Forward is backward

Die Gedanken sind frei,
wer kann sie erraten;
sie fliehen vorbei
wie naechtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen,
kein Jaeger erschiessen;
es bleibet dabei:
Die Gedanken sind frei.

-an old German song-

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I heard Martin Sheen say this a dozen times in ads for the West Wing last year. After this, therefore because of this, it sounds more impressive when a President says it even if it’s only one of the two guys who play President on TV, but of course it’s a very common fallacy. It’s a useful fallacy too, used to “prove” how smoking Pot leads to heroin use, to sell miracle remedies and sometimes to justify a war. Of course you see how it reduces to the absurd in short order when you observe that everyone who uses heroin once drank milk and although we attacked Iraq after Sept 11, 2001, a chain of causation does not exist. I won’t go into the technicalities, but if we accept that this is a fallacy, how do we perceive Anti hoc, ergo propter hoc?
Can the vector of causation run from effect to cause?


Sure it can – When you fail at plan A, or plan A is exposed as a fraud, Plan B becomes the reason you had to use plan A. That’s why our invasion of Iraq was about freedom before it was about preemption even though the freedom story came up after the preemption story was exposed as a lie. So it is with the “9/11 changed everything” proposition. 9/11 it seems, changed things well before 9/11/01.

Do you still doubt that our invasion and occupation of Iraq had anything other than the magnification of presidential powers as its prime motivation? Perhaps the administration officials who claim that Bush planned that invasion before his election and that Bush was obsessed with Saddam to the point that he refused to hear anything about bin Laden or al Qaeda are lying. Perhaps too, the breach of privacy case on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. AT&T and BellSouth Corp. customers is spurious, but it’s hard to get around the notion that because the Bush administration asked AT&T to facilitate wiretapping some 7 months before the attack on New York, the wiretapping had nothing to do with 9/11. Unless of course time works backwards and effects precede their cause.

AT&T is in quite a bind here, because the dictatorship forbids them to tell anyone whether it’s true or not on pain of being charged with treason. You can’t accuse the gang of four of being stupid; one can prove that they lied and created an illegal war in order to become dictators, but that would be treason, so the official viewpoint must be that time runs backwards – just like progress under the dictatorship of Bush.

None the less, our thoughts are free as the old German song that was last sung during the Nazi said. No one can arrest us for thinking that Bush has taken a liberal republic down the fascist road. Perhaps some day it won’t be illegal to tell the truth or to expose treasonous crimes; perhaps. Perhaps someday we too will be free.

Ich denk was ich will,
und was mich begluecket,
Doch alles in der Still,
und wie es sich schicket.
Mein Wunsch und Begehren
kann niemand verwehren,
es bleibet dabei:
Die Gedanken sind frei.