Kitchener

I got the point. It's just not a very interesting or forceful point. The real point seems more to be that you trust the authors of the notice to correctly do the bit that, taken out of context, you take to undermine AGW; but then you deem them incompetent as soon as their expert opinion diverges from your predetermined view. Modifications to a hypothesis and concomitant predictions are bog-standard in science, where conclusions are typically balance-of-evidence. Haven't we seen enough of this "I found a scientist who revised a claim -- therefore the whole "theory" is WRONG!!11!!" line of nonsense from creationists over the years?

From the Nature article: "Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming." The authors do not contest AGW.

Someone who thinks the authorities require positive grounds, and not vague, general curiosity, in order to search people for criminal wrongdoing?

Relax. I didn't say anything about the CPC. I said that favouring public education is typically defined as an inherently liberal attitude -- as it turns out, one that most members of the CPC share to some extent, just as they share pro-attitudes towards single-payer health care, EI, and many forms of social assistance with parties to their left. In my defense, I said this because it's true. Fair enough. And the NDP's policy doesn't hold that we should have no military; yet they are to the left of the Conservatives.

Quite right -- in both cases it has a great deal to do with how we define 'left' and 'right'. Being in favour of public education is inherently considered a "liberal" position. So, yes, it turns out that a great many teachers in the public system are in favour of public education. It says bugger-all about their wider socio-politico-economic leanings, though. Similarly, favouring the possession and use of a military force is inherently defined as right-ish. Soldiers turn out to be right-ish! Shock, surprise, etc. It seems more revealing to say that teachers and troops alike tend to vote for whomever they believe will most value the aims of the profession to which they have (quite selflessly, in many cases) devoted themselves. We could carve this differently with considerable justification, though. The military is a classic "Big Government" project, while public education is one of the most effective ways for capital investors and businesses of all sizes to externalize their training costs. From time to time I gently needle my Canadian Forces siblings when they talk about left v. right issues -- reminding them with a wink that they're direct burdens on Canadian taxpayers, living off the government nickel, with the greatest and most comprehensive publicly-funded safety net of any government employees in the nation.

No. The actual point is very obvious, leading me to wonder how you keep managing to invent new strawmen to wrestle. Read carefully, now: I think anyone campaigning for the Presidency, issuing statements about the "war on terror" and the war in Iraq, and presenting himself as a competent, experienced and informed leader on both the war on terror and the war in Iraq, should know at least the most basic facts about who is who in those conflicts. You respond that this preference for basic informedness and competence is "elitism". I think that response is too strange for words; frankly I doubt that even you believe it deep down. What, going straight from memorized lines about Carter to memorized lines about Kerry? You missed Gore. Skip a groove or three on the record, did you?

Um, okay. If you can see where anyone disputed this, you should quote the post and have at it with both barrels. Oh, no! The e-word! Yes, I suggested that being intelligent is better than being clueless, for an American president. Clearly this strikes you as "elitism". It's hard to make sense of anyone seriously making that contention, but there you go.

And if the American invasion and occupation of Germany and potentially of surrounding nations in 1945 had depended crucially on whether German Lutherans were collaborating with Austrian Catholics, and if an American presidential candidate (who trumpeted his competence as a potential C-in-C and was a cheerleader for the war) had nevertheless been demonstrably, repeatedly, publicly ignorant of which was which, even after years of war... then that too would have been bizarre and shameful. Obviously. Hence the value of having someone with a clue in charge of deciding whether to drop them. I didn't ask for Jimmy Carter, so you can save your memorized lines for situations when they actually make sense. I'd just prefer to see someone who knows the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites, when he presents himself as the candidate best equipped to manage (and possibly expand) the war. My suspicion is that a residual lump of voters will take belligerence over intelligence, but that many potential Republican voters will not -- and will, at a minimum, vote with their feet by staying home, even if they can't stomach either Obama or Clinton.

