The question exposed exactly what it was intended to expose (reckless ignorance) and it was phrased just fine.
Your proposed ‘fix’ would have interfered with that task. I’m starting to suspect you just don’t like the answer you got, which is in line with your first response.
Again, this is in no way a ‘when did you stop beating your spouse’ scenario and it by definition works best if it’s phrased exactly like any other ‘are you okay with attacking X’ questions that are so common in polls today.
Except that the set of those responding ‘no’ to this prompt plausibly includes those who simply don’t think Agrabah in particular is worth bombing. Or maybe not right now. Or maybe they’d prefer boots on the ground instead. The seemingly straightforward answer ‘oppose’ is in fact wide open to interpretation, as you just demonstrated in your response.
If PPP had asked phrased the prompt as an open question (i.e. What is your stance on military intervention in the country of Agrabah?) and then done the hard work of categorizing the responses, then— and only then —would they have a data set that assesses the ignorance of its sample accurately.
That wouldn’t provide any more information unless people gave specific sorts of lengthy answers (that would be impossible to compile into a survey); it also has nothing to do with tactic assumptions.
Instead what they did is asses (accurately) the number of people who were so recklessly ignorant that they’d just say ‘yes’ to bombing any old funny sounding place.
That attitude certainly seems in line with embracing Jesus Christ. I wonder if the God fearing republican candidates would agree? I wonder how they would respond to the poll?
Nah, my opinion is that I recognise them as absolutists. Someone that holds a pre-determined position no matter what the facts are. Someone who continues to hold that absolute position even if the facts change, in the face of all evidence.
That sort of thought-pattern is intellectually dangerous. On any topic.
You are saying that voters who agree with your own opinion are obviously smarter, while those that don’t are dumb. That’s a type of fallacy (I can’t find the link right now) that seems to be driving a lot of rhetoric in political discussions.
Given that we are in the realms of fiction -
What if Agrabah is the source of a Zombie outbreak?
It’s not just possible, it’s frequently done in psychology research. I did similar response categorization and analysis when reviewing transcripts of structured interviews with people with schizophrenia. The particulars will vary widely, but eventually patterns emerge that can be statistically analyzed.
It can be a pain in the ass though, especially if you’re not working with a rubric but rather developing one.
Hmm. I think I now understand how you see this. (Take heart, I mean this sincerely— no snark coming.) I guess my quibble is that while the set of ‘support’ respondents can be pretty safely assumed to be ignorant, the ‘oppose’ and ‘not sure’ groups are almost certainly very heterogeneous in opinion (see my post above). It’s this lack of clarity that frustrates me. The PPP had a great opportunity here to reveal the nuances of America’s ignorance and I feel that they squandered it.
Thanks to each of you, by the way. You’re both great commenters and the reason why I spend more time reading BBS than BB.
Sort of a wag the dog-esque imaginary war, to keep the war hawks happy… and keep the 24 hour news cycle occupied…
It would be stealth participatory fanfiction.
The scary thing is that we have people who believe this is actually happening but for real events.
No, he’s saying that voters who agree with his own opinion are obviously moral, and those that don’t are immoral. And that type of argument is often problematic. But in this particular case, since his opinion is that you shouldn’t want to kill people for no reason, he’s entirely right.
Wanting to kill people without so much as knowing who they are is immoral, and focusing on the form instead of the content of the argument is only a way to obfuscate that. For instance, it’s very different from the refugee nonsense above, in that it’s reasonable to want to help refugees without caring where they are from, but sociopathic to want to bomb a place without caring where it is.
So then to circle back, you’re also correct that we could have gotten even more out of that particular approach, slipping it in the way they did served a very precise purpose well, but left all of the other answers pretty fuzzy. I would’ve actually been kind of interested in finding out more about the ‘no’ and ‘not sure’ crowds (and how many are ‘Agrabah? Like in Alladin?’, as well as how many of those are ‘that’s not a place’ vs. ‘I had no idea that was a place, is it really?’).
I see a huge difference between “no reason at all”, and “a reason I don’t know yet” or even “a reason I disagree with”. Given the framing of this survey question, I don’t think anyone thought they were being asked “shall we bomb it just for the lulz?”. To which “no” is probably the right answer, sure.
Guilty as charged.
But all I’m really doing is preferring that folk gather more information on an important topic before taking sides (and withhold judgement until then) - instead of avoiding thinking by jumping to conclusions - in either direction.
The arguments for never-killing-no-matter-what-the-actual-facts-may-be are guilty of moral absolutism - which is what I don’t trust. That’s how we end up with rabid anti-abortionists. I have nothing against resolutely pacifist Quakers most of the time, but I may disagree with what one would do when confronted with the trolley problem or an assault in progress.
With the unthinking never-bomb narrative, the non-response would also be the only acceptable answer if the target were Mordor, The Death Star, Hadley’s Hope colony (“nuke it from orbit”), or Blofeld’s Lair. Even with full knowledge of all facts.
If that’s the way your moral compass is glued, that’s OK, and I won’t win by arguing on that. I’ll just say that I don’t trust that persons judgement on similar questions requiring nuance or context.
