August 07, 2006

• I'll bet that same half believes that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. I think it's been proven many times that most Americans are downright stupid.
• I'm thinking maybe now is a good time for the Native Americans to buy Manhattan back.
• It's helpful to recall here that the average IQ is by definition 100, and that half of the population falls below that.
• Dumb as a bag of hammers.
• I dunno, there are ill-informed and lazy-minded all up and down that IQ range.
• To be fair most are probably just poorly informed (fox news) and lazy-minded (lack of intellectual curiosity in anything that doesn't directly effect them), as you say PatB.
• It could be this is a case of cognitive dissonance. I.e. It would be too painful to think that a war was started to find non-existent WMDs, therefore the WMDs must exist. "This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence," Massing said. What's the percentage of people (not just Americans) who believe in ESP, astrology, various conspiracy theories, Rapture, crystal healing, reincarnation, psychic detectives, chakras...(list of hundreds more). Critical thinking isn't homo sapiens' strong suit.
• Apparently you are unfamiliar with the Crazification Factor. In short, it's a fairly convincing argument that you can get at least 27% of the American population on side of any wacky idea, as long as it's proposed by someone powerful enough.
• Sounds more than a bit like Gramsci's notion of Hegemony.
• I think that a big part of this issue is that Americans do not have a source that they view as completely reliable. People used to view the media or the Evening News or the government as providing reliable information. But now the different news networks report different things. For example, this article states that FoxNews reported heavily that recently two senators released a report proving the existence of WMD. I assume that other news networks did not report it that way. That results in people not knowing the truth. When the various news agencies report different facts and the government reports possibly more different facts, then it is difficult for Americans to figure out what the truth really is.
• I always wonder who they're sampling in these polls. I couldn't be bothered. And I don't know anyone else who's willing to waste their time. If I get a phone call from one of these outfits, I can say "nothanks pleaseputmeonyour don'tcalllist 'kay thanksbye " in one breath. If I'm accosted in public, my response is usually somewhere between "no thanks" and "fuck off", depending. I know my ninety year old aunt loves to take phone surveys, but she's mostly blind, has no clue what decade it is, and she thinks that Reagan is still president. I have no idea of her thoughts on WMDs, but I suspect that "what's a WMD?" would figure prominently. Have any monkeys actually participated in a Harris poll?
• What's the percentage of people (not just Americans) who believe in ESP, astrology, various conspiracy theories, Rapture, crystal healing, reincarnation, psychic detectives, chakras...(list of hundreds more). Critical thinking isn't homo sapiens' strong suit. Man, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance so has the answer for this. Classicism and Romanticism anyone?
• Yup, idjuts are too busy worrying about ESP, setra setra setblahblah, to think rationally about what's going on up thar in that rarified air where the gummint dwells. Plus they have faith in their man, Shrub. Not to mention they're too busy fighting the godless heathens that don't believe in Idiot's Design.
• Classicism and Romanticism anyone? A glass please, shaken not stirred.
• *jumps on bandwagon /kafkaf red state kafkaf In all honesty, I think wingnut is on it. Good job, man.
• /me wanders in, and looks confused would someone mind, fer the love o' whatever, explain to me how and where the US went totally batshit insane? I mean, this is just getting way out of hand...
• > Ay caramba, that's depressing. and what's worse, even more depressing: this 50 percent is "up from 36 percent last year"... it's one year later: the wmds still haven't been found. thus therefore by logical deduction or inference and quod erat demonstrandum, more people believe the weapons were there!
• Monkeyfilter: Somewhere between "no thanks" and "fuck off"
• When the various news agencies report different facts and the government reports possibly more different facts, then it is difficult for Americans to figure out what the truth really is. thank You Carl Rove
• You can't play the "limited access to proper media" card in this day and age. Thar Intarnets provide adequate access to many different news outlets (take Google News, with its several-thousand sources centralized in one site for your viewing pleasure), which then behooves the surfer to be intelligent enough to compare and contrast the information being presented. What many people fail to realize is that the Evening News is entertainment, just like Access Hollywood or Talk Soup. These are not intended to be sources of real news, but are instead filler for advertisements (which are what the networks really want you to see). This version of "news" is pre-chewed and pre-interpreted for the delicate mental diet of the average American. Many Americans can have the blatant, honest truth dropped at their feet, and they wouldn't have enough interest to bend over and pick it up.
• Oh, and one more thing: ARE YOUR CHILDREN AT RISK?
• I start to think: could news organisations be sued for presenting incorrect or misleading news? Surely there is an unwritten expectation the news is honest, but clearly the old self-policing no longer works (if it ever did). What about a class action suit, on behalf of the population of the United States (since the whole population is affected by the actions of the misinformed)? Or one behalf of the rest of the world?
