War making by PowerPoint

PowerPoint presentation for military briefings on wars in Irag and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat… “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable…”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?_r=0

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

11/19/1863

And now please welcome President Abraham Lincoln.

Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we? Oh - is it ready? OK, here we go:

More at:   http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

People in the grip of error

“One of the hallmarks of the Manhattan mentality is the inability to draw the most obvious inferences from the facts in front of your eyes.  I have often accused Manhattan groupthinkers of flat refusal to get outside their cushy homes and offices and walk around town, thinking that if they actually walked around and observed things they could not help but draw the obvious conclusions.  Well, it's really too much to ask them to walk around, but how about putting a chart of data in front of their eyes?  No, that won't work either:  it seems that even if data on what's going on are collected and presented in a very clear fashion, a Manhattan groupthinker will continue to grasp tightly to his preconceptions in the face of the evidence…” Francis Menton, “The Manhattan Contrarian” http://manhattancontrarian.com

“How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error…Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work…some of those forces were ideological in nature, matters of social prejudice and convention. Some revolved around conceptual limitations, failures of imagination and analysis…”   ― Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Page 15, 126

Candidate Carson v. the Truth-o-meter

Carson v. the Truth-o-meter: 

“…Carson said that under the Nazis, ‘German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s,’ which allowed the Nazis to ‘carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.’ This is a misreading of history on two levels. First, German citizens as a whole were not disarmed by the Nazis. Jews and other supposed enemies of the state were subject to having their weapons seized. But for most German citizens, the Nazi period was one in which gun regulations were loosened, not tightened. Second, a lack of guns was not the issue. If the majority of Germans had wanted to use these guns to fight the Nazis, they could have. But they didn’t. Carson ignores that the Nazis enjoyed significant popular support, or at least, broad acquiescence. We rate this claim False.”

Carson & Truth-o-meter v Barry: 

I think Carson has a point, in that an armed citizenry is less likely to be subjugated than an unarmed one. Consider what would have happened, or not happened, if King George III’s ministers in the 13 colonies had confiscated every firearm in those colonies in about 1770. But I think both Carson and the Truth-o-meter are off target.

The Nazi assault on the civil rights of Jews in Germany was so massive, legalistic, and gradual that their gun ownership was not much of a factor either way. Being only about 1% of the German population, German Jews had no political clout, were easy to victimize.

Most of the Jews murdered were rounded up in Poland, Russia, Austria, France, Italy, and other areas controlled by the German army. The infamous camps were mostly in Poland and Austria. So the question of how gun laws relate to the murder of European Jews would have to take into account more than just how the Jews were treated under the gun laws of Nazi Germany.

Once the Nazi “Final Solution” got rolling, in 1939-41, it would have been a little silly to suggest that even well-armed and combat-inclined Jews of that time would have been able to organize and defend themselves against a German army that nearly defeated the best armies of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States combined.

A real examination of the question of gun laws and the treatment of Jews (and others) by the Nazis would need to take in account the 1930s gun laws of Poland, Austria, France, Italy, and, most of all, of the USSR, because that was where most of the arresting and murdering of the Jews actually took place.

Source (at Politifact): 

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/26/ben-carson/fact-checking-ben-carson-nazi-guns/