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Comment by ramchip | Hacker News Reader

I have no opinion regarding your post itself, but I'd like to point out that a comedy series is not evidence of anything.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...

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He's not presenting it as evidence, but saying that it can help to illustrate a pattern of behavior. There's still the larger, more important task of showing that that pattern of behavior exists in the world, but this allows exemplars of this pattern of behavior to be internalized. The internalization process is obviously dangerous, but ultimately I'm not smart enough to make rational judgments on most things, so I need to rely upon intuitive understandings of things.

(Though one could argue that stuff like this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhFXkvugLM&feature=youtu... can be used as evidence of showing how leading language can work, if you can feel your own opinion being swayed, as Bernard talks. The extent to which one can rely upon one's own feelings of their opinions is another matter... but it's a stab in the right direction.)

It is when it is written by political scientists who attended university with the politicians they later wrote the comedy about, interviewed serving politicians while posing as a think tank to gather info, took advice from other former executive politicians, and secretly consulted high-ranking civil servants for plot ideas, and lifted whole plots from people's then-unpublished memoirs.

Yes Minister is not a normal comedy series. It is bordering on a documentary.

I'm only trying to figure how Chalabi managed to fool the entire US intelligence machinery into invading Iraq, and the only logical conclusion is he couldn't. Facts were being created by the hawks and these people decides on who gets access to the President.

As far as I am aware, the decision making process started with a desire to invade Iraq and then once it was decided to do this any evidence that could justify this decision was collected and circulated (even if it came from someone who was known to be delusional).

Even worse, the UK government knew that there weren't good reasons to invade Iraq, but went along with it simply to keep in with the United States.

I didn't think GWB himself was a neocon, although he was surrounded by a few.

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