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Originally posted by Lee:
His condition is said to be satisfactory.

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"Satisfactory" to the Israelies!
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MinutiaeMan:
Whoever succeeds Arafat in the PLO and/or Palestinian Authority will have to gain support from the populace by taking a hard line in negotiations with Israel -- the same hard line that Arafat was taking. I expect there will be absolutely zero progress with any new Palestinian leader; indeed, things will probably get worse because there won't be any single figure to unite all the factions.

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quote:

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Originally posted by David Sands:
He may not be gay either. Given he has a daughter with a woman he married, it's very possible he's bisexual.

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quote:

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Originally posted by David Sands:
That's possible too. I just object to everyone jumping on him not being straight as too ludicrous to be believable.

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There have been other leaders who have kept such secrets before. McGreevy in NJ was the latest.

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Except for the fact that he didn't actually keep it, but instead watched it bust out in a messy, career-ending display.

I put it to you that we can't really answer this question, since, by definition, secrets we know about have not been kept.
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 
I think it's just as likely that Yasser Arafat is gay as it is that George Bush is gay.

In other words, the same likelihood as for any other person on the planet.
 

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Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
 
You're going to an awful lot of trouble to argue that Arafat is gay, you know. Just because someone MIGHT have AIDS. And I can't believe that, twenty years after people were having their lives ruined (or rather, even more ruined than they were before) because AIDS researchers refused to consider that the disease affected anyone other than homosexuals, that you're doing the same thing. And. . . what does it matter anyway? You want to prove that the guy is even nastier than most people think he is anyway? If he's gay, so what?

And as for France being pro-Palestinian, well what of it? The Palestinians need all the help they can get. They've been fucked over just as much as the Jews were, but them being darker-skinned no-one cares as much. It doesn't help that they haven't reacted too welll to their plight, at this stage I think that both sides are equally fucked-up, but I reject entirely the idea that Israel deserves the unconditional support of the entire Western world and anyone who disagrees is anti-Semitic.
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
In any case, while it's true that more gay people have AIDS than straight people, about 1/3rd of of AIDS sufferers are straight. That's nowhere near a small enlough percentage for us to start making assumptions. We're not in "Arafat has testicular cancer, therefore he MUST BE A MAN!" terrortory.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
News from france this morinig is that he's knock knock knockin' on Alllah's door...
 

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Posted by Veers (Member # 661) on :
 
Israeli officials are speculating that today's the day, because today is Lailat al-Kader, the day God is supposed to have revealed the Koran to Mohammed. So his death would be "symbolic."

But again, its only speculation.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
Sol: good point to make about the secret/not secret dichotomy. My only response is that I'm not certain that Arafat was technically keeping it a secret. Instead, he was preventing too wide a dissemination around the press. But I'm not familiar enough with that area of that conflict to say. McGreevy, though, might not be leaving office with nothing. Maybe a mandate!

Tim, Lee, & Liam: let me try to explain my thinking this way. What I'm trying to do by bringing the topic up is put forth all the plausible explanations for his current condition and the way events have been unfolding. I won't say that Arafat being either homosexual or infected with HIV has been conclusively proven. It hasn't been. For Suha's and their daughter's sake I hope I'm wrong. But what I'm trying to get across is that as an actuarial exercise the possibility that either of those is true is higher than I think people are giving it credit for. Were I an epidemiological actuary, I might have put up precise figures. However, since I'm not, we all have to deal in less mathematically precise prose. I'm not reading our prose as giving appropriate weight to the possibility relative to the possibilities that he is suffering from lupus, stomach cancer, or leukemia. Therefore, I have kept defending the possibility (not the certainty) that he is dying of AIDS.

Lee: many people who attack Israel are doing so for anti-semitic reasons. But many other attack their policies out of principle. I have always thought you were firmly in the latter camp. If I came across as thinking the former, I apologize. It was certainly not something I meant to imply if I did.
 

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Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
 
Not you David, but that Blogger you referenced. He seems the type. But I hate the idea that France is to be condemned for showing some support for Palestine. It's a circular argument - France is awful for supporting Palestine, and Palestine must be awful because they're supported by France. France is awful for lots of reasons, largely to do with the French, but showing support for a Muslim cause when a significant part of their population is Muslim shouldn't be an issue.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
No arguments from you that they are definitely Republicans. But my point is that we should look beyond their reporting and look at the source they're citing. Has anyone been able to show that John Loftus and Ion Pacepa have some deep incentive to lie about this? That's why the complaints about the bloggers don't seem so relevant to me.
 

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Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
 
First of all, since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact there's no shortage of ex-intelligence officers willing to make claims about anything under the sun. Conservatives have a pathological fondness for being told what they want to hear - witness Chalabi as the administration's pet Iraqi.

Second:

quote:

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It was deemed better to have Arafat discredited as a homosexual.

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'nuff said. And I doubt "Israel's daily newsmagazine" is a hotbed of pro-Palestinian sentiment.

