gwern comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (364)
Your conservative revisionism does you no credit. I remember vividly the runup to the invasion because (I have remarked several times in the past) I was shocked at the demagoguery on display and the deep irrationality displayed by the American political system, and the case for invasion was not, in any way, 'Saddam has some corroded chemical weapons left over from our proxy war with Iran'. The case was, 'Saddam has active chemical warfare programs, active biological warfare programs, and most of all, an active nuclear bomb program, which justifies pre-emptive invasion before an American city was hit'. (Remember the aluminum tubes? The yellowcake? The Bush doctrine?) Your link even points this out, of course only to mock this without any explanation of why they seem to now think Bush pushed for an invasion because of some waste dumps. Look at your link! Look at what Cheney said:
How does this match
How does this justify not considering "Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD's ... thoroughly discredited"? (Why were there chemicals weapons there? Because, as the Duelfer report would have told you, that's where Iraq was shipping them for the UN to destroy but the UN decided some were too dangerous to destroy and sealed them away in bunkers, after which the site was razed; maybe not the best move, but understandable at the time. Take a look at the Duelfer report's description of the facility's post-Gulf-War-history and see if it remotely resembles Bush and Cheney's fears, and if it supports the contentions being made by the revisionists that 'really, Saddam had WMDs all along!')
Here Cheney is implying Hussein had 'BW and CW capabilities' and a 'nuclear program', which he might shut down, and then rebuild later. Look at the case GWB himself made in his state of the union address, his own words trying to convince America to invade Iraq because of the clear and present danger its active WMD program in the '90s and 2000s (not leftovers from the 1980s!) posed to America:
I watched this speech live; no one was the slightest bit confused by what Bush meant. There was no subtlety. We all understood that he was saying. If you had told them that 12 years later, the most that could be produced as evidence was what was in your link, we would have been appalled, disgusted, and certainly not have changed our minds to think 'aha, so Bush was right!'
Where's ISIS mobile bio-weapon labs? Where's the anthrax strikes? Have they nuked Tel Aviv yet with Hussein-era nukes? Where are their nuclear scientists running a enrichment plant to purify uranium for a bomb? For that matter, where was the "advanced nuclear weapons development program" when the USA invaded? Are "2,500 corroded chemical rockets" used as IEDs really what Bush meant by "the world's most destructive weapons"?
No, Bush was dead wrong, was proven wrong by the invasion, and links like that merely show a modern version of the Dolchstoss - an incredible desperation of partisan types to rescue, to some degree, one of the greatest strategic failures in American history.
(Seeing this here really astonishes me. I don't understand how this kind of view is possible. This is not a knotty difficult problem like global warming, or a values-based question like gay marriage where facts aren't especially relevant, or conflicting cutting-edge scientific research, or some distant historical event from centuries ago lost in the vapors of time and shifting worldviews: this was something that happened barely 12 years ago, that was documented in pretty much every paper and magazine at extraordinarily tedious length, which was discussed in simple terms that any American could - and most did - understand; you can look up transcripts of official speeches with ease in seconds now, and watch them on YouTube if you prefer; the basic claims were simple and clear - 'Saddam Hussein in 2001 was running multiple active and sophisticated WMD research and development programs with many concrete manifestations' - and the failure of the predictions were widely noted within months of the invasion as the search teams came up flat dry for it, and Bush was heavily criticized for the lack of results long before Iraq became enough of a bloodbath that it became a moot point since the place was now a sunk cost. We have countless in depth books & reporting on exactly how the evidence was trumped up and manipulated and fabricated, and how the war was sold to the public, and so on and so forth. We even understand the Iraqi side of the story and, from his pre-execution interrogations, why Hussein was so desperate to pretend to be much more dangerous than he was and why he didn't cooperate: Baathist Iraq couldn't beat Iran in the first place, and weakened by sanctions, definitely couldn't beat them in the '90s-'00s, and he needed Israel-style uncertainty about his capabilities, assisted by his subordinates fearfully telling him what he wanted to hear. So given all of this is in the historical record and also personal experience of anyone who read a newspaper regularly, how is it I am reading that not just one person but quite a lot of people have managed to convince themselves that Bush was right all along?)
Well, there are some relevant facts, such as whether children raised by gay couples end up less well-adjusted than those raised by straight couples.
Whether that's relevant depends on your values in the first place: are you a harm-based consequentialist?
As it happens, yesterday I took a survey ("Argument Evaluations") on YourMorals.org which asked exactly that question ("how relevant is the argument that 'children raised by gay couples may be harmed' to the morality of gay marriage") and you will be unsurprised to look at the results and see that people differ on what arguments are relevant to the morality of gay marriage:
(Green is me.)
Presumably what you mean is whether children raised by gay couples end up less well-adjusted than they would if they weren't raised by gay couples, right?
I mean, to pick an extreme case for clarity: if it turned out that gay couples only ever raised children who would never have been raised by straight couples even if there were no gay couples, then I don't see how the fact you cite is relevant to gay marriage.