Queston: Could Money For War Be Spent More Constructively?

uscitizen said:
hmm do we have actual verified death totals ifrom the jewish persecution by the nazi's ?
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I doubt it. Good point.

The germans are fanatics about keeping good records. There's probably a good count of actual jews killed at Auschiwitz.

But, who knows how many jews were simply gunned down in the Warsaw Ghetto, or simply executed on the spot by German soldiers. Or killed in the riots
 
Certainly, we always cite the fact the Stalin killed twenty million peopal, and that fourty million civilians died in world war two. These are not based on actual, quantitative tabulations of formally reported deaths in newspapers and hosptital morgues.

Because when we cite them we have a good amount of posterity behind them to gather all the facts to forumulate a very good estimate. This war is still going on and the means to use all that we could use to know for sure is limited.
 
IHateGovernment said:
Certainly, we always cite the fact the Stalin killed twenty million peopal, and that fourty million civilians died in world war two. These are not based on actual, quantitative tabulations of formally reported deaths in newspapers and hosptital morgues.

Because when we cite them we have a good amount of posterity behind them to gather all the facts to forumulate a very good estimate. This war is still going on and the means to use all that we could use to know for sure is limited.
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No one complained about estimates of total dead iraqis from sanctions, or from Saddam's human rights abuses.

In fact, the Lancet report is probably much more rigourous statistically and statistically, than many other "guesses" about human death tolls. Due to the dangerous nature of their work, they freely admit there were limitations in how much polling they could do. That is dealt with statisically in their report.

I have no problem making a distinction between "reported" dead, and "estimated" dead. As long as the estimate isn't some wild-ass guesss. that it comes from a techincally credible analysis.
 
No one complained about estimates of total dead iraqis from sanctions, or from Saddam's human rights abuses.
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That is a darned good point.
 
Well given my demand that we have at least the ability to ascertain these things I would equally object to using those numbers for policy making as well.

The number seems a bit incredible to me given the nature of limited war vs. total war.
 
IHateGovernment said:
Well given my demand that we have at least the ability to ascertain these things I would equally object to using those numbers for policy making as well.

The number seems a bit incredible to me given the nature of limited war vs. total war.
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I'm not suggesting we make policy decisions, based on statistical estimates of casualities.

I'm suggesting we recognize reality: IraqBodyCount says that, formally, there have been around 50,000 civilian deaths. Formally reported by media sources. IraqBodyCount also says the actual death toll is probably far higher than that, since many or most deaths go unreported.

That makes sense to me. I suspect there have been far greater than 50,000 deaths in Iraq. That's just a reality.
 
My guess is that it has not broken 100000 yet. I do believe it will at some point in the near future. However the Lancet report would have us believe this threshold was crossed long ago. If it was that high then given the escalation of civilian killing we would think that perhaps it has gone well over 200000 at this point.

This level of death via terrorist attacks and targeted aerial bombing does not seem likely at all.
 
IHateGovernment said:
My guess is that it has not broken 100000 yet. I do believe it will at some point in the near future. However the Lancet report would have us believe this threshold was crossed long ago. If it was that high then given the escalation of civilian killing we would think that perhaps it has gone well over 200000 at this point.

This level of death via terrorist attacks and targeted aerial bombing does not seem likely at all.
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Not to mention the fact that American troops are engaging and shooting people every day too.
 
And we pretty much wiped out Fallujah didn't we, but kept no count of the dead then. I believe that was the name of the town.
 
Not to mention the fact that American troops are engaging and shooting people every day too.

Yes but it is difficult to kill very large numbers of people by shooting them. The Nazis realized this and moved from firing squads to gas chambers.
 
IHateGovernment said:
My guess is that it has not broken 100000 yet. I do believe it will at some point in the near future. However the Lancet report would have us believe this threshold was crossed long ago. If it was that high then given the escalation of civilian killing we would think that perhaps it has gone well over 200000 at this point.

This level of death via terrorist attacks and targeted aerial bombing does not seem likely at all.
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From a probabalistic sense, I'm pretty sure its broken 100,000.

The lancet was not a political study. They didn't make disticinction between estimated dead civiliarns, or dead insurgents, or dead iraqi army troops. It was just a statistical estimate of dead human beings in iraq.

IraqBodyNet just counts formally reported civilian deaths.
 
I expect that documented civilian deaths would make for the largest proportion of the dead, followed by undocumented civilian deaths, followed by iraqi army deaths followed by insurgent deaths followed by coalition deaths. I wouldn't expect the number of the other types of deaths to be more than double the documented civilian deaths.
 
IHateGovernment said:
I expect that documented civilian deaths would make for the largest proportion of the dead, followed by undocumented civilian deaths, followed by iraqi army deaths followed by insurgent deaths followed by coalition deaths. I wouldn't expect the number of the other types of deaths to be more than double the documented civilian deaths.
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That's a reasonable guess.

If someone else wanted to do a rigourous statistical analysis we might be more confident. But, the Lancet is the only one who has. Its to dangerous for researchers to go into iraq now, and conduct polling and research.

Thank you for your consistency. I'm always amazed at other people who rag on the Lancet study, but throw around random guesses for the amount of people that died under Saddam or Stalin. If nothing else, the Lancet was at least a strong piece of techincal work, statistically-rigourous, and peer-reviewed by experts.
 
Truth be told I'm not really so sure about the estimated number of those who died during the Saddam regime I have also heard of numbers over 100000 but if you discount the Iran Iraq war I doubt that number is around there either.
 
IHateGovernment said:
Truth be told I'm not really so sure about the estimated number of those who died during the Saddam regime I have also heard of numbers over 100000 but if you discount the Iran Iraq war I doubt that number is around there either.
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You're aware that IraqBodyCount only counts the number of people killed in a bomb blast, mortar blast, or other form of attack, right?

And your also aware that ever day we read headlines like:

"20 iraqis killed, 70 wounded in car bomb attack"

Some of those 70 wounded, might die of their injuries a month later, and not be counted in the IraqBodyCount tabulation.

Additionally, somebody driving a car near, but not in the bomb zone, might recieve a concussion from the blast wave, and drive his car into a canal. And drown. That's not counted.

This is also why the US casualty count is much higher than officially reported by the pentagon. Only the dudes directly killed or wounded by an IED are considered "killed or wouned in action".
 
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