Jacob, I don't "assign zero value to the lives of foreigners," not even those of my enemies. But the lives of my enemies who are implacable simply don't have as much value as mine and those of other people, be they Christian, Muslim or atheist, they want to kill or enslave.
There isn't a justifiable reason to remain passive in the face of totalitarian ideologies and those who support and act on them. Violence is not "redemptive" - it's horrible - but sometimes it's necessary.
Because of technology the world has become too small to house us and totalitarian movements. It appears you wish to avoid this circumstance as you accuse us of "demonizing" the followers in your desperate attempt at pacifist moral relativism.
Now, about those "at least 100,000 "deaths"" as presented, you say, by "the most prestigious medical journal on earth." I read the Lancet article you refer to. They didn't count those deaths they claim, they projected them from a very small sample. Figure 2 on page 5 gives the game away. Also their 95% confidence interval gives the number of estimated deaths as between 8000 and 194,000!
This about the same as saying, "We don't know." But it didn't stop the authors from claiming 98,000 deaths. The article was an exercise in pre-election headline grabbing, not an effort at finding the truth.
Fred Kaplan has an article discussing it here in Slate
slate.com
and if anyone's interested the Lancet article may be read here (registration is free):
thelancet.com |
