Comments on: Gordon Prather

By: paul b

paul b — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:13:35 +0000

ps if you think democrats will stop an attack on iran keep dreaming. what happens when obama who has all our troops still in iraq and Iran starts justifiably retaliating you think he won’t attack. and the othe 2 options are bush does it first or mkane so we are basically fucked (that being the most linguistically accurate term for current situation).
so really my only hope for not being shipped to persia with boots and a helmet or living in a 3rd world north america is that all the easrtn powers are moving against us in secret, but like was discussed india seems to be on our payrol for now and while not a match for us are need if we want a war with iran( which technically we already are since while we have not declared war we have committed acts of war against them) so yah that about it
keep your guns they already have had there coup they won’t come to your house they are just gona make your home worthless and keep you there

By: paul b

paul b — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:53:03 +0000

NO MORE BLOOD FOR VOTES!!!!!
not entirely on topic but
The party elected majority of our republic with the single mandate of ending the illegal occupation has not only fully funded the war to the end of this year with no calls for withdrawal AND THE FIRST HALF OF NEXT YEAR im an independent but i voted for democrats before but from this point on never again its one thing to launch a war for profit its another to exploit the little moral out rage Americans have musterd against this atrocity impeach EVERYONE!

By: M.E. Nuclear Follies: Hersh, Ritter et al and the Failed States Index « Peace & Wisdom

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:09:48 +0000

[...] existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime,” and Scott Horton has interviewed him on the subject. Prather shows a touching incredulity that nothing the Bush administration does [...]

By: Chris Dornan

Chris Dornan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:29:05 +0000

Toth, I think you are going off on a tangent. The point about proving a negative has little to do with mathematical logic, even if it can be cast in those terms (I have training in mathematical logic). It can illustrated with two simple examples: (i) I claim that there are no dollar bills in the USA and (ii) I claim that there exists a gram of Kryptonite in the USA. It is trivial for me to disprove (i) but it is *practically* impossible to disprove (ii) (assuming everyone has agreed a test for Kryptonite). The more I try to provide evidence for the negative (absence of Kryptonite), the more it can be effortlessly countered with claims that the I am a sneaky untrustworthy type that is good at hiding things. The neocons are experts at these mind games going, back to Team B and hyping up of the Soviet menace in the 1970s. It has more to do with psychology than logic.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:19:04 +0000

Touché

By: Toth

Toth — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:20:09 +0000

As mentioned in the interview and often repeated everywhere about proving a negative.

In principle you can prove a negative but there is a dichotomy.Typically you use reductio ad absurdum reasoning, proof by contradiction. Normally you prove a claim positive by assuming the claim is not true and then show that assumption leads necessarily to an untrue outcome, incoherency, logical contradictions etc. which means the negation of the assumption, in this namely the claim is true, must be true. You can as easily use the opposite direction in reasoning, but the key word here always is “necessarily.” That means that the negative claim must carry in itself – in the predictions the assumption of the opposite makes – it’s own falsifiability. A negative claim that does not carry it’s own falsifiability in this way can only further only be falsified by it’s verifiability. There you have the dichotomy. If it is in principle verifiable, but in practice isn’t, like for example proving in a certain country there do not exist blue cookies. The verifiability represents the practice which says it cannot be proven and the falsifiability represents the principle which says it can be proven. For as long as the claim isn’t falsified by presenting a blue cookie, the claim remains in the sphere of verifiablity and thus unproven.

For all practical purposes about these kinds of political subjects that is the same as saying a negative cannot be proven, but it is not so in principle and that to my mind is a distinction that may be important to observe.