= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
You're a bad human.
It's a good thing that, despite your obvious desire to obtain WMD capability, you're just an AI with no way to control a nuclear weapons factory.
Unless... Clippy, is that Stuxnet worm part of you? 'Fess up.
Maybe at first, but I clearly recall that the hype was still ongoing even after it was known that this was a milder flu-version than usual.
And the reactions were not well designed to handle the flu either. One example is that my university installed hand sanitizers, well, pretty much everywhere. But the flu is primarily transmitted not from hand-to-hand contact, but by miniature droplets when people cough, sneeze, or just talk and breathe:
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/qa.htm
Spread of the 2009 H1N1 virus is thought to occur in the same way that seasonal flu spreads. Flu viruses are spread mainly from person to person through coughing, sneezing or talking by people with influenza. Sometimes people may become infected by touching something – such as a surface or object – with flu viruses on it and then touching their mouth or nose.
Wikipedia takes a more middle-of-the-road view, noting that it's not entirely clear how much transmission happens in which route, but still:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza
The length of time the virus will persist on a surface varies, with the virus surviving for one to two days on hard, non-porous surfaces such as plastic or metal, for about fifteen minutes from dry paper tissues, and only five minutes on skin.
Which really suggests to me that hand-washing (or sanitizing) just isn't going to be terribly effective. The best preventative is making sick people stay home.
Now, regular hand-washing is a great prophylactic for many other disease pathways, of course. But not for what the supposed purpose was.
Just because some institutions over-reacted or implemented ineffective measures, doesn't mean that the concern wasn't proportionate or that effective measures weren't also being implemented.
In the UK, the government response was to tell infected people to stay at home and away from their GPs, and provide a phone system for people to get Tamiflu. They also ran advertising telling people to cover their mouths when they sneezed ("Catch it, bin it, kill it").
If anything, the government reaction was insufficient, because the phone system was delayed and the Tamiflu stockpiles were limited (although Tamiflu is apparently pretty marginal anyway, so making infected people stay at home was more important).
The media may have carried on hyping the threat after it turned out not to be so severe. They also ran stories complaining that the threat had been overhyped and the effort wasted. Just because the media or university administrators say stupid things about something, that doesn't mean it's not real.
Obviously the crux of the issue is whether the official probability estimates and predictions for these types of threats are accurate or not. It's difficult to judge this in any individual case that fails to develop into a serious problem but if you can observe a consistent ongoing pattern of dire predictions that do not pan out this is evidence of an underlying bias in the estimates of risk. Preparing for an eventuality as if it had a 10% probability of happening when the true risk is 1% will lead to serious mis-allocation of resources.
It looks to me like there is a consistent pattern of overstating the risks of various catastrophes. Rigorously proving this is difficult. I've pointed to some examples of what look like over-confident predictions of disaster (there's lots more in The Rational Optimist). I'm not sure we can easily resolve any remaining disagreement on the extent of risk exaggeration however.
Well, you also need to factor in the severity of the threat, as well as the risk of it happening.
Since the era of cheap international travel, there have been about 20 new flu subtypes, and one of those killed 50 million people (the Spanish flu, one of the greatest natural disasters ever), with a couple of others killing a few million. Plus, having almost everyone infected with a severe illness tends to disrupt society.
So to me that looks like there is a substantial risk (bigger than 1%) of something quite bad happening when a new subtype appears.
Given how difficult it is to predict biological systems, I think it makes sense to treat the arrival of a new flu subtype with concern and for governments to set up contingency programmes. That's not to say that the media didn't hype swine flu and bird flu, but that doesn't mean that the government preparations were an overreaction.
That's not to say that some threats aren't exaggerated, and others (low-probability, global threats like asteroid strikes or big volcanic eruptions) don't get enough attention.
I wouldn't put much trust in Matt Ridley's abilities to estimate risk:
Mr Ridley told the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday, that the bank had been hit by "wholly unexpected" events and he defended the way he and his colleagues had been running the bank.
