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In Reply to: RE: are you saying questioning authority is stupid? posted by LtMandella on November 21, 2020 at 09:14:52
even when presented with contradictory evidence, the message is still, "obey"
If you approach the day keeping the phrase "figures never lie, but liars always figure" at hand, you might be surprised at the things you find.
Follow Ups:
platitudes are not evidence. Data is evidence.
If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs!
Data was his god. It only cost, what, about 70,000 American lives and 2 million Vietnamese to prove him and the data wrong, something he never was willing to admit to his dying day.
The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?
He mistrusted that "data" but lied to the American public about it, thereby prolonging a war he knew damn well was unwinnable (not to mention the moral question).
What's going on with covid is almost the reverse. Data and advice based on that data provided by the worldwide medical community is basically as accurate and sensible as they can get it, yet way too many fools in and out of government refuse to accept it and act accordingly. The U.S. and many other countries are reaping the cost of that lack of acceptance right now.
z
If you approach the day keeping the phrase "figures never lie, but liars always figure" at hand, you might be surprised at the things you find.
You are and we should all be skeptical regarding the views/advice of medical experts all over the world who basically say the same things? Their advice should be ignored? They're lying or don't know whereof they speak? You haven't yet seen enough evidence that ignoring their advice results in exactly what they predicted to warrant suspending your skepticism?You think the authorities in Australia did the wrong thing? They should have waited and possibly exposed many more people to the virus based on the possibility that the guy lied?
Dunno, maybe I'm misinterpreting. But judging from some of your previous posts it doesn't seem like you had much problem suspending skepticism regarding Trump's lies, distortions and obfuscations.
Edits: 11/21/20
Which is true. Willful ignorance is another matter.
The thing about MacNamara is that the principles of the business world can only be applied to winning wars when your opponent is playing the same game, like the second world war. It should have been obvious. It was obvious. It didn't work in Korea. The French tried the same strategy in Vietnam that we did and failed. We had more firepower but that's all.
The generals were only giving Washington the data MacNamara wanted. Body counts, tons of bombs dropped, etc. Those were the metrics that Washington used to measure progress.
The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?
I'm sure as hell not defending McNamara, who deep down knew it was bullshit too. Just sayin' that in the case of covid medical experts/scientists do have a lotta reliable data. The Australian episode was a bizarre result of a liar providing faulty data to authorities. Hardly the norm or adequate reason to be skeptical about the advice we are getting from medical experts everywhere about precautions we should take regarding covid19. How'd the skepticisism of Upper Midwesterners work out?
The whole operation right from the start, while the French still ran the country, was poison.
Westmorland was interested in body counts because Washington wanted body counts. He didn't have the capability of fighting the kind of war that Hanoi had in mind.
And he was on the wrong side anyway. We were never gonna have to fight them in Peoria.
The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?
Edits: 11/21/20
No question that folks with preconceived notions - or ulterior motives - can and often do cherry pick and/or manipulate representations of data to support preconceived notions, biases, and ulterior motives.
McNamara - may he burn in hell - certainly cherry picked, manipulated representations, and had ulterior motives in his use of data.
On the other hand, use of accurate data to predict infectious disease characteristics has been proven, over and over again, to reliably predict the paths of such diseases.
Rates of infection, mechanisms of infection, mortality, disease characteristics, are accurately measurable. Simple actually. Lot of work sure, but simple mathematics and straightforward medical work.
If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs!
Bingo! We have a winner!
Give the brilliant young man a Kewpie doll :)
If you approach the day keeping the phrase "figures never lie, but liars always figure" at hand, you might be surprised at the things you find.
People thought MacNamara was nuts to turn the trim little 'bird into a bloated, ugly 4-seater but they overestimated the taste of the American public and the Squarebird was a sales success.
Got Bobby Mac a spot in JFK's cabinet and the rest is sorry history.
X-tons of bombs doesn't not = surrender. Kennedy and LBJ should have looked at the Edsel, not the Thunderbird.
But bean, really...you probably should have chosen a better subject line for your post. It wasn't scientists who over-reacted to a bullshit story, it was elected leaders, who are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Call it wrong, people die, you get blamed. If it all turns out to be crap, you still get blamed.
MacNamara, by the way, wasn't a scientist either. He was an MBA/management type who didn't want to be questioned, which is a characteristic of MBA/management types.
The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?
Shit stirred, deliberately.
Just a bit of poking fun.
If you approach the day keeping the phrase "figures never lie, but liars always figure" at hand, you might be surprised at the things you find.
Now throw that spoon away!
And always have a back-up spoon (or three) at hand.
I do love a good shit stirring!
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" -Michael McClure
Did my best to get it off on a tangent about the 1958 Thunderbird, too.
The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?
"In Retrospect".
"The disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. As you see it gets in the lungs!"
They were (supposedly) the best and brightest and they were wrong.
There was plenty of information out there, they just didn't want to see it.
Failed to learn from the Korean War, for one thing, or Dien Bien Phu. Still, the only lesson our leaders have taken from the horrendous military adventurism of the post-WWII era is, don't have a draft. Because if anybody's kid can get killed in Iraq, then the general public might sit up and take notice.
The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?
Edits: 11/21/20 11/21/20
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