Kitchener

Luigi has, I suspect, raised 4 children, had a fine career, and retired to Muskoka since this thread was last posted in. Necrothreadia -- ick.

From the Vancouver Sun article: Gosh, you think?

The bill is aimed at multiple-murdering biker-gang sociopathic killers for financial gain? That's the first I've heard of it. I hope you're wrong about support for the bill arising from this case. It's a truism that single, extreme, and largely irrelevant cases make for bad law; but they make for bad reasons to support a law, too.

I don't think anyone can seriously contend at this point that the Harper government has lived up to its promise for more transparent and open government. This is but the latest in a string of maneuvers that will make it harder to find out about government malfeasance.

Maybe, yep! But a rather more parsimonious explanation is that I was bemused by the irrelevance of your strange outburst to the balance of the thread. A: "Should we pursue talks with the Taliban?" B: "Sure, why not? After all, if we consider the way that --" C: "BUSH CHENEY ARGLE BARGLE NEO-CON FLYING MONKEYS DEAD CHILDREN IMPERIALIST SMURF!" B: "Erm..." C: "IGNORAMUS!"

What are you talking about? You just quoted me explaining three key disanalogies. It's not enough to just make little words appear on the screen; they should have some connection to reality. When you quote someone doing X, and then say "You didn't do X!", it raises serious questions about you. Except for the key respects in which this comparison fails, you mean.

Hate crime legislation does not make it one crime to harm the gay person and an extra crime to harm their gayness. Such laws go to the intent, not the consequences, of crimes. Typically they justify greater punishments by appeal to the greater harm done by hate crimes, inasmuch as hate crimes can provoke both copycat and retaliatory crimes, among other things. Hate crime laws are not very useful analogies for the proposed "fetus protection" law.

Which person? Which poll? How do you square this with the Environics result that very few Afghans even knew Canadian troops were there, until told? (At which point, the pollsters said, they expressed a high regard for Canadian troops)? I was not talking about you, in what you quoted from me. But you certainly do not seem to be thinking very seriously about poll data -- and what it means, and what it doesn't mean.

What the heck does this absurd generalization have to do with the thread?

Umm... why don't you quote the claim about which I actually inquired? You might then notice that your paragraph has the teensy little problem of having absolutely nothing to do with what we were discussing.

If the person trying desperately to avoid thinking seriously -- and succeeding -- won't concede that a 2005 poll showing 65% supporting an option that makes no reference to Canada fails to support the claim that a "vast majority" of Afghans today want Canadian troops to remain in Afghanistan... it's completely unsurprising.

So, you agree that this casts serious doubt on the claim that Afghans in general are strongly attached to our presence in their country. The fact that 2% knew that Canada in particular was even there at all makes these finely limned poll numbers about what they want "us" to do rather suspect. In any case, I have no certainty to offer. My inclinations are to problem-solve: buy the best tools for the best people, and send those people to Afghanistan to Set Things Right. But it's been clear all along that this prospect is chimerical; and now it's too obvious to even have much sympathy for other people still in the grip of that vision. Painful as the option is, I don't see any remotely plausible alternative to withdrawing troops on the shortest timescale consistent with relocating/protecting the Afghans who have endangered themselves by working with us. We can concentrate on identifying the least corrupt NGOs having the most credibility and safety in Afghanistan, and support them with resources at arm's length. Our current occupation cannot be thought likely to solve the problems that most need solving -- tribalism and rampant domestic corruption. It endangers our troops; embroils us in old disputes not of our concern, cast in a shiny but misleading guise of Taliban v Good Guys; and takes us down that dangerous and discredited path of using our military to fix the Islamic world. I thought it was funny, too, but it's just an awkwardly placed negation. It says that a vast majority don't want us there; it means, it's not the case that a vast majority want us there. (The sentences immediately following that one make this clear.) As a demographic they didn't ask us to go there; we went on spec. And I doubt that your projection of stable-nationhood desires onto them is very sound (as opposed, say, to wanting the wars to end). But if you think that a stable and secure country is somehow less extravagant than a million bucks each, I doubt that you're taking very seriously what it means to create such a situation out of a religiously, ethnically, linguistically, socio-economically, culturally divided country having a level of poverty that makes our usual examples of poverty -- e.g., Haiti -- look well-off, having virtually no education system, driven largely by deep tribal commitments, utterly riven with corruption at every level of institution, with no national or cultural tradition of the rule of law and no national history of democracy. And all they're asking for is a stable and secure country? It's time to stop with the soundbites phrases and get serious about what this means.

Ah. So the quote saying that it's not only CO2 is what supports your claim that the IPCC said it is all CO2. And the quote saying that anthropogenic effects explain most of the warming is what supports your claim that the IPCC says CO2 explains warming, period. And the quote in which they include some natural effects supports your claim that they considered no natural effects! Fair enough. I guess this is "painfully obvious" -- to anyone who already has decided, independent of any actual data or reasoning. In the meantime, the blinkered, superstitious AGW masses will have to go on wondering how data, trends, and correlations drawn over thousands of years are vitiated by a report of an oceanic cycle reported as operating decadally. Not having access to the highly liberating "P=not-P" rule of inference demonstrated above, this just won't seem to obvious to them...