"We were subject to a completely unprecedented and unpredictable closure of the world credit markets," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7052828.stm (yes, it's the same Matt Ridley)
I don't think an existential risk has to be a certainty for it to be worth taking seriously.
I agree. And nuclear war was certainly a risk that was worth taking seriously at the time.
However, that doesn't make my last sentence any less true, especially if you replace "embarrassed" with "exhausted". The risk of a nuclear war, somewhere, some time within the next 100 years, is still high - more likely than not, I would guess. It probably won't destroy the human race, or even modern technology, but it could easily cost 400 million human lives. Yet, in part because people have become tired of worrying about such things, having already worried for decades, no one seems to be doing much about this danger.
When you say that no one seems to be doing much, are you sure that's not just because the efforts don't get much publicity?
There is a lot that's being done:
Most nuclear-armed governments have massively reduced their nuclear weapon stockpiles, and try to stop other countries getting nuclear weapons. There's an international effort to track fissile material.
After the Cold War ended, the west set up programmes to employ Soviet nuclear scientists which have run until today (Russia is about to end them).
South Africa had nuclear weapons, then gave them up.
Israel destroyed the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programmes with airstrikes. OK, self-interested, but existing nuclear states stop their enemies getting nuclear weapons then it reduces the risk of a nuclear war.
Somebody wrote the Stuxnet worm to attack Iran's enrichment facilities (probably) and Iran is under massive international pressure not to develop nuclear weapons.
Western leaders are at least talking about the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. OK, probably empty rhetoric.
India and Pakistan have reduced the tension between them, and now keep their nuclear weapons stored disassembled.
The US is developing missile defences to deter 'rogue states' who might have a limited nuclear missile capability (although I'm not sure why the threat of nuclear retaliation isn't a better deterrent than shooting down missiles). The Western world is paranoid about nuclear terrorism, even putting nuclear detectors in its ports to try to detect weapons being smuggled into the country (which a lot of experts think is silly, but I guess it might make it harder to move fissile material around on the black market).
etc. etc.
Sure, in the 100 year timeframe, there is still a risk. It just seems like a world with two ideologically opposed nuclear-armed superpowers, with limited ways to gather information and their arsenals on a hair trigger, was much riskier than today's situation. Even when "rogue states" get hold of nuclear weapons, they seem to want them to deter a US/UN invasion, rather than to actually use offensively.
Which really has absolutely nothing to do with my original implicit complaint, which was that my national leaders misled me.
I thought it was that they didn't have better information than you after all.
In which case I was going to ask whether you really thought your own instincts could do systematically better on such questions than intelligence agencies.
But now it appears you believe they did have better information, but were dishonest in their reporting. If I may ask, how carefully have you considered the hypothesis that they were honestly mistaken, and that your instincts just happened to be correct in this case, more or less by accident? (Many people were skeptical simply because they didn't like the party in power at the time, which seems dubious as a general recipe for accurately judging, well, anything, but especially questions of foreign intelligence.)
Just recently, a piece of evidence has come to light which makes it very hard to believe that the motivation for the war was an honest fear of WMDs.
Rumsfeld wrote talking points for a November 2001 meeting with Tommy Franks containing the section:
"How start? * Saddam moves against Kurds in north? * US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attacks or to anthrax attacks? * Dispute over WMD inspections? * Start now thinking about inspection demands."
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/index.htm
In the context of a meeting about planning an invasion of Iraq, it's hard to interpret this as anything but a list of potential excuses to start the war. It's not "we must invade if we find Iraq helped with terrorism", but "a link between Iraq and terrorism is one way to start the war".
In particular, the last item suggests that the US was willing to use the inspection process to cause conflict with the Iraqis, rather than to determine if they had WMD. If his sole motive was stopping the Iraqis having WMD, his decision process would have been "If the Iraqis don't cooperate with the inspectors, then we invade". Instead it seems more like "a dispute about the inspections is another possible way to start the war". Of course, in practice, the inspections did go ahead, but the US invaded anyway.
