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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (211520)	1/2/2007 11:51:47 AM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

She's comparing apples and oranges. It's deaths in the military under Clinton but only deaths in Iraq under Bush. I've told her that several times but I now understand that she's too genuinely uneducated to comprehend the concept of comparing similar items instead of dissimilar ones. The purpose of the two data point chart (about as high as rightwingers can count apparently) is to mislead. It's supposed to present Iraq as a non-issue as the American Public becomes disgusted by the body count in this corporate war. It doesn't take into account the 27% or so decline in the number of the uniformed military or those not serving in Iraq. It also doesn't take into account the gun-toting contractors. It also doesn't take into account Iraqi police and security forces -- even those fighting on 'our' side. It's a graph meant to LIE which is all rightwingers have left in their arsenal. This is a war based on a pack of lies, conducted by lies and, now, rationalized by lies. Listening to the likes of her is like listening to used car salesmen determined to sell you a car that's been sitting under water for a week. No matter how they paint it up, it's still rotten underneath.

To: epicure who wrote (211520)	1/2/2007 3:03:20 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Why all your detailed reasoning? His graph is complete nonsense. It is comparing Iraq war deaths to TOTAL military deaths. The basis for the two is about an order of magnitude different (something like 140K vs 1.5M). The two oldest numerical tricks for confusing people are: 1) Failure to normalize 2) Graphs with non-zero bases. He does both in one shot. Using his logic, suppose the USA were involved in a little war in some place like Columbia and had only about 1K troops or "advisors" there, and lets say that we suffered 800 dead per year, and sent in 800 fresh ones to keep the strength at 1K. How long would we play that game? After all, the 800 dead out of 1K is just the same as 800 dead out of 140K, and heck, it is perfectly valid to compare that to the deaths based on 1.5M is it not? I suspect the most extreme example of how the USA has spent money over relatively few deaths, would be the money poured into the Space Shuttles for the combined deaths of about 15 (??) people. Those deaths were less than 5 days of our Iraq run rate this last month, so we should not have spent much money on them. Of course, it was a significant fraction of the shuttle fleet as well, perhaps that justified it. IIRC, there was another example of this type of thinking, pushed by a right wing pundit earlier in the war (Rush??) who noted that American deaths in Iraq (at the time) were about on par with the annual murders in California, and since the total population of CA is about the same as the population of Iraq, then obviously being a soldier in Iraq is about like living in CA. Geez... why do numbers confuse people so badly?

To: epicure who wrote (211520)	1/2/2007 3:06:30 PM
From: mistermj	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

The graph that drives the radical left nuts. The graph is labeled and shows exactly what it says it shows. Its funny that you get so bent out of shape about this, but never say a word about obvious distortions on the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed or the manipulated poll numbers that are used here all the time. You look pretty foolish ignoring those things while trying to spin this graph. No need to spin it Iktomi. Speaking of spin, why do you change your name so much? Also speaking of spin...do you have any numbers yet on the number of teachers that have to crap their pants because of poor working conditions? I remember you talking about that...but haven't seen the data you used yet.

To: epicure who wrote (211520)	1/2/2007 6:00:14 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

If you look at the Clinton years, there are considerably more people in the military than now.. Looking at the Defense Manpower Data Center pdf that mjdfl posted: Average active duty miilitary personnel was 1,469,441 over the eight Clinton years compared to 1,407,662 for the first four Bush II years. On this number we see a decline from the Clinton years, but not a big one. Looking at the total military FTE numbers, the Clinton average was 1,599,344, while the first four Bush years average was higher at 1,679,887. What really stands out on the pdf is the long-term downtrend in accidental deaths. The decline is much greater in percentage terms than the reduction in military personnel. One other thing that catches my eye on that pdf is that there's actually a column for "terrorist attack". What's the difference between that column and "hostile action"? It's that we took casulties and our leaders didn't fight back. So you see deaths from terrorist attack not accompanied or directly followed by hostile actions. That's opposed to the reason why you have a military in the first place.