Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Whatever. To argue against fantasy counterfactuals requires I rejoin with other fantasies. Then we get into an argument about imagined events. Its like a sandbox argument about 'Spiderman could kick…

Sometimes figuring out what might have been is fantasy.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Sometimes it isn't.

If someone is standing on a railroad track, and steps off, and five minutes later a train goes by, it isn't that far-fetched an assumption that if he had still been standing on the tracks, he would have been killed. Arguing along the lines that there is no way to prove it since it didn't actually happen is asinine. The ability to make such projections on abstract information is what separate human intellect from perceptual mentalities.

For a bunch of people leaning on the administration for a lack of omniscience, you sure are dense about exploring alternatives.

It is a near-certainty that had the first Gulf War not been fought, or no other major military action taken against Iraq, that Saddam would today be a nuclear power. The bomb program (previously unknown) that was discovered and dismantled by the U.N. authorities after the Gulf War was estimated to have been able to produce a bomb by the end of 1995 at the latest. Possibly much sooner.

Might be worth reading the whole excerpt. The Official Story now is that Saddam's operations were completely transparent, and that only a congenital idiot would assume he was hiding anything significant.

I know what the positions of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party have been in foreign policy issues for the past thirty years. And in most cases it is about as hard to predict what would have happened if they had been carried out to the letter as the train prediction was.

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