No. This is unclear, to my knowledge. For example. I don't think it follows in the least that we should. Perhaps a majority would like us to build each person a new house; yet this would hardly mean that we should. It's a question of desirable results that solid evidence indicates we can achieve for reasonable costs in a feasible time frame. What a majority of Afghans want is but one ingredient in a very, very large range of factors.

Is that the new math? Sorry, no. You don't get to reinvent English in order to make 65% "a vast majority". Or here's an idea: you could give actual evidence supporting the actual claims you actually made. I'll believe it when I see it; but it ain't my job to try and find evidence for claims you make without backing them up.

No. This does not exhaust the possibilities. Another option would be simply to accept the inevitability of Afghans sorting out their disagreements and finding an equilibrium that reflects (or gradually, autonomously, changes) the large proportion who want (or say they want) Islamic rule. I certainly need not be "respectful" of such an unfortunate, unproductive preference (as I see it). I just think it's naive ideology to pretend that it doesn't exist.

So your evidence for saying "a vast majority" is a poll citing a 65% figure from 2005?

I wasn't aware that this had been demonstrated. Could you cite the evidence for it?

Could you quote the actual passages from "Chapter 9" that support the precise claims you actually made -- in contradiction to the actual quotes I gave from the IPCC itself? Thanks. Yes, there's the conspiracy theory. I'm afraid I also doubt the alleged "facts" touted by 9/11 conspiracy theorists too.

You're amazed at people who don't accept as "facts" the interpretive conjectures of every anonymous internet scribbler they encounter? Huh. Then common sense amazes you. Which IPCC report are you talking about? The complete 4th report has 6 chapters. In its Summary for Policy Makers (i.e., the least nuanced version!), the section on "Causes of Change" absolutely does not say that only CO2 explains all of the current rise. In fact, it doesn't even say that CO2 is the only anthropogenic factor in warming. From p.5 of the SPM: It then goes on to discuss CH4 and N2O in some detail. Did you read any of this? The report also qualifies its conclusions quite carefully, in descending order of evidential confidence, while explicitly not claiming that all warming is anthropogenic: It does indeed mention natural factors, even in the brief summary version, in the course of acknowledging the limits of the methodology in generating regionally fine-grained predictions: In sum, the things about which you seem to be confused, unclear, ambiguous, or just plain wrong are not hard to find. Why should I, or anyone else, trust your extrapolations when these seem so clearly in the service of preconceptions to which you are absolutely committed? Notice that none of this is to deny that the role of CO2 may have been overemphasized. Evidence for this conclusion could mount as study progresses. That's how good science works: currently well-evidenced explanations and predictions might yet encounter better evidence for a slightly modified conclusion. But I don't see much except ideology in the triumphal over-interpretation of a single letter to Nature, and an accompanying conspiracy theory about most climate science and scientists.

Well, "true democracy" can be many, many, many different things. Separation of church and state is hardly essential to it. The dichotomy with embracing sharia law is an obvious false dilemma. More to the point, though, -- that is absolutely not the question. Not. The. Question. The question, recall, was whether Jack Layton (inter alia) was wrong to say that the Taliban should included in official dialogue: "Are discussions with enemy giving them credence or the right course to a negotiated peace?" My point was quite simply that he was not wrong; he's suggesting something that is not only basic political pragmatism, but is also something Karzai is doing officially, and which NATO is doing informally. Even if the aim is a militarily compelled peace, as opposed to a purely negotiated one, discussions with the Taliban are essential. Indeed, you might conclude that your question is ill-formed, since it alludes to the Taliban as "the enemy", without any qualification, suggests that those ambivalent farmers, who periodically dig up weapons at the call of a local leader who counts as Taliban, are the enemy that we're there to destroy, and are not Afghan citizens with legitimate concerns, whose lives we are presumably there to improve.

Well, that's a fact about you. Yet when one multiplies the force of your opinion by the degree of your recognized expertise on the matter, the resulting evidential factor is not interestingly distinct from zero.

The history of the former Taliban regime is not in question; and I think I understand it fairly well in any case. The Taliban as it exists now is a loose conglomeration of people, somewhat organized and coordinated at the centre, but at the fringes manned in part by farmers, herdsmen, and general part-timers who are Taliban when they can be galvanized, and plain old folks hoping for the best on alternate days. Almost every hearts-and-minds NATO mission to the countryside therefore involves "talking to the Taliban" to some degree. And at least back-channel communication with more overt Taliban elements must be a reality for any competent force in the position Canada's forces are in. These are people and movements that have significant popular support among Afghans; any nation-building approach that denies them a voice would be inherently unrepresentative and anti-democratic. Running around in small circles screaming "Terrorists! No talking to terrorists!" is approximately the least informed and most useless thing conceivable at this point.

We talk with the Taliban all the time, as does the current government in Afghanistan -- just not formally. You should find out just what and who the Taliban are, before deciding whether we should talk with them. Oh, and be prepared for a loud and bitter chorus of complaints about your use of the term "Taliban Jack". Some members of this board have a totally non-partisan opposition to such labels; and their use is against board policy, I believe.

Why would you say such a thing, when even in that brief note the authors make specific reference to the likely timescales involved? I think you need more carefully to read what they actually wrote before pronouncing on what it means.