See, that’s where I"m a bit fuzzy, why would the answer ‘yes’ be anything other than recklessly ignorant?
It’s not a real country, the people who answered that question obviously didn’t know what it was exactly, so they were willing to make that judgement call. Period, end of argument. We know that these 30% of Republicans and 19% of democrats were willing to bomb any random place, though I suspect the foreign sounding name factored into that.
That’s all that question answered…who is completely batshit crazy and dangerously ignorant.
Well, since you went down that road.
I personally am of the opinion that ‘the only people who should be making these decisions are those who are far better than I at using logic and reason in the face of issues that might result in the death and suffering of innocents’, partly because I myself fell into the ‘let’s nuke Afghanistan to glass’ crowd after 9/11, and that was purely an emotional reaction and I luckily had no influence over events in that situation.
I think a lot of those of us who are disconcerted by our own reactions get accused of moral absolutism, when in reality we see that part of ourselves in many of our country’s more reckless and dangerous decisions (Iraq, etc.) and we have reason to believe that those rational, reasonable, responsible people aren’t the ones who have the final judgement calls in these issues.
I think it’s fair to say ‘don’t do this in my name unless you can demonstrate you’re being really responsible about the final decision’ at this point. ‘Don’t kill unless you’re really fucking sure’ is a completely rational response IMHO.
Nobody has been saying “yes” makes any sense, ever… Unless they were in on the joke and really in for the lulz I guess.
I totally agree. The ‘yes’ voters are certainly both, and that is the main point of the whole reportage here.
I’m just adding that the “no” voters (that were not in on the joke) are also ignorant in their own way. But much less dangerous.
That’s actually much like my attitude to a load of political issues - though I frame it as : delegating these decisions to experts who have more resources, training, facts and advice at their disposal in the necessary discipline for decision-making than I have - or have capability/time/interest to invest.
I don’t pretend to know more about economics than the top economist in the country, or more about military or diplomatic strategy than people who have been training their whole career in those arts. The man-in-the street or on the comment-boards that does claim to have all the answers to hard questions based on soundbites - and the politician that plays to that man - those guys are scary.
I’m totally in agreement with that! A totally sane statement.
It’s the possibility, the potential for an ‘unless’ in that statement for a 1-in-a-million justification that allows me to say that “not sure” (tell me more) is more rational than an immutable, uninformed “no”.
Well, ok, but trolley problems don’t come up much in real life. I’d expect someone would still say no if they for instance thought bombing might occasionally be helpful in extreme cases, but not very often, almost certainly not if the proposed target’s situation wasn’t even newsworthy enough for them to be recognizable. That doesn’t seem so ignorant to me.
I don’t think they’re dangerous at all. I think they’re an asset.
We’re completely skipping by the ‘we should only attack in self defense’ mindset, which is completely legitimate and is, in fact, what this country was founded on.
I think the ‘no’ voters were right whether or not they were in on the joke, they presumably would know if we’ve just been attacked by somebody…one can assume they’d know about any invasion in progress at the point of the survey.
Well, I’m pretty sure we can have a huge buffer of pacifists before that sort of thing even begins to become an issue. How many of our current issues can’t be traced to past international interventions of one sort or another?
There are lots of reasons that a firm ‘no’ is completely legitimate, including the ‘extremists are made, not born’ one.
I’m not willing to say my more nuanced ‘no’ is more legitimate than that of somebody who, had they been in charge, would not have created a faction of the messes we’ve created since WWII. I think it quite likely that they’ve been right all along.
I’m out of my depth in political history here, but it seems to me that there are trolley problems in diplomacy quite regularly, and Military Strategy right down through to chess is about weighing up how many fighters should die so that others should live.
That is why the thought experiment is reductionist - the point is how it illustrates larger issues.
Given credible evidence of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, sometimes making the hard decision to break some eggs works out as less-horrible than the alternative of letting it continue unchecked. Historians will revisit decisions like that (cf. Hiroshima) all the time.
I don’t know what WMD/slavery-ring/torture-chamber nastiness has been brewing in Fort Agrabah that has made it seem like a valid military target today, and I haven’t been following the news closely enough to recognise the name - but I know that I don’t know. And it’s possible that the guys drawing lines on the map do.
So - tell me more about this choice you have put in front of me before I start telling the chiefs how to do their job.
You mean Nigeria, the Democractic Republic of Congo, Somolia, South Sudan, Yemen, Palestine, and Burundi, right? No? We’re not rushing in to save them too? Whyever for?
We also have a habit of ignoring all kinds of far more awful tragedies…and we’re not even talking about the non-military horrors that people in Cameroon, Chad, Honduras, Djibouti, Mauritania, Nepal, Senegal, and more are suffering where the same amount of resources will have a lot more value creating things for people instead of destroying infrastructure and creating a whole new batch of terrorists.
We’re WAY past the point where we should be giving our political decision makers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to humanitarian issues.
Again, ‘I don’t know of any reason to bomb those strangers, and therefore no’ is a totally rational response to the world we actually live in.
(I know, I know, using the past to predict the future…burn the witch, right?)
