Do Liberals Underestimate the Badness of Saddam?
O.k., LC, Rilkefan, the Funkmeister, and others of you guys have been on my back about offering "proof" of my "claim" that liberals tend to underestimate the badness of Saddam. You people in the reality-based community, with your "facts" and "reason" and "scientific method" make me sick.
Still, I'll humor you.
But seriously, it seems like the thing to do here is to step back and ask some prior questions (note: this move is sometimes used to muddy the waters in order to protect a claim from refutation. That's not what I'm doing here.).
First, what the heck did I mean when I made the relevant claim--that claim being, again:
(LUS) Many liberals underestimate the badness of Saddam Hussein
?
Second--and relatedly: what would count as evidence for and evidence against (LUS)?
I'm going to throw out some quick thoughts, and maybe you'll have some, too.
A. I don't exactly expect to find a lot of liberals saying "I love Saddam!" or "Gee, that Saddam certainly is misunderstood." If we did find those things, of course, that would constitute evidence for (LUS). But I'd be surprised if we found much of that kind of thing.
B. Finding a lot of liberals saying "Gosh, that Saddam is evil and I hate him"--or things to that effect--would count against my thesis in a decided way.
C. I guess what I expect to find most is passing references to Saddam's badness, after which the authors go on to change the subject, especially if the subject is changed to the badness of Bush.
That's where things get tricky. Some such passages will have the effect of minimizing Saddam's badness and some won't, so there we'll have to go case-by-case, right?
One complicating factor: take me as an example. I think my credentials as a Saddam-hater are well-established, yet I spend way more time bashing Bush than Saddam. So why's that? I have a hypothesis, but I'll let you think about it first if you care to.
Anyway, much of the above may be wrong, but the general strategy seems sound to me: we need to figure out what would count as confirmation and disconfirmation of (LUS) before we get down to he nitty-gritty of actually evaluating its truth-value.
O.k., LC, Rilkefan, the Funkmeister, and others of you guys have been on my back about offering "proof" of my "claim" that liberals tend to underestimate the badness of Saddam. You people in the reality-based community, with your "facts" and "reason" and "scientific method" make me sick.
Still, I'll humor you.
But seriously, it seems like the thing to do here is to step back and ask some prior questions (note: this move is sometimes used to muddy the waters in order to protect a claim from refutation. That's not what I'm doing here.).
First, what the heck did I mean when I made the relevant claim--that claim being, again:
(LUS) Many liberals underestimate the badness of Saddam Hussein
?
Second--and relatedly: what would count as evidence for and evidence against (LUS)?
I'm going to throw out some quick thoughts, and maybe you'll have some, too.
A. I don't exactly expect to find a lot of liberals saying "I love Saddam!" or "Gee, that Saddam certainly is misunderstood." If we did find those things, of course, that would constitute evidence for (LUS). But I'd be surprised if we found much of that kind of thing.
B. Finding a lot of liberals saying "Gosh, that Saddam is evil and I hate him"--or things to that effect--would count against my thesis in a decided way.
C. I guess what I expect to find most is passing references to Saddam's badness, after which the authors go on to change the subject, especially if the subject is changed to the badness of Bush.
That's where things get tricky. Some such passages will have the effect of minimizing Saddam's badness and some won't, so there we'll have to go case-by-case, right?
One complicating factor: take me as an example. I think my credentials as a Saddam-hater are well-established, yet I spend way more time bashing Bush than Saddam. So why's that? I have a hypothesis, but I'll let you think about it first if you care to.
Anyway, much of the above may be wrong, but the general strategy seems sound to me: we need to figure out what would count as confirmation and disconfirmation of (LUS) before we get down to he nitty-gritty of actually evaluating its truth-value.
posted by Winston Smith at
1:53 PM
7 Comments:
Well, although I continue to be averse to your dogmatism and general annoyingness, I'll trust you on the original formulation.
My guess is that very few liberals--not NONE, but pretty certainly not MANY--fail to acknowledge Saddam's evilness entirely. Some pretty clearly fail to acknowledge it at all (e.g. the human shields), but they're so few in number that I don't see any reason to make a federal case out of 'em. And I'm not sure about their politics anyway--there's a good change they're way left of liberal.
