quicklink

Here’s to the dead. And the living.

The four German soldiers who died in last week’s Kabul suicide attack, Jörg Baasch, Andrejas Beljo, Helmi Jimenez-Paradies, and Carsten Kühlmorgen – the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th German soldiers to die in a (publicly known) sort-of combat situation after World War Two – were honoured today in a special ceremony at Cologne airport.

Earlier today, they were bid farewell by their comrades and Acting Commander ISAF, the Dutch Brigadier General Bertholee, at Camp Warehouse, Kabul. As any decent leader, he knew he had to adress the future while not forgetting about what happened –

“We can show our respect for the sacrifice that our comrades made in only one way. Continue our mission as well as we can; show determination; and make clear that we will not be intimidated. That will also help to overcome our grief.”

Not surprisingly, their work has seen a spark of interest in recent days. I suppose one thing the public could do is preserve this interest and remember that all those international troops are in Afghanistan not only to help an increasingly isolated Afghan central government survive against resurfacing warlords, but because we believe that our very personal security is enhanced by doing so.

They are some some of those who make people carry balloons instead of bombs. And they have a website that describes some aspects of their life – and sometimes their death – in Kabul.

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compulsory reading

Jane Galt on Signal And Noise

Megan McArdle has an interesting post about the difficulties of gaining useful data through polls. She correctly states that – however carefully chose your sample may be – some people will always lie, that is, she implies, a lot of people will lie.

Personally, I think that questionnaire framing in conjunction with the reality construction effect of increased statistical attention to a particular issue (if you increase statistical research of domestic violence, chances are you’re going to see a huge – statistical – increase simply because you’re asking more often) is the bigger problem with respect to reliable idea of what’s going on in people’s minds – as it is usually done with the result in mind.

But Megan is right: people will lie for the pure fun of it, because they want to be in compliance with what they believe are societal expectations, or those of the person asking them, even in anonymous surveys, they will “lie” because they don’t really get what the pollster asks and feel it is embarrassing not to understand, and they will lie for a whole lot of other reasons I haven’t thought of and for which a poll would probably not be helpful. But on the other hand, sometimes “lying” is too big a word for a different perception of reality… just ask the PR people in the US Department of Defense, they would probably agree these days ;-) Megan writes –

Surveys are bad because people lie. And the more important/interesting the subject, the more they lie. Imagine you did a survey: would you hide Jews in your basement if you lived in Nazi Germany? You’d probably get a “yes” response 90+ percent of the time. Yet if you transported all the people you surveyed to Nazi Germany, where they would actually have the opportunity to dedicate an unknown number of years to hiding a dangerous person in their basement, feeding and clothing them, emptying their chamberpots, and putting their entire family in danger from the kind of people who roll up to your door in the middle of the night and carry away even your smallest children to a location where their fingernails may be pulled out, their eyes gouged and their bones broken without disturbing the neighbors, you would find that your “yes” response dropped to a tiny fraction of 1%. The 90% yes response is what we call stated preference, and it doesn’t correlate very well with revealed preference, which is what we call what people actually do, rather than what they say they would do.

Interestingly, I remember reading about a recent poll in which Germans were asked about their ancestor’s behavior during the Nazi period (unfortunately, I can’t remember where I read that) and such an astoundingly large part of their ancestors were actively involved in saving oppressed people that someone commenting on the figures wondered what happened to all the people who looked the other way when Nazi thugs came to pick up their neighbours. Some were clearly lying for one or the other reasons above, others just stressed the part of reality they found more convenient to convey. Think about it, could “my granny told me how she did not report someone/something to the authorities” not be interpreted as “active” protection? As reality is so complex, there’s no clear-cut way to differentiate what’s true, and what’s not. If you define cut-off points, ie categories, you once again run the risk of creating reality instead of reporting it. Gosh, Werner v. Heisenberg was a wise guy indeed…

A statistical problem relating to more recent German politics are the poll results for fringe parties in any election. Believe it or not, but the figures reported for fringe parties on tv are basically just made up. They are informed guesses, but if my information is correct, they are essentially made up. The reason for this is that the polling institutes simply do not get any useful number of responses for these parties – because of small, “representative” samples as well as the reasons cited above. They know that these parties do get some votes – you can count them, after all, later on.

But in the meantime, they’re just guessing. And as it’s only fringe parties, it usually doesn’t make a real differencein most cases. But it’s nonetheless interesting to know how the tv presenter arrived at “other parties: 3,9 percent”.

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Ken Starr Grand Jury - Monica is not here
media, photoblogging, US Politics, USA

Living History. Deleting Posts.

After Blogger decided to shred two of my planned entries today I have settled for one involving only very little typing.

I was in Washington, DC, back in 1998 when the Starr-Rreport was released, and I have never in my life seen so many journalists per square-centimeter.

I only had a tiny disposable camera with me, and the reddish part in the right hand side – yeah, that’s my middle finger.

I guess Hillary Clinton will have a more interesting account of that part of her living history. Der Spiegel has some German excerpts from her biography/political re-positioning in this week’s print edition.

I am not particularly interested in this kind of books, but I did have a brief look at the excerpt. I can’t help but wonder. What does Hillary Clinton really mean when she writes about she and Bill managed to get on after, well, you know –

“The Key to understanding our marriage is certainly our common history. But to be true, our relationship is too profound to be put into words. Maybe I could express it this way: In the Spring of 1971 I began a conversation with Bill Clinton, and more than thirty later we still talk to each other.”

“We still talk to each other?” Now here I can’t help but wonder if I believe this is a positive or negative verdict about their relationship…

Note: As this is a re-translation from German, I don’t know what she actually wrote. Last week’s Wolfowitz-oil quip should be a sufficient reminder of the perils of translation.

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