Steven Malcolm Anderson 4 GodsSelfSex (mail) (www):
Says it all. Jeff Soyer (Alphecca) once put together an imaginary newspaper showing what today's pundits and "intellectuals" would be saying about D-Day.
A 2001 study on civilians in war by the International Committee of the Red Cross showed a shift in a stark statistic: In World War I, 9 soldiers were killed for every civilian, while in today's wars 10 civilians die for every soldier.
The source is none other than the Pentagon's report to Congress which they admit is not comprehensive (hell, they wouldn't even admit to keeping such statistics until now) and is far lower than the number estimated by Iraq Body Count which draws its data from reports of deaths and injuries by news services, newspapers and other news outlets.
According to our military, they're getting about 85 DAILY attacks right now, resulting in a daily average of 63 Iraqi civilians and security forces killed and wounded by insurgents. It worked out to about 25,902 since January of '04. Iraq Body Count says that more than that have died, let alone been wounded -- which they're estimating at a ratio of 3:1 wounded to dead.
Let's not forget that WWII was the largest and deadliest continuous war in human history.
At least 50 million people died as a result of the war. This figure includes acts of genocide such as the Holocaust and General Ishii Shiro's Unit 731 experiments in Pingfan, incredibly bloody battles in Europe and the Pacific Ocean, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Few areas of the world were unaffected; the war involved the "home front" and bombing of civilians to a new degree.
How trivial to even try to compare the conflicts. At the current official rate of 63 per day, it would take over ten years to to get to the quarter million mark. Please god tell me we won't be there to see that milestone.
The problem with human nature and death is that one or two deaths is tragic indeed -- something we all can relate to, a dozen or a score is horrible, a hundred is a bloody massacre, but thousands become mere statistics. Millions are incomprehensible. We simply can't wrap our heads around that.
Saddam is on trial for the killing of about 140 men and boys in one village, and for that and so much more he will fry, as should the mother who threw her kids off that bridge in S.F. We lack a greater penalty.
We're getting into the statistical realm in Iraq, and as evident by the satire you linked, some of us are getting dangerously removed from the idea that preventable deaths are no less tragic when they happen on a large scale.
Mark Adams, the high and mighty, hypocritical, bloviator. (mail) (www):
And by the way, I saw this hilareous skit on "Weekends at the DL" while writing the last post. Fox News commentators went back in time to the beginning of the Civil Rights movements and were embedded with those "crazy partisan negro insurgents" who had the audacity to want something called "equality."
That wasn't funny either, . . . well, not much. I only squirted coffee through my nose once or twice in laughter.
Y'know, the article would have closer to the mark if in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the US declared war on China. Now THAT would have been funny.
Steven Malcolm Anderson 4 GodsSelfSex (mail) (www):
We let Germany declare war on us and then we invaded North Africa instead of hunting down the individual Japanese pilots who had bombed Pearl Harbor to bring them to trial. That's the difference between the military approach to war and the Keystone Kops approach to war.
Oh wait, it's Halloween.
Hmmmm. I call bullshit.
I read another one about what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had been elected President in 1940.
I enjoy fiction, especially when it has a strong basis in fact. The "faux article" did not.
P.S. I like historical fiction best of all -- Winds of War, etc.
Paper That Sees Fit to Print Aluminum Tube Lies And Other Fiction By Judy Miller:
The source is none other than the Pentagon's report to Congress which they admit is not comprehensive (hell, they wouldn't even admit to keeping such statistics until now) and is far lower than the number estimated by Iraq Body Count which draws its data from reports of deaths and injuries by news services, newspapers and other news outlets.
According to our military, they're getting about 85 DAILY attacks right now, resulting in a daily average of 63 Iraqi civilians and security forces killed and wounded by insurgents. It worked out to about 25,902 since January of '04. Iraq Body Count says that more than that have died, let alone been wounded -- which they're estimating at a ratio of 3:1 wounded to dead.
Let's not forget that WWII was the largest and deadliest continuous war in human history.
How trivial to even try to compare the conflicts. At the current official rate of 63 per day, it would take over ten years to to get to the quarter million mark. Please god tell me we won't be there to see that milestone.
The problem with human nature and death is that one or two deaths is tragic indeed -- something we all can relate to, a dozen or a score is horrible, a hundred is a bloody massacre, but thousands become mere statistics. Millions are incomprehensible. We simply can't wrap our heads around that.
Saddam is on trial for the killing of about 140 men and boys in one village, and for that and so much more he will fry, as should the mother who threw her kids off that bridge in S.F. We lack a greater penalty.
We're getting into the statistical realm in Iraq, and as evident by the satire you linked, some of us are getting dangerously removed from the idea that preventable deaths are no less tragic when they happen on a large scale.
That wasn't funny either, . . . well, not much. I only squirted coffee through my nose once or twice in laughter.
Stop with the facts. It really messes up a liberal argument.