When "Give Peace A Chance" Becomes "Killing Me Softly" (Trees And Things)

WMK: ...denounce the pacifists...etcetera...

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 08:35:00 EST

Hi Gerrymander! (and all Neocon stalwarts out there dreaming of the perfect world made safe for fee markets and 'muscular' capitalism if only those crybaby anti-war bitches would STFU!!!)

Herman Goering and Joseph Goebbels called - they want their ideas

stogie: Re: Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:52:24 EST

Jon Stewart points out that the US has said that it will leave when terrorism decreases. Assuming that this statement is true (as Jon Stewart and Tony Snow do) and that terrorists are rational, the only possible conclusion is that a rational terro

PenitenziAgite: Re: whiplash indeed

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:11:11 EST
Yes, but the paper itself claims in its first conclusion that public debate itself directs insurgent operations. That could be something like: "Iraq: Should we stay for 100 years, or 150?".
This paper is just junk. The Robert Wood Johnson Fo

Shy Elf: Re: Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:29:44 EST
This quote I thought (even on first reading) was the best part of the paper. It destroys the main arguments of the paper, and the paper makes no reply. To quote the paper (I had a bit of a laugh at this line)
In this model, both the

PenitenziAgite: Re: Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:15:35 EST
Once again, if i was trying to help the authors out, I would encourage them to leave it out. It doesn't add anything, but it does hurt the author's case.

MayorBob: To be fair.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:24:56 EST
They did put the Onion cites in the footnotes and they did try to limit the number of Chortler cites in the report.

port1080: Re: Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:06:05 EST
I can be acceptable to cite popular TV shows in academic papers, but it depends on the context - for example, if you want to make the point that a certain topic is getting wide spread coverage, it would be acceptable to say something like "Subject X was co

Lou: Re: Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:27:37 EST
Citations from 'The Daily Show'
I'll have to go back and read the paper more carefully...but I still have to ask...Did they really cite the Daily Show? Jon Stewart...parody..."Mess-o-tomania"...Comedy Central?
Don't get me wrong.

Shy Elf: Re: ...somewhat more closely to the Geneva...

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:37:53 EST
As bad as the Iraq Body Count website is as a statistical source of civilian casualties, it's the best information out there because the Iraqi government deliberately stopped releasing statistics so as to avoid drawing media attention. It's accuracy

3fingerspointback: ...somewhat more closely to the Geneva...

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:13:28 EST
The authors of the study took their data for civilian deaths in Iraq from the Iraq Body Count website, which tracks media reports. It seems more likely to me that what is really being measured in that block quote is the propensity of American deaths to ov

JimmyHavok: Re: whiplash indeed

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:24:59 EST
CNN at least was rather ubiquitously viewed
So...the Iraqi insurgents would watch CNN, and say "Hmm, not much opposition to the war this week...perhaps I won't kill anyone today." Now we're getting a causal chain going.

JimmyHavok: Re: unanswered questions

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:20:10 EST
Second, how can you presume to put those deaths on the people who are saying we never should have gone there in the first place and not where they belong, on those who ignored all intelligence (in both senses of the word) and reason to invade a country

PenitenziAgite: Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:07:24 EST
First of all, this paper "confirms" nothing.
To be critical, I can point out a few methodological hitches. Their rational model of insurgent behavior is entirely speculative. It is actually based on criminal violence models based on U.S. soc

Shy Elf: Re: whiplash indeed

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:19:25 EST
CNN at least was rather ubiquitously viewed by at least those Iraqis with satellite dishes for much of the study period. The strict censorship in Iraq and elsewhere in the Mideast left only CNN and Al Jazeera as reasonably trustworthy sources of news

DEMachina: unanswered questions

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:43:08 EST
First, as those upthread have pointed out, removing Baghdad from the calculations is disingenuous at best.
Second, as Shy Elf said above, some of this might have to do with media attention. If the insurgents really are paying attention to U

JimmyHavok: Re: whiplash indeed

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:38:44 EST
You are claiming a causal link between anti-war speech in the US and violence in Iraq. I find it doubtful that Iraqi insurgents pay any significant attention to the US news media...however, I'm willing to be persuaded by actual evidence. Statis

gerrymander: Re: whiplash indeed

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:05:08 EST
Suddenly correlation equals causation.
Nope. Correlation is still correlation. Speaking in the United States about the war does not force non-US agents in Iraq to act. Speaking, however, apparently can create a short-horizon chance for third part

JimmyHavok: whiplash indeed

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:55:42 EST
Suddenly correlation equals causation. I can't keep up, is there an RSS feed somewhere that can help?

Shy Elf: Re: about gave me whiplash

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:19:42 EST
The point is that this is a good reason to report results for Baghdad separately, but as a result for not reporting results for Baghdad at all, it is bullshit. The same can be said about the non-reporting of results for areas with "low" prevalence of

Shy Elf: Re: about gave me whiplash

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:02:02 EST
In other words, Baghdad gave the wrong answer?

gerrymander: Re: about gave me whiplash

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:58:59 EST
Whats the point of a study which maps correlation (already a tenuous modeling concept) between violence and news coverage when it ignores the center of violence?
I'll let the authors answer this one:
From column (3) in table 1, i

Shy Elf: Re: about gave me whiplash

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:54:46 EST
The violence in Baghdad is of a different type. In Baghdad, it's been more sectarian violence with little response to news. The more "insurgent" type of attacks have until recently been concentrated elsewhere, and the satellite dish test does a

uncarved block: Yep

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:52:46 EST
It will be interesting to research the reception the methodology of this report in contrast to the reception given that report a year or so ago trying to measure the number of Iraqi civilian casualties. I have a hunch that there will be a high

port1080: Re: about gave me whiplash

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:35:39 EST
The only reason I can think of to exclude Baghdad is that perhaps there is simply so much violence in Baghdad that it serves as background noise which wipes out any statistical meaning when the other violence is considered in. I think it's quite reasonab

Lou: Give me a break

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:10:21 EST
Funny how the neocons practically ignored every piece of informed data that said we shouldn't go to war in Iraq...but one small and possible flawed (as Wetkarma pointed out) study comes out and all of a sudden it's treated as Moses and the Tablet.

wetkarma: about gave me whiplash

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:58:55 EST
So I'm here nodding my head and thinking to myself "I'm going to have to print this study out and take it with for the train ride this afternono"...and then I come across the "violence in Baghdad was excluded from the results" line.
Sorry? What?
Isn'