If that's what I wrote (i.e. what you put in quotes above), then my considered judgment is that it's wrong. In fact, I never believed that, so I'm not sure why I wrote it that way. My guess is sloppiness. I whipped off that post in a few minutes I was able to get online between long expected droughts. My bad.
What I believe is (LUS).
That's the more interesting and important claim anyway.
Oh, and check this out:
I was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. I incautiously wrote something that was probably false. False, false, false.
See? It's easy! And not at all painful. You should try it sometime...
Inquiry marches on.
As for your other points...well, they're not so good:
1. one case of the passing reference/changing the subject won't do it. IF such things confirm (LUS) (a claim I'm not committed to), they'll only do so if there are many such cases.
2. The last stuff is just silly. It isn't true that you're only warranted in asserting things you know to be true. Assertions are often permitted in the absence of knowledge. Depending on what's at stake, sincere and/or justified belief is usually enough. In the context of a blog (that almost nobody reads anyway) it's radically non-standard to demand that every claim be researched beyond a reasonable doubt. Especially when they're explicitly identified as hypotheses or conjecture.
Previous mistakes aside, the relevant claim is now (LUS), and it's clearly being offered as a hypothesis.
Jeez, sometimes this sht requires the patience of Job.
Winston,
One thing I noticed is that you have a load of empirical and definitional problems involved with testing your thesis:
"(LUS) Many liberals underestimate the badness of Saddam Hussein"
The most glaring one I see is establishing the default baseline of "badness" (e.g. quantifying, scoring etc.).
Azael,
Look, dude, you're the rudest and most dogmatic comment-poster on the blog. You'll just have to deal with it if I don't always treat you with kid gloves. It just gets tiresome and annoying. I'm nicer to you than you deserve, so try to be adult about it. If you want me to be lovey-dovey with you, then try to be minimally civil. Otherwise suck it up and quit whining's what I'd recommend. Your double standard gets tiresome. Despite your quibbling and disrespectfulness I try to treat you as if you deserved respect until it all just gets too angrifying. I don't "make the rules" around here, I let the community of inquirers do so. But don't whine if I respond to your disrespectfulness in kind. What's sauce for the goose... If it hurts your feewings, you're free to go elsewhere. I'd prefer you stay and be civil, but, hey, I'm not in charge here, I just know the password.
LC,
Well, that's the nature of these things. We won't have to quantify his badness, and we can use any more-or-less common-sensical criterion most of us are willing to agree on. It'll be hard, but if we all agree that (LUS) and its denial are sensible propositions and fair game for discussion then we must admit that there's some way of telling which one is true.
I intentionally built in a good bit of vagueness because it's vague propositions we're interested in here. But, as Chuck Peirce points out, there's nothing wrong with vagueness so long as you're clear about what you're being vague about.
Incidentally, LC, nobody would be happier than me to discover that (LUS) was false. I think it's true, but would be quite pleased to discover that I was wrong about that.
If I might be so bold, and perhaps arrogant, as to mediate, I would hypothesize the following (in case anyone cares):
I haven't really seen where anything Azael has said has been specifically offensive, but then again, I was largely agreeing with him and neither me nor my argument were the target of his posts; these types of things are really in the eye of the beholder, and the target of someone's ire tends to be more perceptive and sensitive about when the line has been crossed into poor taste.
Winston seems to me to overall be a very reasonable guy and so the fact that his pique has been seriously aroused is prima facie evidence that SOMETHING was awry in Azael's posts. I've also learned (the hard way) that things like body language, tone of voice and expression, which are key components of communication, are sadly absent online. This often results in misunderstanding and unintended offense, IMO.
So the one piece of advice that I would cautiously give would apply to anyone, Winston included. And that is, when you think someone is being rude, unreasonable or overly personal in an argument, CITE THE SPECIFIC THING THE GUY SAID THAT WAS SO OFFENSIVE. EACH TIME. That way nobody stews and stews until it erupts in an outburst against the other party.
Maybe it's the quality of commenter this site attracts, but I can't recall ANY time when a poster here (at least a regular) has really gone over the line and attacked another unfairly. There seems to be a substantial amount of respect for the other person's opinion and that's why I spend a lot of my pretty limited surfing time here.
