I’m generally pretty admiring of Josh Marshall; he’s an unabashed partisan but usually one with a fair respect for facts and sense.
Today, not so much.
First, he gets spun by Juan Cole’s mistranslation of the Iranian threat to Israel. Here’s Marshall citing Cole:
According to Farsi-speaking commentators including Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, Ahmadinejad’s exact quote was, “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Cole has written that Ahmadinejad was not calling for the “Nazi-style extermination of a people,” but was expressing the wish that the Israeli government would disappear just as the shah of Iran’s regime had collapsed in 1979.
When Cole made his post, a commenter here at Winds took him to school:
I am Iranian, and I can tell you Cole is wrong.
Let’s start with simple fact, that is not directly relevant. He writes that Khomaini said the Shah government “must go”. But “az bain bayad berad” does not mean “go”, it litterarly mean something like “must cease to exist”, and the most direct translation would be “must be destroyed”.
Now to the latter part:
“bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad”
The translation is not perfect, the dear Professor is not convewing the action implyied the sentence, as I or any Iranian would read it.
So Cole errs, or lies, and somehow it becomes a part of the historical record…
Next he catches McCain in a double-secret intellectual jujitsu hold.
…But that’s really secondary to the real issue which is that the strategic aim of the surge has failed. It’s fastened us down even more firmly in Iraq whereas the aim was to jumpstart a political process in the country that would allow us to begin to disengage.
These points are completely lost on McCain. A savvy campaign should be able to make McCain’s failure to understand the surge’s failure into a potent political issue.
So the disagreement becomes a flat disagreement over facts; the problem, of course is that this presupposes that the issue isn’t whether McCain disagrees – because we’ve already assumed facts that make McCain wrong – so no debate is possible or even desirable.
The last time I saw intellectual jujitsu that slick was last week, when the data showed that the oceans were stubbornly not warming up:
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
That really hasn’t been my impression of Marshall, but I’m always willing to think better of people. Is there anything he wrote that struck you as particularly fair-minded?
Marshall has a point there. “Domo arigato, domo, domo” does not mean “Israel must be destroyed.” It means “This damn water is cold.”
It strikes me that, even if there was fractionally more heat going into the water, there’s still a frickin’ planetary mass under the water that has to be heated too.
Wonder if it could be as simple as that?
Remember the “white earth” problem?
_”scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.”_
This translates to “we havent quite figured out the mathmatical hoops we’re going to jump this data through to make it match our expected result.”
See what they did with the satellite data.
It was an embarassment for a long time because it didnt show the atmosphere warming, and then the scientists decided to play with the numbers and WHAMO, they found warming. Thats not to say it was definitively not factual… but the problem is if they HAD found warming originally nobody would have kept picking at the numbers and possibly correcting them to get the cooler result. There is nothing double blind about these kinds of studies, and expectation DO play a major role in which results are eventually enshrined.
The link to Marshall’s site is incorrect. I also don’t understand the link you’re trying to make between publicizing that the surge is not working as advertised and the translation of Farsi.
Later in the same “robot” article, the scientists cited says that the mathematics to account for water vapor’s influence in the atmosphere, regarding warming, have not been developed. Since water vapor is by magitudes the greatest GHG, this means that the scientific rigor to predict atmospheric warming, or its lack, simply does not exist.
This is the same response I got when someone on this site wrote, “Kevin Drum is generally a fair-minded guy, but in this post….” and I asked the same question. Is it me?
Obviously the robots are partisan political hacks, probably plants from the Bush Administration meant to quell another global consensus.