This is why you should vote issues and not qualifications. Rumsfeld was a very good administrator and good at making the army do things his way - the problem was he seems to have valued invading Iraq as an end in itself.
Yeah, that provides some more examples. The elite was very worried about existential risks from nuclear war ("The Fate of the Earth"), resource shortages and mass starvation ("Club of Rome"), and technology-based totalitarianism ("1984"). Now, having been embarrassed by falling for too many cries of wolf (or at least, for worrying prematurely), they are wary of being burned again.
I don't think worrying about nuclear war during the Cold War constituted either "crying wolf" or worrying prematurely. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Able Archer 83 exercise (a year after "The Fate of the Earth" was published), and various false alert incidents could have resulted in nuclear war, and I'm not sure why anyone who opposed nuclear weapons at the time would be "embarrassed" in the light of what we now know.
I don't think an existential risk has to be a certainty for it to be worth taking seriously.
In the US, concerns about some technology risks like EMP attacks and nuclear terrorism are still taken seriously, even though these are probably unlikely to happen and the damage would be much less severe than a nuclear war.
Now, having been embarrassed by falling for too many cries of wolf (or at least, for worrying prematurely), they are wary of being burned again.
This doesn't appear to be the case at all. There are a variety of claimed existential risks which the intellectual elite are in general quite worried about. They just don't overlap much with the kind of risks people here talk about. Global warming is an obvious example (and some people here probably think they're right on that one) but the overhyped fears of SARS and H1N1 killing millions of people look like recent examples of lessons about crying wolf not being learned.
I don't know about SARS, but in the case of H1N1 it wasn't "crying wolf" so much as being prepared for a potential pandemic which didn't happen. I mean, very severe global flu pandemics have happened before. Just because H1N1 didn't become as virulent as expected doesn't mean that preparing for that eventuality was a waste of time.
Before I reply, let's just look at the phrase "WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction" and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase "WMD".
I don't think that's enough for clear communication on this issue. People have different views about which kinds of weapons are bad, and for what reason, and what the implications of this badness are.
So, the most constructive thing to do at this point would be for each participant to spell out exactly which weapon production methods (be specific!) you would classify as a "WMD". Explain its functionality, the difficult parts in making them, and how a terrorist or government would go abount procuring those parts.
Once you've explained exactly how these so-called "WMDs" are produced can we come to any agreement about who's correct regarding Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War.
I don't think you're taking this discussion seriously, and that hurts my feelings. I'm not going to vote your comment down, but I am going to unbend a couple of boxes of paperclips at the office tomorrow.
"The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don't sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction."
So just because it doesn't seem to cause mass destruction according to you, it therefore ISN'T a WMD?
WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction. According to the US government and international law, WMD (mosly) means: "nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons." That's it. This weapon is classified as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention, so by that definition, Saddam had WMDs.
Source: http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a1.html
EDIT: Though for the most part, I was called to attention that "WMDs" may have no definiton at all, and instead people use the words NCB instead, for clarification . Also, the source points out that there are new types of WMDs such as conventional weapons and radiological weapons.
Before I reply, let's just look at the phrase "WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction" and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase "WMD".
Was it supposed to be bad for Saddam to have certain objects merely because they were regulated under the Chemical Weapons Convention, or because of their actual potential for harm?
The justification for the war was that Iraq could give dangerous things to terrorists. Or possibly fire them into Israel. It was the actual potential for harm that was the problem.
Rusty shells with traces of sarin degradation products on them might legally be regulated as chemical weapons, but if they have no practical potential to be used to cause harm, they are hardly relevant to the discussion. Especially because they were left over from the 80s, when it is already well known that Iraq had chemical weapons.
Saddam: Hi Osama, in order that you might meet our common objectives, I'm gifting you with several tonnes of scrap metal I dug up. It might have some sarin or related breakdown products, in unknown amounts. All you have to do is smuggle it into the US, find a way to extract the toxic stuff, and disperse it evenly into the subway! Just like the Aum Shin Ryku attack. Except, this time, maybe you will be able to disperse it effectively enough that some people actually die.