Third, details of his exact medical status could be withheld for other reasons than the political sensitivity of the (alleged) disease affecting him. The Palestinian Authority is in a real state as it is, with no clear line of succession, and anyone makign a pronouncement could find it being used against him by one of the other contenders. And there's historical precedent for keeping his condition secret - the attempted assassination of Reagan for one: his cabinet wantonly ignored Constitutional law regarding the President's incapacitation (granted with the knowledge and assitance of the clearly-designated successor, Bush Snr.) for the sake of presenting the illusion of continuity of leadership. Then there's Brezhnev or Andropov or Chernenko, at least one of whom continued to publicly rule after his death.

Therefore the complaints about these bloggers are extremely relevant. They're supportive of an administration that publically opposes homosexuality and uses that opposition as an electoral bargaining chip. As if that wasn't bad enough they're attempting to exploit another culture's dislike for that sexual orientation in order to discredit someone they perceive as an enemy while simultaneously holding up the slur as yet another reason to consider him an enemy.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
OK, Lee, that's what I had wanted now for a while. A few short responses.

1. Pacepa defected in 1978 during the height of the malaise when it looked like that side might win. The book he published in 1987. All that happened before the Iron Curtain fell. He had plenty of status and income before then, so it looks less like a need to support himself by feeding the CIA what they wanted than a realization that what the Soviets and Romanians were doing was wrong.

2. "Discrediting" someone is not the same as lying about them. I wouldn't say the statement necessarily supports either of our positions.

3. I suppose it's possible someone could use a statement like that against the pronouncer. Although I haven't seen any other good reasons why no one has come forward for why they won't spill the beans one way or the other. I'm open to other explanations though if you'll post them.

I think you've put forth some very plausible reasons for that not being the situation. But I would not say that either side has proven it. I would also not say that the hypothesis that he is suffering from AIDS has been affirmatively disproven given that the sources are not so disreputable as to be disbelieved on sight.

We'll just have to see what the next few days bring (if it's ever answered period...)
 

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Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
 
It's all circumstantial evidence. "If the shoe fits. . ." say your bloggers. But it doesn't fit. They've taken a picture of his foot with no indication of scale, and put it together with a shoe whose internal dimensions thay don't know (but have extrapolated based on external dimensions and the materials used in contruction), and concluded that Arafat could wear it snugly and comfortably with no pinching around the toes. To strain my metaphor past breaking point, he won't be able to stand up in court and embarrassingly demonstrate it doesn't fit either. 8)

My inability to prove he doesn't have AIDS is of no more importance than your inability to prove he does. Just because I can't provide a summary of his symptoms and a list of alternate causes, it doesn't render stronger your argument based on partisan opinions.

And "not immediately discreditable" does not equal "non-partisan." Your sources want to see Aaraft as homosexual because:-

a) It reinforces their own prejudices. "That Godless heathen terrorist is a faggot? I'm not surprised!"

b) It plays on the prejudices of the Palestinians, who are garded as the enemy, if not of the bloggers then the enemy of their friends the Israelis. Arafat is obviously revered by his people. The political implications of his sexuality and the ways in it could weaken the Palestinans' cause, their resolve, the reputrations of his successors, are miriad.

There are a lot of people skilled in character assassination who don't have anything to do now, for the next four years. They have to keep busy somehow.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
The bloggers have nothingto do with the credibility of the source they cited. I had thought of saying something about that last paragraph you wrote two posts ago, but I wanted to keep mine short.

Of course they have a motivation to quote facts that help their case, but that doesn't mean that the facts they cite are necessarily wrong. A source stands on its own apart from whoever cited it. This dynamic is somewhat similar to the problem Arnold Kling identified in Paul Krugman's logic. We can impute motives to anyone, but that does not make the facts (or the "consequences" in Kling's column) less true. I'd rather see the argument stick to the probabilities that the sources cited in the IsraelInsider were telling the truth or not.

I wish I had more of a background in statistics, because I'm not sure what I'm leaving out here. What I'm trying to get at with the proven/not proven problem is that until you can show that one contingency is not the case (e.g., show there is a symptom or event wholly incosistent with one option), it stays in the sum equation that expresses all the possibilities. The only thing all the circumstantial evidence goes toward is the value that each contingency is discounted by:

(0.X)(He has leukemia) + (0.Y)(He has HIV) + (0.Z)(He has lupus) + . . . = 100%

(0.X) and so on being the probability that its adjacent event is true, 100% being 1.0, 50% being 0.5, etc.

Now it's true that one of these additive parts might be of a substantially lower value than another. What I'm getting at is that all the circumstantial evidence we put forward just shifts the values of probability variables. But because no one has put forth evidence inconsistent with his sickness, each value has to stay in there.
 

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Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
 
But by the same token I can put forward plenty of circumstantial evidence that George Bush is insane. He isn't (I don't think), but it would be cool if he was (until you bring the large supply of nuclear weapons into the equation). But that would be reflective of MY partisanship. The evidence in either case is circumstantial and irrelevant. These people say Arafat is gay and has AIDS because they want him to be gay and have AIDS. The question then becomes, do YOU want Arafat to be gay and have AIDS?