That and the hot chicks. Woops, wrong site.
Um, you really can't be serious about this, can you?
Months of dogmatism, uncharitable interpretations and snideness can't be alleviated with one "gosh-I-just-can't-imagine-what-I've-done-wrong" [bats eyelashes]comment.
Seriously, dude, I'm not stupid enough to fall for that crap. If somehow--and I simply don't believe this is true--you honestly don't see it, well, go back and read your own bloody comments. Don't ask me to do it for you.
And, yes, some of my more reasonable flesh-and-blood friends who read this blog have said things to me like "dude, I can't believe you keep trying to talk to that Azael guy." So there's that...
Now, I obviously don't demand that anyone treat me with kid gloves, nor show me any special respect just because I know the password and get the discussions rolling. Heck, I don't even demand that people show me the same degree of respect that I show them.
But after months of virtually relentless snide crap from you, A, I've just decided to speak to you in roughly the same way you speak to me. If you want to start being civil, nobody'd be happier than me.
Surely you recognize that that's fair, no?
Well, the very fact that you'd characterize things that way shows how out of touch with reality you are.
Um, and it's actually several against--if my reasonable flesh-and-blood homies are to be taken into account... But that's my word, so it can be ignored.
And, just to pick out one tedious point from many, the "Packer validates your world-view" mantra was old when you started it. Packer's book does NOT, in fact, "validate" my "world-view", though I agree with him about many things. The book is interesting to me b/c it's well-done, well-researched, coherent and reasonable...so that even when I disagree with him I find myself compelled to take his arguments seriously.
I don't know how many times I have to say this, but, in particular, I *disagreed* with Packer's view about whether or not to invade Iraq. What, exactly, is so difficult to understand about that?
I could, you'll note, make the same lame-ass argument against you, but I don't. That is, I could say "Packer 'invalidates' your world-view, ergo you get all bent out of shape about his book," but I'd not make an argument like that. Suppose that Smith agrees with Jones and Jones thinks that Smith's arguments are good. It in no way follows that Jones thinks that Smith's arguments are good *because* Jones agrees with them. This is an elementary point, and uncontroversial. In fact, to accuse Jones of such a thing is to accuse him of being intellectually dishonest--a very serious charge.
Note also that your very defense of yourself reveals some of your problems. None of this has anything to do with my agreeing with Packer or your pressing the issue. I think I've demonstrated several times around here that I'm willing to consider different points of view, admit when I'm wrong, and discuss things civilly even with people with whom I disagree. Your absurd synopsis of this little dust up suggests that I just drool over books that agree with me and get mad at those who press me. Neither of those things is true.
What's really angrifying about all this is that despite my long-term and at least relatively patient efforts to take your points seriously, no matter how dogmatic and annoyingly expressed, you continue to be snide and accuse me, basically, of being pig-headed and intellectually dishonest. When dogmatists start accusing me of being dogmatic that's where I have to draw the line.
Even the--by your standards--relatively benign opening line of the first comment above hints at the problem here. "Let's just stick with the original formulation, not a re-formulation, shall we?" Again, just an example and not even up to your normal standards, but obviously intended to be snide and suggest that my formulation was intentionally misleading. Particularly funny and irritating given that my point in writing the post was specifically to start clarifying and figuring out whether or not my belief about (LUS) was true or false, something I--unlike you--am genuinely interested in knowing. Your mind is made up on the issue, mine isn't.
Finally, this is one reason political inquiry is so difficult. Folks who are serious about it--like me--have to try to do with with folks who are not serious about it--like you--making snide comments in the background. I'm not a person who finds it hard to admit error...not, that is, except when dogmatic ideologues are yammering away in the background gloating over every honest mistake and making unfounded accusations of dishonesty.
And really finally: I'm starting to think that you haven't even *read* the Packer book.
And really, really finally and once again: no, I don't make the rules around here.
And finally finally: this discussion is not interesting enough to maintain my interest. Believe whatever you want. That seems to be your specialty.
Um...really? Uh... er...
Hm.
That makes me think I was too harsh, which, if so, I regret.
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