If I’m arguing the truth or the falsity of what you said, and you believed what you said, that has applications to the subject as far as I can see.

Truth cannot be seen without a human component. So if you see something and if you believe something, that has to be justified, otherwise you should not believe it, because it isn’t the truth. And really, it isn’t the truth because there are no justifications nor reasons to believe that it is the truth. Or at least you don’t explain them, if they exist.

By the way, with regard to Iraqi blogs: how do you know that any given Iraqi blog (which has positive-sounding messages) is not part of the US government’s propaganda efforts to promote a positive feeling about the war?

Two reasons.

Because I know propaganda, and if this is propaganda, the home of Iraq the Model would be protected by Special Forces/Rangers. 24/7. Because of the lack of official recognition and official protection, it isn’t propaganda as propaganda should be conducted.

2nd reason. Bush doesn’t do propaganda. Bush doesn’t use Iraq the Model in order to win arguments, he does not conduct PR campaigns with the “brothers”, nor give any collaborating evidence that Bush is actually using Iraq the Model directly. Bush is either incompetent at propaganda, or Bush refuses to authorize any propaganda.

This is supported by the 2004 elections and Fallujah, among other things, and it is supported by how completely inefficient Bush is at convincing and selling his views.

Not completely ineffective, but less effective than Clinton.

I don’t use statistics to determine truth. 5 billion people could believe the US is an oppressive nation, but I as one man will still believe otherwise.

Fair enough, but notice that this is quite orthogonal to my post, as my post was not about matters of truth or falsity but a response to the question that neoneoconned had raised in his comment. He had asked:

“And how do you think that made Iraqis feel?”

Thus, the question I was responding to was did not concern truth-values at all. It was a question about “what I think” about what subjective opinions/feelings that Iraqis may have about this. And I wrote about what I think Iraqis might feel about the incident. Objectively, the only hope of what Iraqis feel about this incident can only be determined with a scientifically carried-out opinion poll or survey.

By the way, with regard to Iraqi blogs: how do you know that any given Iraqi blog (which has positive-sounding messages) is not part of the US government’s propaganda efforts to promote a positive feeling about the war? After all, the military has a budget for this sort of propaganda effort. (Likewise, for Iraqi blogs that have negative-sounding messages, we have no way of knowing that they are not part of the insurgent propaganda effort; we have to take all Iraqi blogs with a good deal of caution, I think, as there is no way to determine the authenticity of the bloggers).

That one Iraqi, however, is greater than your own personal opinions, of course. Which is of course, the point I chose to make.

One opinion has no statistical significance.

I don’t use statistics to determine truth. 5 billion people could believe the US is an oppressive nation, but I as one man will still believe otherwise. Statistics concerns itself with inductive logic, I’d rather use deductive logic because it is far more accurate in discerning the truth of matters.

Polls are not opinions. People do not write down what they believe as a whole, they only write down answers to specific questions. Thus, a person could believe A, but not B, disbelieve C, and then say A makes them disbelieve B. While another person could say he disbelieves A, disbelieves B, and believes C but that A makes them disbelieve in B( the exact same conclusion as the former).

Polls are just pieces to the puzzle, without the bigger picture, it gives not the truth of the matter because the truth encompasses the whole of the picture and not just its specific parts.

Statistically speaking, you can catalogue the data about birds and have the result to be 900,000,000 out of 900,000,000 times that the bird you’ve catalogued is white. You are taking the position that these statistics give you a reason to say that the Truth then is that ALL birds are white. That is the inductive logical inference and conclusion.

However, the first time that you see a black bird, a crow, then obviously the truth then becomes changed. Hence when you use statistics to derive truth, you are creating a malformed and malleable truth, not a standard of inflexible diamond.

What matters now is not how many Iraqis believe this or that based upon statistics and polls, what matters is whether what you said here is true or not.

It probably made them feel what they already knew — that, in the US’s eyes, their government has no sovereignty.

Them being the Iraqis, all I have to do to disprove your opinion is to show an Iraqi that does not feel what you claim that they Iraqis feel. If you want to counter it, you must find your own examples of Iraqis believing as you have portrayed them as believing.

