Seems to me there was just such a proposal in Congress recently.
What happened with it?
Although wrong, I do not feel that’s a unreasonable belief. Like many things, especially in probability (Monty Hall’s 3 doors, for example), intuition seems to point in the wrong direction.
This campaign might not be such a bad thing. Picture it going this way:
Ken Mehlman: The Democrats are saying we should bring the troops home and get out of Iraq right now! And-
Voter: Really? In that case, I’m voting Democrat! Thanks for the tip, mister!
Ken Melhman: D’oh!
Oooh! I got accused of “banality!” And “self-righteousness!”
Look, buddy. Whether we are talking about morality - which, though it can’t be objectively determined, is still a discussion that we should be having, IMO - and moral reasons, or simply about pragmatic reasons (e.g., “damn fool war”), we are still talking whether continuing a troop presence in Iraq is the right thing to do or not. This situation is clearly a lot more complex than being a simple moral dilemma. I would have to be an idiot not to realize that. I would also have to be an idiot to suppose that I could make a truly objective moral argument for the removal of troops. You’re the one who chose to see my statement as “a simple moral lesson,” not me.
The irony of it all is that Republicans just love to make moral arguments for party positions, like this war, abortion, etc. The reason is pretty clear - morals are a more powerful ground to stand on than pragmatics, when it comes to winning voters. By acting as though they’ve cornered the market on morals, it becomes pretty hard for the opposition to take an opposing stance and convincingly take a “moral” position themselves, especially since the Dems don’t know how to use the language of morality. You and I may realize that morality is something that is neither objective nor simple to determine, but most voters apparently think differently.
The pragmatic case for getting out of Iraq now is pretty clear, I think. There is reason for people to disagree about it, though, based upon whether or not they think that the situation is going to get any more stable with our help. I happen to doubt that things will improve while we are there, but who know? We could wait and see if we get luck. God knows that’s been an effective strategy in the past :rolleyes:.
Don’t worry too much about it. UncleBeer is an interesting, intelligent guy, but he occasionally fails his saving throw against being a dick.
Daniel
Alternative solutions to what? There wasn’t anything to resolve until your monkey overlord decided to lie us into a war.
This is just stupid. First, because there is nothing unusual about referring to adult offspring as the “children” of their parents. It designates a relationship, not an age, and it’s a perfectly valid use of the word.
It’s also stupid because the voluntary nature of the joining the military does not mean that the parents of those who join have no right to feel that their CHILDREN are being exploited, put in harm’s way or killed unnecessarily by the civilian leadership thos CHILDREN entrusted their lives to when they signed on the dotted line.
This is an irrelevant question since nobody is suggesting that military personael in Iraq should disobey orders. We’re suggesting that they’re orders should be changed.
The fact that they (like I did at 18) signed up voluntarily does not absolve their civilan leaders from their responsibility to ensure that those who sign are put in harm’s way only if absolutely necessary. Just because they weren’t drafted doesn’t mean they aren’t being victimized and exploited.
Then there’s more to what you’re saying than you’ve said. If the moral argument for withdrawal is so compelling, then why don’t you give us something to hang out hat on? Something more than just bleating, “It’s wrong!”
But since you’ve already made up your mind, and reduced the entire proposition to that single platitude, I don’t think anyone’s gonna find it profitable to hold that “discussion that we should be having” with ya. You’ve distilled the argument down as far as it can go.
Oh yeah, Grelby. You should take heed of LOHD’s advice; he knows, in this instance, that of which he speaks. Seriously.
Let’s talk some honesty here. The Republicans passed a huge tax cut for their wealthy base, then fudged the numbers by saying “see, in 10 years we’ll still be close to a balanced budget because these tax cuts will expire”. They put a sunset on tax breaks, knowing full well they intend never to enforce the sunset. Why not flip the first proposition to say “The Republicans may or may not ever support a balanced budget.”?
Gay marriage. How many Dems are actively promoting it? What was the essential difference between Bush and Kerry on gay marriage? This is a bogeyman issue raised by Republicans to frighten the gullible.
Troop withdrawal. By the time November 2006 rolls around, it isn’t going to be a radical position.
Flag burning. Anyone remotely interested in having a flag burning amentment isn’t someone that I care to get votes from anyway. Of all the stupid issues the Republicans raise to try to scare people, this is the stupidest.
Even if it does, it won’t have any effect while they’re in their riot gear.
Are you fucking retarded, BobLibDem? Did you read anything I said? More importantly, did you comprehend anything I just said?
Because, dumbfuck, we are currently talking about the difference between the Democrats in 2005 and the Republicans in 1994. The Republicans are currently in power and the default election goes to the incumbent. They do not need to provide a clear, coherent plan to keep power - they just need the Democrats to keep futzing around. The point is that the way the Republicans annihilated the Democrats in 1994 was to present a clear set of policy goals and the steps they would take to achieve them. And then they actively publicized this plan. The Democrats, on the other hand, have done nothing remotely resembling that. They have presented no concrete plan of their own. If this continues, they will still not be the majority in Congress in '06.
In short, get a clue.
Guess what! It doesn’t matter! The Republicans can continue to frighten the gullible with it because the Democrats have not come out with any coherent policy on the issue so the Republicans can basically assign anything they want to the Democrats in this regard.
Again, doesn’t matter. The Democrats don’t have a coherent plan for the pullout. Until they get one and publicize it, it won’t make much of a difference.
And yet, Hillary Clinton has just co-sponsored legislation against flag burning. Whee! Once again, the Democrats have no coherent policy of their own. They will not unseat the Republicans until they come out with their own clear “Contract with America” - type document.
