What I thought before the war in Iraq

I came down on the wimpy, "Well, it doesn't have to be a disaster" side. To be fair, it still doesn't have to be a disaster, but it sure doesn't look good.

I have an allergy to most right-wing writing. That "I'm going to tell you what you have to do and pretend that it's the universe imposing obligations" tone drives me up the wall. Logically, it's no worse than the left-wing "I'm going to tell you what you have to do to be a decent person and pretend that it's a universal obligation", but my emotional reaction is very different. There's plenty of evidence that many people have the opposite reactions, but I have to take what they say on faith--I can't imagine what it's like to be them.

In any case, I only notice flaws in things I can pay attention to, so I was reading left-wing anti-war stuff and noticing some flaws. In particular, they say "Iraq is a sovreign nation!" and I'd think, "But Germany and Japan were rebuilt successfully". It seemed to me that they were expressing something as a general principle which was only true some of the time.

They'd say, "WWII was different", but if anyone published a list of the ways that WWII was different (especially if it was published before the war in Iraq), I'd be quite interested in a link. At this point, I think of "WWII was different" as parent-speak--the state in which one may be saying something true, but where it seems so utterly obvious that one doesn't offer any convincing explanations. I try to avoid parent-speak, but even without children, it becomes more tempting as the years go by.

Also, people seemed to be saying both that Bush was a puppet and that he was insisting on a war in Iraq because of his own psychological motivations. No one seemed to notice that these can't both be true. This lack of attention to logic made the anti-war side seem less credible. In theory, the puppet masters could have been using/amplifying Bushes stuff about Iraq for their own nefarious purposes, but I don't remember anyone saying that.

There were some people saying, "It doesn't have to be a disaster, but the people running it are blithering idiots"--I wish I'd listened more carefully to that part.

What I thought before the war in Iraq

I came down on the wimpy, "Well, it doesn't have to be a disaster" side. To be fair, it still doesn't have to be a disaster, but it sure doesn't look good.

I have an allergy to most right-wing writing. That "I'm going to tell you what you have to do and pretend that it's the universe imposing obligations" tone drives me up the wall. Logically, it's no worse than the left-wing "I'm going to tell you what you have to do to be a decent person and pretend that it's a universal obligation", but my emotional reaction is very different. There's plenty of evidence that many people have the opposite reactions, but I have to take what they say on faith--I can't imagine what it's like to be them.

In any case, I only notice flaws in things I can pay attention to, so I was reading left-wing anti-war stuff and noticing some flaws. In particular, they say "Iraq is a sovreign nation!" and I'd think, "But Germany and Japan were rebuilt successfully". It seemed to me that they were expressing something as a general principle which was only true some of the time.

They'd say, "WWII was different", but if anyone published a list of the ways that WWII was different (especially if it was published before the war in Iraq), I'd be quite interested in a link. At this point, I think of "WWII was different" as parent-speak--the state in which one may be saying something true, but where it seems so utterly obvious that one doesn't offer any convincing explanations. I try to avoid parent-speak, but even without children, it becomes more tempting as the years go by.

Also, people seemed to be saying both that Bush was a puppet and that he was insisting on a war in Iraq because of his own psychological motivations. No one seemed to notice that these can't both be true. This lack of attention to logic made the anti-war side seem less credible. In theory, the puppet masters could have been using/amplifying Bushes stuff about Iraq for their own nefarious purposes, but I don't remember anyone saying that.

There were some people saying, "It doesn't have to be a disaster, but the people running it are blithering idiots"--I wish I'd listened more carefully to that part.

Lizards and rock-paper-scissors

biology gets complicated

An unusual game is being played out in the Coast Range of California. Three alternative male strategies are locked in an ecological "perpetual motion machine" from which there appears little escape. As in the rock-paper-scissors game where rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and scissors beats paper, three morphs of lizards cycle from the ultra-dominant polygynous orange-throated males, which best the more monogamous mate gaurding blues; the oranges are in turn bested by the sneaker strategy of yellow-throated males, and the sneaker strategy of yellows is in turn bested by the mate guarding strategy of blue-throated males. Each strategy in this game has a strength and a weakness, and there is the evolutionary rub that keeps the wheels spinning.

The description seems to view the cycle as a problem ("little escape"), but I can't see that it's inferior to species with a stable male strategy. The most obvious thing that could destabilize it would be oranges developing the ability to identify yellows as males.

Lizards and rock-paper-scissors

biology gets complicated

An unusual game is being played out in the Coast Range of California. Three alternative male strategies are locked in an ecological "perpetual motion machine" from which there appears little escape. As in the rock-paper-scissors game where rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and scissors beats paper, three morphs of lizards cycle from the ultra-dominant polygynous orange-throated males, which best the more monogamous mate gaurding blues; the oranges are in turn bested by the sneaker strategy of yellow-throated males, and the sneaker strategy of yellows is in turn bested by the mate guarding strategy of blue-throated males. Each strategy in this game has a strength and a weakness, and there is the evolutionary rub that keeps the wheels spinning.

The description seems to view the cycle as a problem ("little escape"), but I can't see that it's inferior to species with a stable male strategy. The most obvious thing that could destabilize it would be oranges developing the ability to identify yellows as males.