January 25, 2007

Deafening Silence of the Muslim World in Response to Mass Murder by Muslims

From Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times:

It's hard to know what's more disturbing: the barbaric sectarian murders by Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, or the deafening silence with which these mass murders are received in the Muslim world. How could it be that Danish cartoons of Muhammad led to mass violent protests, while unspeakable violence by Muslims against Muslims in Iraq every day evokes about as much reaction in the Arab-Muslim world as the weather report? Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King?

Where is the ''Million Muslim March'' under the banner: ''No Shiites, No Sunnis: We are all children of the Prophet Muhammad.''

...There's a lot at stake. If Iraq is ultimately unraveled by Muslim suicide-nihilism, it certainly will be a blot on our history -- we opened this Pandora's box. But it will be a plague on the future of the whole Arab world.

On Sen. Webb’s Response to the SOTU

From Jonah Goldberg, in the LA Times:

'AS I LOOK AT Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be-President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. 'When comes the end?' … And as soon as he became president, he brought the Korean War to an end." This was part of freshman Virginia Sen. Jim Webb's stentorian Democratic response to President Bush's State of the Union address.

One wonders if the untold millions of North Koreans who've starved, bled and died since then would similarly applaud Eisenhower's courage and wisdom. For more than half a century, North Korea has been a prison-camp society beyond the imagining of George Orwell, where public executions for stealing food are familiar events. The man-made famine of the 1990s alone claimed the lives of up to 1 million people (hard data from Stalinist regimes are difficult to come by).

One also wonders when our troops are going to come home. Technically, the Korean War isn't really even over. We're merely enjoying a cease-fire — much like the one we had with Iraq in the 1990s.

Webb favors a "formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq." Well, our forces have been in South Korea for almost six decades. Something tells me the antiwar base of the Democratic Party doesn't have that sort of timetable in mind for Iraq.

So, except for the fact that the Korean War didn't end, our troops are still there and the outcome has been the source of humanitarian and national security nightmares, Webb's salute to Eisenhower's statesmanship really strikes home.

The article's title: "Fight today or occupy forever."

The Error in MSM Reporting of Presidential Polls

The latest polls show GWB with extremely low approval ratings.

As a professional market researcher, it is part of my job to design market research studies, write the questionnaires, supervise the fieldwork, and analyze the results.

One traditional use of market research is to determine the efficiency of advertising campaigns. One way in which this is done is via awareness and attitude studies. In these studies, people are contacted, screened to include only those who are potential customers, and then asked a series of questions designed to determine their awareness of and attitudes towards the product or service.

Changes in attitudes can often interpreted as being in part the result of changes in the product's ad campaign.

This leads us to the error in MSM reports about these polls. MSM reports rarely (if ever) note that their own coverage - in this case, the equivalent of a product's ad campaign - is part of the cause of the lower poll ratings.

If MSM had been boosting GWB for the past 6 years, rather than slamming him as they have done - e.g. if they had been printing the good news from Iraq, as well as the bad, or if they had been presenting the good news on the economy as prominently as its significance deserves - there can be little doubt that his poll ratings would be higher.

The poll results are a measure of MSM's biased coverage as much as they are of the President's job performance.

Given MSM's relentlessly biased coverage, it is not possible to reasonably interpret presidential polls as being exclusively a result of the facts about the president's policies; the polls measure the result of MSM coverage at least as much.

There is a saying in the advertising business: nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. This means that if the product is bad, good advertising will get more people to try it faster, find out about how bad it is, and drop it.

But I have never yet heard of a study of how fast intentionally damaging advertising can hurt a good product. And MSM's biased coverage is very similar to intentionally damaging advertising.