My personal position is, I don't really care. He was an evil man who we don't have to worry about anymore. His sexual proclivities are as relevant to me - to anyone - as his bloody star-sign.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
No, the evidence is circumstantial and relavent because it goes to the weight of probability of each event. Their biases are also relevant to the weight of those probabilities, but by themselves they are not the kind of evidence that brings the events to a 0.0% chance of having happened because there is other evidence that weighs in favor of it being the actual contingency.
 

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Posted by Veers (Member # 661) on :
 
According to this article from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, PA Chariman Mahmoud Abbas will announce Arafat's death once he returns to the West Bank from Paris. However, this appears to be from "inside info," a term which has been used a lot since Arafat left to Paris.
 

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Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
 
It's only relevant in that the evidence has been weighted to support their central hypothesis - that Arafat is gay and has AIDS. But ultimately it's just hate propaganda disseminated by homophobic pro-Israelis, which you're helping to perpetuate.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
I will not deny that such a revelation would confirm in the ideas of some misguided people that homosexuals are intrinsically wicked. I am not one of these people. I have a close family member who is gay, I don�t believe being a homosexual is a sin, and I think sodomy ought to be decriminalized. I have no way to know with reasonable certainty whether Arafat being homosexual or bisexual would increase the degree of danger or marginalization gays feel. However, I think there is a competing value of not discounting possibilities because they are politically disfavored. We obviously disagree on the proper balance of those two inconsistent goals, but I think there is some value in each of our opinions. Therefore, I don�t dismiss yours, but I have seen no compelling reason to discard mine.

On a more technical note, I thought of something that might be missing from our debate that might bridge the gap between us. I know that Bayesian probability theory is a very good way of formalizing the scientific method, which is not dissimilar to these kinds of forensic debates. However, I have not taken any graduate level courses in statistics, so I might be barking up the wrong tree here. Anyone out there who knows more about this than I and can tell us whether what I�ve been trying to explain might use that method of expressing probability is welcome to chime in.

Unfortunately for our invigorating discussion, I just started a new job today, so this will have to be my last regular post on Flare. I�ll still lurk around, and perhaps post occasionally. But until March, this will have to be most of it.

Talk to you in the Spring (Northern Hemispherians) or in the Fall (Southern Hemispherians)!
 

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Posted by Veers (Member # 661) on :
 
This means that the conservative population here has dwindled down to...?
 

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Posted by Veers (Member # 661) on :
 
CNN, most news sites are now saying that Arafat has died. Apparently, it's been announced in Ramallah, by Palestinians.
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 

"His sexual proclivities are as relevant to me - to anyone - as his bloody star-sign."

Virgo. Or Leo. Apparently, there is some dispute over his birthdate.

And I found something interesting about the Wikipedia article where I looked that up. It starts out saying "The neutrality of this article is disputed.". Then the actual article says:

"Yasser Arafat...was the President of the Palestinian Authority...; leader of Fatah and Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization..., and co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize and a fatass."

Gee, I wonder how they could possibly consider that non-neutral...
 

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Posted by The Captain from M.I.K.E. (Member # 709) on :
 
He doesn't know whether he's dead or alive.. he doesn't know whether he's Virgo or Leo.

Can we really tolerate this kind of "wishy-washiness" in the leaders of the world?
 

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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
 
He's dead now.

*runs away from this incredibly weird thread*
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Yeah...what's sickening is that EVERY news sation is treating him like some sort great leader.

Only BBC offered a complete telling of what's known og his life: both his pitfalls and startyliing comebacks.
Man, he sure lost a lot of face when he backed Saddam in the first Gulf War.

Any effectivness he once had at leading his people vanished after he rejected Clinton's big peace proposals in washington and he was just a prisoner since then.

Amazingly, no one's come forward to say what a scumbag he really was: they're revering him as a "hero to arabs everywhere".
 

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Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
 
I also heard Bush's take on the situation, in that press conference with Blair, today?

Bush really sounded like he spoke through clenched teeth when acknowledging Yassir's worth to the Palestinians.
When he said "Palestine has lost one of their great leaders and will go through a time of mourning now" he stared down, on his shoes almost.
Then he said they were going to put more effort in the peace talks.
I don't know if he truly meant it or simply paid lip service because everyone and their mother is saying "what a great time this would be for new peacetalks!", but obviously he can afford to be more generous now.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Everyone involved in the many failed peace processes (it seems) really looks at this as more an chance for peace than a real tragedy.
Whoever can broker a peace now is grabbing the brass ring of popularity in the region and everyone wants in.
I would;nt be a bit suprised to see CLinton offer his name to a plan (along with his forme advisors that *nearly* pulled off the last one).

Sharon's adminsiatration has been pretty damn restrained during all this: gotta give them credit there.
A lot of violence that would have been retaliated against a week ago has been walked away from this week by Israli military.
No bombings yet though: thanks whatever gods you'd like for that.
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by The Captain from M.I.K.E.:
He doesn't know whether he's dead or alive.. he doesn't know whether he's Virgo or Leo.

Can we really tolerate this kind of "wishy-washiness" in the leaders of the world?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Veers:
The question is, what did he look like without his headscarf?

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He would still have had on his tinfoil beannie to keep out Mossad's mind reading....
 

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