One Iraqi individual’s subjective opinion posted on a blog can hardly be taken as representative of what the majority opinion is. One opinion has no statistical significance. Only opinion polls with wide enough sampling can give any idea, scientifically speaking, of what opinions are held within a group of people about an event, and with what percentages. So, pointing to a single blog opinion is not relevant at all, I’m afraid, statistically speaking.

Such is the comraderie and implicit trust in comrades of arms, the Band of Brothers. Those who have fought and shed blood together, need no written or spoken permissions.

Special relationships are obviously different than the relationship between strangers or enemies.

People define sovereignty as “the power to do what they want independent of what is real and what is reality”. I define sovereignty as “the right of the people to determine their government, laws, and taxation”.

It probably made them feel what they already knew — that, in the US’s eyes, their government has no sovereignty.

It probably made them feel that you’re putting your opinions in their mouth, pulling their strings like the puppetmaster. Contrary to reality, which is this.

It seems that President Bush’s visit to Baghdad has given more credibility for the operation; that at least was what I heard from people around me or read in Baghdad’s papers today; the visit definitely left a positive impression that America is dead serious this time about finding solutions for Iraq especially when it comes to security and critical parts of reconstruction like electricity.

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

When people think of sovereignty as being independent of reality, then they see visits by the President of the most powerful and influential nation in the world as a delegitimizing force. This is backed by Charles’ idea that the US has no right to exercise global power nor influence simply because of the facts of the matter. However, for Iraqis and Indians that understand that sovereignty is a thing recognized by others as much it is fundamentally derived from respecting the wishes and rights of the citizens of a sovereign country, they do understand that acquiring the approval and acceptance of the world’s foremost and lone superpower goes a long way towards establishing legitimacy and sovereignty.

Anyone who has not studied guerrila wars, rebellions, the Israeli fight for nationhood in 1949, or any other incidence in which people had to contest for the approval and legitimacy that the world could provide them, will have trouble understanding what sovereignty really means and how best to achieve it.

> yeah well if he [Bush] had such
> great trust in the Iraqi PM how come
> he only gave five minutes notice he
> was coming?

There’s an even more important issue here than the trust issue. The point is, it is unthinkable that a U.S. president could simply go off and land in, say, France, or Germany, or any other sovereign country, without informing and seeking permission from that country’s head of state.

But, for Iraq, those niceties are apparently not necessary. The president of the US can simply hop on a plane and land at five minutes’ notice, as if he were landing in Kansas, or Puerto Rico, or Alaska. No permission of the Iraqi government is needed.

What this shows very clearly, is that Iraq’s government does not actually have any sovereignty: Iraq is treated by the US as if it were US territory — like Alaska or Hawaii — where the US president can simply fly in and land without taking any prior permission or information or authorization. The lord of the manor come to pay a visit.

Neoneoconned is quite right to raise the question that he raised, therefore: “And how do you think that made Iraqis feel?” It probably made them feel what they already knew — that, in the US’s eyes, their government has no sovereignty.

It was a very, very tone-deaf thing to do on the part of the US president.

DU?

See here for confudes “dogged reliance upon the veracity of well rebutted and debunked “facts”.

5:09 AM, June 15, 2006

Well debunked by whom? Rebutted by those who refuse to provide casualty figures as required under the Geneva Conventions. The ones who say “we don’t honestly know”. Oh but that’s alright dougie a few ultranationalist blogsters have better facts. i.e. the ones that have the same agenda as you.

http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=9349

They tried to shoot these messengers too but fell a little flat.

There is none of the 15 year growing up period in which the Baby Boomers had time to rebel against their parents and formulate a philosophy based upon always fighting authority.

The authority of parents has been growing less and less, so in essence there is nothing to rebel against. Teenagers are increasing looking for more order and authority, in the weirdest of places. If they don’t find it, they feel helpless and a failure, and they either suicide, go on a columbine killing spree, or they do drugs to forget.

Too much order and parental protection (i.e. WWII) and you have the Baby Boomer 60s. Too little order and authority, and you have the 90s gang problems, drugs, and other psychotic episodes.

*sigh*