No doubt it's terribly confusing. It would be sad but understandable if, nearly 7 years after 9/11, there were voters in remote corners of the USA who didn't understand that Al Qaeda is Sunni and not Shi'ite; that the Iranian government (and population for the most part) is Shi'ite and not Sunni. Still, I don't seem to have required the use of any higher mathematical or analytical abilities in order to master that particular elementary fact. For an alleged military specialist and aspiring C-in-C, who has consistent defended the occupation of Iraq and mooted an expansion of hostilities to include Iran, having a basic clue about who's allied with who would seem to be rather important. Of course you may disagree; I didn't say that everyone has come to think that informed, intelligent leadership would be a pleasant change.

Indeed. For all that he was sometimes accused of being too overtly political, whatever that means, Hillier never struck me as someone who enjoyed politics nor as someone who wanted to do more of it. Writing, commenting, speaking... the Lewis Mackenzie plan would probably suit him well.

The debt and deficit they were fighting were the largest in Canadian history, by far. And they were produced (the deficit entirely, the debt very substantially) by the Conservatives, from who they took over in 1993. They have smaller surpluses, in fact. And they've cut spending in a range of areas, including environmental programs, while increasing spending on the military somewhat. Which is exactly what you'd expect, if the Liberals had been largely devoted to debt reduction and not so much to social programs and infrastructure. Note the date: 9 full years after they took office, and after the military reductions of the 90's. Notice also what the article actually says... "Mr. Chrétien can open the government's wallet and allocate new money for projects and issues that some of his cabinet ministers and backbench MPs have supported to no avail in the past." Like I said.

From your lips to God's ears.

Thanks, that's an interesting article. It's more interesting for its venue, Psychology Today, which is not typically an arena for conservative rants. It's unclear to me just what notion of political correctness the authors are working with, however, just as it's unclear with virtually everyone who complains about PC in my experience. Quite apart from the truly silly evolutionary psychology employed in some of the article's points, the authors seem to assume that it's an article of PC faith that no men like blond bombshells, or that polygyny isn't widespread. I don't recall seeing or hearing such claims in my life, but maybe I just haven't ever encountered the True PC-ersTM. What thoughtful people might have a problem with is Miller and Kanazawa's sloppy use of the idea of humans' natural inclinations, as if reflections on the socio-sexual behaviour of other primates tells us what's "natural" for humans. One thing that humans naturally do, one might observe, is form societies with rules, and one of the key things these rules tend to govern is marital and familial structure. It is far from obvious that any one set of such rules or structures should be regarded as more natural than any other -- be they polygamous or monogamous. Anyhow... it's interesting and I'm glad you posted it. For my part, based on the thousands of complaints about political correctness that I've encountered (including those on this thread), I doubt that "PC" has a general usage consistent with any meaning much more precise than "stuff the complainer thinks is stupid".

Eliminating the deficit and paying down the debt were the Liberals' projects. (I assume you meant capital-L Liberal; the Liberals of that time were very busy cutting small-l liberal programs and institutions as well.) But I expect you're right that politics was the key consideration. It's politically easiest to gore everyone's ox at once than to cut social spending in the name of debt control while pouring more money into the military. This was a mistake all around; as Linda McQuaig has argued in impressive detail, they could have been running only a slightly slower pay-down schedule while funding (socially and economically important) social programs at a much higher level. The same applies to military spending, no doubt. Yet in part this was down to the pro-spending crowd, too, who just couldn't stop whinging about needing new helicopters, air interceptors, tanks, and so forth. It was a lot easier for the Liberals to let the armed forces wither on the vine, when the primary points of discussion revolved around no purchases under hundreds of millions of dollars. There were a lot of improvements, personnel increases, and equipment purchases that could have been advocated on a much smaller scale, too.

True enough. The fact that Obama made that mistake repeatedly, after being corrected on it, and after six years of a sustained intense war against Canada that he's supported loudly, makes clear your parallel between Obama's remark and McCain's remarks... Why should some facility with the most basic facts of a long-standing controversial war that one supports be a "pivotal issue", after all?

