posted
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.
posted
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.
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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posted
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:It was deemed better to have Arafat discredited as a homosexual.
'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.
posted
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...)
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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posted
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.
posted
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.
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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posted
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.
posted
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.
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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posted
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.
posted
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.
posted
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)!
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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"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...
Registered: Mar 1999
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capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
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posted
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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