Comments Elsewhere

Mike Schneider’s response to my post is a bit strange. Strange, in part, because he doesn’t actually reply to much that I wrote. Instead, he decides to accuse someone he has never met of anti-Semitism:

“Perhaps if you weren’t in such fucking hell-ass rush to slam Da Jooz, you’d have backed up a couple paragraphs to King Abdullah (hint: not an Israeli).”

Apparently Mike Schneider thinks that the relevant part of my statement was that Israeli intelligence is mostly composed of Jews (which was not, in fact, actually a part of my statement as such, although I guess it can be taken as part of the known background context). That’s a rather odd bit of reasoning, though, since the main thrust of my claim had nothing to do with Jews, but rather with the conflicts of interest involved in uncritically swallowing “intelligence” leaked to the press by an intelligence agency that would just happen to support military action against one and possibly two of its three biggest military enemies.

Of course, his article does also mention claims by King Abdullah of Jordan. But what Schneider was apparently too busy to check in his own article is that King Abdullah didn’t claim that anyone in Syria got chemical weapons from Iraq. He claimed that a group of terrorists got chemical weapons from within Syria–a state which is believed to have already had chemical weapons without any help from Iraq. So it’s unclear, exactly, what additional evidence Abdullah’s claims (if true) are supposed to provide.

(N.B.: the mere fact that Israeli intelligence says something, or that United States officials say something, does not automatically make it false–even if what they are saying does serve their geopolitical interests. But you ought to know enough about governments and wars and geopolitics by this point in history to realize that uncritically citing government reports or intelligence “leaks” that transparently do serve the interests of the people offering them is not necessarily the best way to find the truth of the matter. The main point here is not an empirical one: I don’t think any morally interesting questions about the Iraq war hinge on whether or not Saddam Hussein’s government was keeping stockpiles of NBC weapons, and while I think there’s good reason to think that they did not, I would not be particularly surprised if it turned out they did. It’s an epistemological one.

In a similar vein, perhaps if Mike weren’t in “such fucking hell-ass rush” [sic] to slam my reply to his comments 26 minutes after they were posted, he might also have noticed that the following “reply”:

“Do you understand why “most people” was in quote-marks, “Rad”?

“ALL elections are won by pluralities, because “most people” actually stay home or are ineligible to vote.”

still relies on false premises, due to the fact that Hitler did not win by a plurality, but rather lost in the Presidential election of 1932. Badly. Because a supermajority of Germans who voted, voted against him.

Maybe he meant to refer to one of the two Parliamentary elections in which the NSDAP gained about the same percentage of the vote (37%) as Hitler won in the Presidential election in the first Parliamentary election of 1933, and then dropped to 33% in the November election, but (because of the different landscape in Parliamentary elections) became the largest party in the Reichstag. But again he wouldn’t be talking about “most people” (since parliamentary government works by coalition, not by majoritarian vote), or, if scare-quoting “most” people somewhow actually makes it mean “a lot, though not even close to the majority” or “about 1/3 of the people who happened to vote”, he still wouldn’t be talking about Hitler; he would be talking about the Nazi Party. (Perhaps he should have put “Hitler” in scare-quotes too. Or at least done one of those Google fact-checking searches he seemed all fired up about earlier in the thread.)

You might wonder why harping on such facts as these is so important. After all, it’s still pretty alarming that about 1/3 of the Germans who voted in 1932, voted for Hitler for President, and for the NSDAP in Parliament. Fine, but if your goal is to argue that there are problems with representative democracy it hardly helps your argument to trot out cases in which a horrible regime arosein spite of the consistent outcome of majoritarian votes rather than because of them. If you did mistakenly think that the Nazis ever received any kind of majoritarian support in any national election whatsoever in 1932, then it seems like the thing to do would be to admit your error and, if you still think there is good evidence to support your claims, produce that instead of insulting people who bother themselves about such minor things as historical facts.