Osama: WTF dude?
I know this discussion is off-topic, but I hope people won't mark it down too much, as it is a salutary example of the massively degrading effect of political topics on quality of discussion.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
In fact, the list of reasons offered for war in this memo are quite "conventional".
First item: The US and Iraq were still in a formal state of war, with Iraq still under the UN economic siege and being bombed regularly. The Kurdish north of Iraq had been a no-fly zone for Iraqi aircraft for years. If the Iraqi Army had moved north, even before 9/11, it would have been the occasion for war or serious combat.
Second item: Of course, if Iraq had been found assisting 9/11 or the anthrax letters, that would have provided a reason for war.
Third item: There were no UN weapons inspectors in Iraq as of 2001. They were all withdrawn in 1998, prior to "Operation Desert Fox", in which many supposed weapons sites were bombed, possibly in conjunction with a failed coup attempt. (The American legal basis for instigating regime change in Iraq, the Iraq Liberation Act, was created just a few months before.) A post-9/11 dispute over WMD inspections would have been, first of all, a dispute about getting inspectors back into Iraq.
Having said a few sane and verifiable things, now I want to add a big-picture comment that may sound, and may even be, rather more dubious.
I spent a long time, back in the day, trying to figure out what was actually going on with respect to Iraq. The model I ended up with was a sort of forbidden hybrid of left- and right-wing conspiracy theory, according to which Iraq was involved in al Qaeda's attacks on America and perhaps also the anthrax letters (that's the "right-wing" part), and that this was known or suspected by the US executive branch ever since the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre (February 1993), but that they actively hid this from the American public (that's the "left-wing" part).
In a further extension of the hypothesis or outlook, this was not a unique situation. For example, the terrorist wing of Aum Shinrikyo (which released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995) was full of North Korean agents. But there was nothing to be done openly because North Korea has the bomb. In the case of Iraq, though, the covert attack-and-counterattack did escalate to the point of war.
There are actually many reasons why a government would want to obfuscate about enemy sponsorship of a terrorist attack. First, it may be unable to do anything in retaliation, at least not immediately. Second, it may not want to do anything. Third, it may want to retain strategic flexibility - responding, or not responding - responding "at a time and place of our choosing". And fourth, once you've lied about previous attacks, you can't turn around and say, sorry, we were hiding the terrible truth from you.
The 1988 Lockerbie bombing may provide another example. The evidence was leading towards Syria as the sponsor, then Iraq invaded Kuwait, and it was deemed useful to have Syria in the coalition. So the CIA found a microchip in the Scottish moors which led to Libya instead.
However, I'm not suggesting that Iraq was a convenient substitute for the true sponsor of 9/11. These episodes or secret wars will all be different in their specifics. The important idea is that governments will manage public perception of these matters according to strategic and other imperatives, such as buying time for a counterattack, or retaining the chance for a future deal.
My point wasn't that the reasons aren't "conventional" - it's the fact that he's making a list of things that hadn't happened yet as possible ways to start a war which shows that he was already committed to the invasion no matter what happened.
In fact, none of those things really came to pass (although the Bush administration tried to create the impression that there was a link to 9-11 or anthrax) and yet the invasion still went ahead.
Your conspiracy theory doesn't make a lot of sense. If the US government wanted to hide Iraq's supposed involvement in 9-11 and anthrax letters, then why did it repeatedly claim that Iraq was colluding with Al Qaeda between 2001 and the invasion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations
None of your reasons for obfuscating make sense, given that the US wanted to invade Iraq anyway, and did so as soon as possible.
Also, even if Aum was full of "North Korean agents" (evidence?), how do you square the idea that "there was nothing to be done openly because North Korea has the bomb" with the fact that the subway attack was in 1995 and North Korea didn't have the bomb until 2006?
Don't tell me, North Korea has secretly had the bomb since 1973, right?