Of course they didn't criticize him for being honest and committed. Naturally you might think that the things for which some Liberals criticized Hillier were in fact just manifestations of his honesty and commitment. His critics might agree, in fact; for example, honesty can overlap with foolishness, and commitment can amount to zealotry. It's best to be clear when you're inserting your words in someone else's mouth. For my part, I think Hillier was a fairly good CDS. I also think you'd do well -- in the spirit of honesty and commitment to truth -- to note that he was personally appointed by Paul Martin. Who was, at the time, something of a high-ranking Liberal.

Then why your focus on the problem of proving "prior intent" as the key point? The real issue, in any event, is the attachment to giving one- or two-sentence summaries of half-remembered complex cases, and using this as grist for outrage. The problem is twofold: (1) You may very well be getting it wrong or overlooking the nuances that made the decision the best real-world outcome, all things considered. (2) Even the cases that you rightly depict as badly flawed -- and we have no way of knowing how many that is -- are always going to be overrepresented in media coverage, and hence will confirm the biases of those already convinced that the justice system is "broken". Think of it this way: The headline "Criminal case resolved today; system works pretty much as it should" is about as interesting to the media as the headline "Man loses eight bucks on the lottery". The media disproportionately eports lottery winners, but it sure doesn't mean that the overwhelming majority of players don't lose. They disproportionately report when justice goes wrong, too, but that also doesn't mean that the overwhelming majority of cases don't work out as well as their inherently tragic backgrounds permit. I can't speak to the question of how things seem to you, but I assure you I'm open to any actual evidence and argument. I don't work in the justice system; I have no dog in the fight; I just prefer to point out problematic reasoning based on cherry-picked and anecdotal data. I understand that there may be good reason to believe the "broken justice" rhetoric as applied to the laws, the system, or the judiciary. But none's been given yet on the thread.

Among many other things, the fact that McCain can't seem to remember the difference between Shi'ite and Sunni and how that distinction is relevant to Al Qaeda is going to make the attack ads pretty easy to write. I suspect that even many conservative Americans have had their fill of the Earnest Ignorance model of leadership. He's getting an easy ride while the Dems have their internal bloodletting. But when people finally start paying attention to the history of the Straight Talk Express, the wheels will fall off the wagon.

Well, shouldn't one have to prove prior intent? That's what 1st degree murder requires, after all. Since all the antecedent factors bearing on his intentions when he entered the situation are missing from your one-sentence description, you've given no grounds for the outrage you want to elicit. Got a link to a mainstream news story about this case and ruling? Thanks.

Is there evidence for this claim? It might be true, I suppose. But there's a lot more than wealth in the equation. "Have-not" fundamentalists, I suspect, are likelier to vote Conservative than for any other party in contemporary Canada. So too are anti-gay folks, of whatever income level, I expect. This is all conjecture without some data; but the received view of the neo-con success in the USA is that it harnessed the lobbying/advertising power and influence of the corporate-class conservatives in order to gather the votes of the religious right -- many of whom are have-nots. We shouldn't minimize the prospect that the same strategy isn't also successful in Canada.

What's elitist about pointing out that your source is a self-confessed saboteur or deceiver about educational matters? If you want to trust him anyhow, well, that's your lookout. You could also get your palm read for $100, and all I would do is point out that palm-reading is, like John Snobelen's statements on education, utterly unreliable. Indeed I can. Better yet: I understand it. Ad hominem is non-fallacious when it bears on the reliability of someone's testimony. Since Snobelen has a track record of lying about education in Ontario, and damaging it through his policies, it is not a fallacy to point this out when evaluating his proffered opinions and statements of alleged fact.

