{"id":299,"date":"2007-01-27T11:46:24","date_gmt":"2007-01-27T15:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=299"},"modified":"2007-01-27T11:47:01","modified_gmt":"2007-01-27T15:47:01","slug":"sophism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=299","title":{"rendered":"The future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a good one from the President<\/a>:<\/p>\n

>Bush consulted with Gates and Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who will head U.S. forces in Iraq, at an early-morning meeting at the White House. Speaking with reporters afterward, the president complained that lawmakers “are condemning a plan before it’s even had a chance to work<\/strong>. And they have an obligation and a serious responsibility, therefore, to put up their own plan as to what would work.”<\/p>\n

Aside from the fact that it’s false to claim that alternative plans have not been offered, criticizing the plan before “it’s had a chance to work” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of planning for future contingencies. In the first place, the claim, as I understand it, is that the plan has already been tried a few times over, and so hasn’t worked. In the absence of any significant change, the plan is unlikely to work this time. Even if that were false, it still doesn’t make any sense to criticize criticism of future plans because they haven’t had a chance. The point of the criticism is that the plan won’t work in the future, so don’t do it. Jeez. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a good one from the President: >Bush consulted with Gates and Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who will head U.S. forces in Iraq, at an early-morning meeting at the White House. Speaking with reporters afterward, the president complained that lawmakers “are condemning a plan before it’s even had a chance to work. And they … Continue reading The future<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bush"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}