Libyan no-fly zones, a dialogue
JIM-BOB: I think you should get a little bit pregnant.
CHUCKLES: It is impossible to get "a little bit pregnant".
JIM-BOB: But babies are wonderful! If we don't have a baby, our lives will be empty!
CHUCKLES: We do not have the room or money to bring up a child.
JIM-BOB: whoa whoa whoa! I didn't say we should have a baby! That would be a terrible idea! I just said you should get a little bit pregnant.
CHUCKLES: Well, it frankly did sound to me like that was what you were arguing but anyway my original point stands; you cannot be a little bit pregnant.
JIM-BOB: You're just dismissing the idea out of hand! How about our friend Jellica? She got a little bit pregnant and it was fine!
CHUCKLES: No, Jellica got pregnant, accidentally, and then had an abortion. And it wasn't fine, it was pretty awful for her.
JIM-BOB: But I really want a baby! And because I want a baby so much, and I know that it would be an awful decision for us to have a baby, I think the best solution is for you to get a little bit pregnant.
CHUCKLES: It is not possible to be "a little bit pregnant".
JIM-BOB: Why do you keep misinterpreting me?!!!!
(Peter Galbraith is excused this one, as he has made an attempt, albeit one that didn't convince me, to explain why he thinks that there is some possibility to have some of the benefits of an armed occupation without any of the costs. But the general run of debate has been that classic schema of argument that you hear over and over again in politics and never in economics: Q: "this is not possible", A: "but not having it would be really bad", Q: "Okay it's possible then".)
"We did [a no-flight zone] for a long time and quite successfully..."
ReplyDeleteGuess who/where.
Suspect the "never in economics" claim only works via a tacit restriction of what counts as "in economics". I bet you can find any number of dodgy justification of economic policy decisions that have just this form, but then they count as "in politics". Yes?
ReplyDeleteMcCain and Lieberman made my mind up for me right off at the beginning.
ReplyDeleteSomebody very clever once said "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance". It seems there may be a very unsavory corollary.
ReplyDeleteIn a situation where a person who doesn't have good ideas is nonetheless in a position to be widely heard, that would suggest that telling lies to help their ideas achieve public acceptance is pretty much exactly what they would do.
I'm starting to get the nasty feeling we're going to go in mainly out of a vague sense of embarrassment at having prematurely backed the wrong horse.
ReplyDeleteYou can't stop that thing if really exist.
ReplyDeleteWell, we can get pregnant if the UN says we can, not otherwise. There is a R2P doctrine which was rather buggered up by the USA, if I recall correctly.
ReplyDeleteI really, really, like this analogy.
ReplyDeleteI'm starting to get the nasty feeling we're going to go in mainly out of a vague sense of embarrassment at having prematurely backed the wrong horse.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it would have been a better idea to not have backed a horse in the first place.
O/T but may be of interest to the mgmt and readership: 'science betrayed' part 1 - R4
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/03/17/libya.civil.war/index.html
ReplyDeleteI have been commenting about the ostrich nature of discussions of Libya, including the President's which do not include the word "oil".
ReplyDeleteFor clarity in thinking about Libya, it would be better if we had learned from the Iraq model of discourse. In Iraq, instead of saying “sectarian violence” we should have consistently said “faith based violence”
Here we should consistently use the phrase “Oil Rich Libya” as in “Oil Rich Libyan no-fly zones, a dialogue".
It's a useful right wing rhetorical strategy as in "wasteful government spending" going back at least to Cato's carthaga delenda est but I suspect, it was a major element in that rock sucking Demosthenes' Phillipics
How about "Oil slightly rich but not really enough to matter if Ghaddafi wasn't soooo obnoxious Libya"?
ReplyDeleteAlternate post title, that D^2 was too nice too use: Shorter Conor Foley.
ReplyDelete