Honestly, I think that war in general is immoral, but I’m not foolish enough to think that I can construct a convincing argument around that position sufficient to justify troop withdrawal. A far more compelling argument could be made that getting involved in the first place was wrong, but honesty compels me to admit that the premises of that argument itself are open to question. So, while, as I said, I think that the moral question is one that should be discussed, the means of constructing a rational argument for troop withdrawal should be pragmatism.
That said, as I mentioned before, the right has never let the subjectivity of moral philosophy get in the way of claiming the moral high ground, as they have found that morality wins elections - reason and pragmatism, not so much. I hardly see why the left should not also stake out a moral position for policy positions - after all, many aspects of the Democratic platform can only be argued from a moralistic viewpoint! I don’t see anything wrong with rebutting the argument that “the US has a moral obligation to see this through” with “Fuck no, it doesn’t! We have a moral obligation to prevent as many more meaningless deaths as possible!” For those that agree with the latter position, it is then a matter of which you think will do more harm - withdrawing, or “staying the course.” It is phrasing the argument for an American presence in Iraq as some kind of moral obligation to foster democracy and arms non-proliferation (why Iraq in particular?) that I think is dishonest and hypocritical. If there is a moral question about Iraq at all, it is about what will do the least amount of harm in a bad situation, not about high-minded nonsense like freedom or courage.
Am I parsing this right as, “Yeah, I sometimes act like a dick without meaning to?” I mean no disrespect, I’m just wondering what exactly you mean here.
In any case, it is the Pit, so harsh words can be expected. I’ll just try not to take it too personally :D.
Yes . . . and also not quite. Sometimes, in addition being a dick unintentionally, I’m fully aware that I’m being a dick. In this particular case, I was pretty sure someone would come by and slap that label on me, and someone did - kinda - and rightfully so. I certainly can’t claim that what I said was free of dickishness, either by accident or by intent. So, that’s what I meant when I said that LOHD was giving you good advice. He’s a generally sharp guy and can usually find his ass with both hands. I’m pretty sure his comments were intended to let you know that I was, more or less, intentionally being a dick. Take that for whatever it’s worth to ya. Prolly not much.
In the end, though, I’m glad to see that your argument does indeed have some nuance to it, and some entirely valid reasoning supporting it. My only real gripe, I guess, was the overly simple way in which it was presented seemed to be intentionally confrontational . The manner in which I tried to draw you out a little more, was just a bit dickish on my part.
Carry on. Glad you’re inclined to be a good sport about it and I apologize if I have offended you.
I know Clothahump isn’t worth the effort, but the rest of you guys might be interested in this.
The margin of error is proportional not to the number of observations but to the square root of N. As the sample size increases, there is diminishing marginal returns. You can never quite get the margin of error down to 0 unless you sample the entire damned population.
For example, the margin of error with an N of 1,002 is 3.09% at the 95% level of confidence. Increase the sample size to 1m and the margin of error contracts to about .1%. So you’ve decreased the sampling error, but does this really add any strength to your statistical inference? The question then becomes, given poll results of X and Y and a margin of error Z, what is the probability that X actually leads Y in the polls, and even if you decrease the margin of error, what happens to this probability?
Let’s see.
60% of the respondents said that the war is not worth fighting. Let’s be optimistic and suppose the remaining 40% all felt that the war is worth fighting. Our margin of error is 3. Let’s also use the 99% confidence interval for our own calculation, a more rigorous standard than the washington post article uses.
We want to know what the probability is that more people believe the war isn’t worth fighting given the size of the sample and the margin of error. As it turns out, we can do this pretty easily.
The probability that significantly more people oppose the war given the size of the spread and the margin of error at the 99% level of confidence is 99.999%.
Increasing the sample size to 1,000,000 and decreasing the margin of error to .10 yields exactly the same probability out to maybe a half dozen more digits. I don’t know, my calculator doesn’t show that many.
Clothahump, your interpretation and analysis of polling statistics is to laugh.
Yes, where the repubs put forth a shittier version of what the dems were going to draft and voted their own proposal down down.
IIRC Murtha was talking within 6 months, not literally the next morning.
Murtha also had provisions about quick response forces, etc. in his resolution.
And upon further reference, my hindquarters had obviously taken over my typing/speaking abilities on my last Contract-related post. Please accept my apologies.
Yeah forgot about that as well.
Cmon Rick, you’re smarter then falling for that bullshit.
Let me put it this way;
Suppose you flip a coin ten times. What’re the odds that, instead of flipping 5 heads and 5 tails, you’ll flip 7 or more of one of the other? Well, they’re pretty good. That’s quite likely, actually. It’ll happen all the time.
Now flip a coin 1,000 times. What’re the odds that you will flip 700 or more heads or tails?
Zero, in any practical sense. If you started flipping 1000-coin sequences now, flipping coins at a rate of one every five seconds, you would go your whole life and not even get close to 700 heads or tails in a 1000-flip sequence. If you were immortal, you could flip coins for billions of years, from now until the sun burns out, and you still wouldn’t do it. You could flip coins from now until the universe dies of heat death and it STILL wouldn’t happen.
The odds of flipping 700 heads out of 1000 tries? 1 in 883,283,900,400,058,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I took a stats class once in which the instructor likened polling samples to taking samples of blood. You don’t have to look at every drop of blood in a person’s body to get an accurate white cell count. If the samples are selected correctly, a thousand people will gice you a remarkably consistent reading.