were kept about a program that existed--at least everyone in government thought it existed--in 1998. An order from Saddam to dismantle the weapons written in, oh, 2000, would work wonders for me.

I don't think there is enough evidence to draw a conclusion, epistemologically speaking.

And are you saying that Saddam wasn't a monster? This isn't going to be fun if you retreat into denial.

'Paranoid' is if I go to the mailbox one day and find a letter opened, as if the glue on the envelope failed, and I draw the conclusion that you, dear Issy, have managed to come all the way from wherever to open one envelope just to irritate me, because you have a elaborate plot to irritate me in subtle ways, other than making me waste time with your weak arguments, of course.

But assuming that a person will act today in the same way that he has acted since he was a murderous teenager, not so irrational.

I've said it before, but your arguments would be so much stronger if you gave a rat's tuches about the truth. And for this I'm missing CSI: Miami.

That was my 200th comment.  I should have ended with a better joke.

Brave Naftali! Insuring that we benighted saps, who regularly sing paeans to Saddam's generosity and benevolence, awaken from our slumbers to the true depth of his infamy!

You really want to stick to this fairy tale of insufficient awareness of Saddam's brutality, don't you? Fascinating. And it really is your mission to supply the American public with the info re his brutality they so clearly lack. Good for you, and I understand that there are numerous Inuit in need of refrigerators. Here is a position for a lad of your bent! Go sell 'em!

Regarding barbarism, I'd say that term perfectly describes the overall US posture towards Iraq, from Clinton's bombing runs and sanctions which murdered-what?-100,00? 150,000?-innocents, and over which Madeleine Albright forever disgraced herself by losing no sleep, to the series of fabricated rationales for Bush's unbridled aggression (WMDs, Al Qaeda, yellowcake, the Chicago fire, the sinking of the Lusitania....all proof of Saddam's infernal designs), and on and on.

I note parenthetically the blindingly senseless trope, so enamored of apologists for Israel and trotted out here to perform similar noxious duty, of responding to claims of barbarity by pointing to an arguably worse actor-in this case, Zarqawi-to deflect attention from the issue at hand. I've provided tutelage in the bankruptcy of this smarmy gambit before, so for now let's just say that every schoolyard has room for more than one bully and this pedestrian fact in no way exculpates either of them.

You: "And are you saying that Saddam wasn't a monster?"

Me : "First, I don't know of a single serious critic of the war who denies or minimizes Saddam's brutality."

This would suggest to the average rational person that I think Saddam was brutal. I also referred to his crimes, to his bestiality, his atrocities. Again, there's nothing startling about this-all sensible people, regardless of their position on the US aggression against Iraq, know that there's no question about Saddam's thuggishness. You know this, of course, yet you insist on bemoaning America's ignorance of his crimes, for reasons I can't fathom without resort to clinical categories. 

By the way, what accounts for your own soft-on-terrorism stance? Why stop at Lebanon and Syria? Perhaps the wily Arabs have cached those elusive weapons in Detroit, where they flourish. Maybe Atlantis? Narnia? Pluto?

As I said, paranoid. 

Incidentally, you claim that your penultimate comment was your 200th; the counter by your name says 202. Who's wrong?

And I wouldn't worry about coming up with better jokes. I found the body of your comment exceedingly funny, losing steam only with the forced "CSI" remark.

So, keep on churning out your risible takes on geopolitics, and by all means don't let your writing interfere with your TV watching, an activity for which the evidence suggests you are far better suited. 

And to think I was under the impression that when you write this stuff you somehow foam at the mouth. Silly me. But it is now clear why you write on the Jewish site. Your comic timing is lousy, you can't set up a punchline if your life depended upon it. So, of course, hang out with Jews. The ladies love a sense of humor.

Regarding the cataloging of Saddam's brutality. Remember the thread? Or do we have to use clinical terms for everything here--and I say you have ADHD or something. That's funny. Actually it's not and I certainly don't want to confuse you if you are really here for the instruction on humor.

So back to Saddam and the thread. That's what Hitchens does so well. He remembers everything. And surely you wouldn't compare a normal story by a corrupted CNN to anything Hitchens writes. He makes them all look like rank amateurs. Hitchens does the details. I could say that people have lost fingers and have had their bones drilled--but Hitchens knows their names and their stories. That's good reporting. And I don't think there's been enough of that kind of reporting in the mainstream media. But perhaps that's why Hitchens is Hitchens--he does his homework (hint hint).

I would love to see the same type of details come out about Mugabe--in the mainstream press.

Let's see, I asked you to define barbarism--how'd you do on that? Nada. Now you call me soft on terrorism. Of course, I would ask you to do what the UN won't, which is to define terrorism. I'll ask, but... we both know how far that's going to go. But oddly enough you seem to acknowledge that it is a problem that also exists in Syria and Lebanon, and that there are pockets of it in Detroit--I'm flattered that you think I know how to solve it.

Didn't you say no straw men? Wasn't that one of your ground rules? Evidently you would like that to apply to me but not you. Narnia? Atlantis? Pluto? Fire hazard dude. Or will you parse and say no, that's reductio ad absurdum? In English, straw man.

How hard is it to figure out how these counters work? I wrote my 200th comment, and then right after that I wrote my 201st. They all go up whenever I post. My goodness, if you can't even be honest about that. And when I post this, everywhere I post or have posted will tally up by one more. And for some reason it's too much of a stretch for you to imagine if my count is 203 that 200 came shortly before that? Really.

So let's sum up, shall we? The main article was about Christopher Hitchens, and you have brought it all the way to the Jewcy comments tally. And you somehow think this demonstrates your argumentative skill?

Dude.

Dear Naftali, you're getting more scattered as we go on. Lest continued debate unhinge you further, I'll restrict myself to two comments:

1. Many thanks for the correction re the counter. You are right and I should have seen what you generously pointed out.

2. "Straw man" is not English for "reductio ad absurdum". When one sets up a straw man, one is arguing against a position that one's adversary doesn't hold. Unlike a "straw man" argument, which is a scurrilous or dense response to one's adversary, a reductio is a perfectly legitimate logical operation. Briefly, a reductio demonstrates that adopting one's adversary's premise leads to a preposterous conclusion, thereby demonstrating the poverty of the premise. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Don't let my pointing out this solecism of yours dispirit you. Continue your studies, apply yourself with determination, and I'm sure you will achieve adequacy.  

Write if you calm down, and good luck.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQoP9RrZcDM

Nothing to see here... Everything's fine!

Just read the thread, I simply responded to your own words, the points of your own essays. I just didn't cut and paste.

I know the difference between redctio and strawman--but which one of us first said, Narnia, Pluto, Atlantis. It's hard to tell the difference between straw man and reductio the way you use them, both in a dishonest way.

All of this has nothing to do with the thread, which you keep losing. Anyway, let's wait for another moment to fight. I think this one's over. In the meantime, try to figure out how you got from Hitchens to the Jewcy comment counter--Mr. Call the Other Person Scattered.

Oh, and if we don't attack each other tomorrow, Happy Purim.

Is your good fellowship genuine, or just anticipatory Purimspiel? Oh, wait...now I'm being paranoid.

Cheers to you as well, and perhaps we can at least agree that the media have shamefully underreported the wickedness of Haman. 

Thank goodness for the History Channel and the Nazi's arrogance on the need to document and film every breath they took.