• You'd never be able to prove that they didn't act in good faith on the information that was available to them. That's the beauty of the system. News agencies are not obligated in any legal way to print the truth (unless someone sues them for misrepresenting facts, as is often done in the tabloids). This is not a public service that is intended to provide people with necessities, like drinkable water or BSE-free meat. It's a one-way gossip arena, and it's up to the listener to decide whether or not they believe. However, much like anything else, public opinion about a news agency does a lot to curtail any "poetic license" with the news.
• could news organisations be sued for presenting incorrect or misleading news? In the United States, the answer is 'No'. I'm too tired at the moment to track it down, but there was a court ruling not to long ago that the media are not compelled to tell the truth when distributing the 'news'. If you want further evidence, consider that when Brit Hume, star news anchor, was caught deliberately fabricating quotes by Franklin Roosevelt during the push for social security privatization, he did not even apologize and there were zero professional consequences, AFAIK.
• What many people fail to realize is that the Evening News is entertainment And failing miserably at that, too, I might add.
• Maybe a bit of wilful blindness is to blame -- that if Iraq didn't have WMDs, then the war would be unjustified, their President would have lied to them, that American lives are being sacrificed needlessly, and that the two billion a week being spent on this thing could have been better used for schools, health care, and GameCubes for all. But if you believe that Iraq did have WMDS -- and they just haven't been found yet -- then none of those problems exist. Easy.
• Well according to the latest polls one third of americans also think there was a some type of coverup. http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/national/article/0,1406,KNS_350_4888448,00.html
• I've said it before, I'll say it again. Nerve gasses and anthrax are the same category of weapon as land mines. They are for denying battlefield areas to the enemy. They are not for killing large numbers of people. Nerve gas suffers from the fact that its heavier than air and all you have to do to survive is get away from it (or above it). The people that died from Om Shin Rikyo's attack were people that actually handled the sarin, and even one of those survived (why you ask? because he wasn't wearing gloves that held the material next to his skin). Bombs are better. Anthrax, well, that was the real deal in the Washington D.C. mail system, and the only people that died in that case were heavy smokers. It also responds well to antibiotics, is hard to deliver and manufacture. Bombs are better. So the whole he might have had mustard gas is stupid. Its useless. Bombs work better for terrorizing people, and are easier to make and deliver. WMD is a distraction. Iraq was is a forward outpost for the coming battle over the last few drops of oil that the neocons plan to fight. And if you were worried about the third type of WMD, nukes, why are we not in N. Korea. (For the record, Iran does not have them, and is nowhere near getting them ... this too is a distraction). Honestly, I'd rather spend the money on wind turbines and solar cells, but nobody f'ing listens to me.
• Nicely ranted Mord. *tosses banana in guitar case*
• Wind turbines? Solar cells? Pinko...
• Oliver Stone, 9/11 and The Big Lie
• When World Trade Center ended, I left the theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb directing and acting, coupled with still hardly imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and indelible images of that hellish morning. I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californian afternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind of shock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone's movie reinforces the Big Lie -- endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by the right-wing media -- that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Well I have even less intention to see the movie then.
• Right-wing blogs discover massive conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq
• Awesome.
• (f) because the Bush administration is so embarrassed by their failure to prevent the theft of all these dastardly weapons, and because Democrats are embarrassed by this discovery because it proves that Saddam really did have WMDs all along, they have all jointly created a vast conspiracy where they conceal the discovery of WMDs in order to cover up for their negligence. Boy, that would explain a lot. UPDATE II: As Bob Fertik notes, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton gave a truly wild interview to the BBC just last month in which he insisted that the U.S. was largely right about its pre-war claims about the Iraqi threat, and with regard specifically to the issue of whether Saddam had WMDs, Bolton said: "I fully believe that all of the evidence on that is not yet in." Well, Hans Blix is holding things up. Still. Right, right?
• Blix spoke on channel 4's Discovery the other night. I do believe he would have said, "Bollocks," had he not been such a gentleman.
• Iraq war started by dumb drunk. I wish I was joking. This is probably FPP-worthy, but I'm too lazy today. Someone else do it.
• How's that for a curbeball? *ducks* I just can't take the sad reality of the entire kit-n-kaboodle anymore...
• TWO dumb drunks. One of them just happened to be dry. Well, somebody had to say it and get it out of the way.
• It's going to be on 60 Minutes this Sunday: Faulty Intel Source "Curve Ball" Revealed.
• Doesn't matter. If it hadn't been that guy, they'd have found another reason.
• The Curveball thing is an obvious attempt to deflect blame. While they may have used this jackass' stories to bolster the plans, they already had them in place and were working the data to fit the plan. Don't get sucked in.
• Yup. Smoke. Mirrors. Look over there. Not my fault. Something shiny. Ooooooooooooh!