An article by John Snobelen, the school dropout named Education Minister by failed teacher Mike Harris, in order to display his contempt for the portfolio? The John Snobelen caught on tape proposing to sabotage education in Ontario, while he was Minister? And who then actually lived in the USA while supposedly serving as an Ontario MPP? It is extraordinarily hard to fathom why any thinking person would take Snobelen's word for anything, and in particular anything to do with education in Ontario. But the Sun chain known its audience, I guess.

Army Guy, I'd like to thank you for your thoughtful response, and to apologize for not saying so sooner. I don't know exactly how NATO's approach in Afghanistan is different from everything the UN ever tried -- which, after all, ranged from Korea to the Golan Heights to Cyprus, in terms of different methods. But I'm more concerned to figure out why they think it will work. That, I suppose, is what Canadians have never been told: how the specific efforts of our soldiers can be reasonably expected to produce a specified outcome within a specified time. Otherwise you get an indefinite mission for no clear overarching purpose; no matter when you quit the mission it will look as much like "cutting and running" as it would have looked in the very first year; and the public won't feel invested in it. Which is very much what now seems to be happening. True enough, as far as it goes. But I seem to recall some positive reporting on development/security work from the missions in the former Yugoslavia (i.e., mine-disposal, well-construction, etc.), so there might be something unusual about Afghanistan. The lack of a clearly articulated mission, would be my guess. It's also a bit inconsistent to complain about the reporting of military deaths, if one would also complain if those deaths weren't reported. Wouldn't that show a lack of interest and respect? And in any case, who talks most volubly about military casualties if not supporters of the mission in Afghanistan? Coach's Corner never lets a death go unmentioned. The fact is that Canadians in general, even those who oppose Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan, care most deeply about Canadian casualties in the first instance, and that makes them newsworthy. That is an excellent point. But how is that work -- constructing various buildings or physical infrastructure -- supposed to survive the departure of its protectors? Afghanistan had plenty of nice buildings that were destroyed by conflicts over the past decades. On what evidence do we foresee a different fate for the stuff currently being protected? The open question is whether some of that violence wouldn't happen at all, if not for the presence of troops. A lofty goal indeed! So demanding, difficult, expensive, that money and lives shouldn't be sacrificed unless there's reason to believe it can succeed. That's what I'd like to see, though. The track record of failures in this regard is quite long, while the successes, historically (e.g., Japan) are few, and highly disanalogous to Afghanistan, and involved military occupations of many years, even decades. Well, we didn't go the moon. But I take your point. The mistake, though, is in thinking that we hold our heads high because we took a military mission in Afghanistan, or we fail -- period. Nonsense. There is so much suffering in the world, so much good to be done, and so many obvious, familiar, well-understood ways in which we could do that good. Feed the poor. Educate the illiterate. Fund AIDS treatment for impoverished populations in Africa. There are better ways to hold our heads high. I believe you! It would be great if this fact could be honestly admitted by our elected officials. But it seems at least as obvious that there's also no long-term plan or answers either. I submit that if there were a solution, you would find a lot more broad-spectrum support for it. As for progress: I believe that our presence in Afghanistan is currently making things better for most of the Afghans whom it affects. I just don't see any reason to think that the benefits will outlast our presence. Given the absence of plausible answers as to how the mission will eventuate in long-term stability, I don't see much reason to doubt that we're just delaying the equilibrium that Afghans will have to reach for themselves. The surplus of other noble deeds waiting to be done, coupled with the circumstances under which we embarked on the Afghanistan mission, make it pretty natural to conclude that we did it in response to actual or perceived political pressure. But the motives of many of our soldiers, politicians, citizens, NGOs and workers are no less noble for all that.

Indeed. But... but...! I'm so fortunate to have been spared your incisive critique. Man, you were so close to giving one, there, eh? Who said you shouldn't protest injustice? Few things are more important, in my books. But hysterical, evidence-free, over-generalized panic is not an intelligible protest. It's just the recitation of spin points from the moral panic industry.

Poor Canada!