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On April 26 2011 21:01 Kukaracha wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 19:46 iMAniaC wrote:
Just like to point out that numbers say very little unless they are explained. You just forgot to do this yourself, by ignoring the consequences of armed occupation
Yeah, but in a way, that's exactly what I wanted to do - pull out some credible-looking numbers and show how the previous graph was wrong. Quite probably, the crime rate would have been different if the US had not been involved. But then again, is it the fault of the US if the Iraqi people commit crimes? Are not the criminals themselves to blame for the crimes they do, rather than the people responsible for (the lack of) punishment for the crimes? The numbers say nothing whatsoever about that. And again, if I had used some other numbers, they'd be just as worthless if they, too, were not explained.
Edit: BTW you're also suggesting that if the US had not invaded Iraq, the situation would be the same. This is... kind of odd, to say the least.
I thought about that, too, and decided it would be kind of pointless to start making theories about. If the US had done nothing, Saddam might still be in charge and he, of course, liked to minorities of his own civilian population. One course of action I could have taken, was to take an average over his entire reign, in civilian deaths caused, and assumed that he would keep killing people at the same rate, then compared that number to the number killed after the US intervention. But it would hold just as much water as my previous diagram (i.e. very little), so I didn't bother.
The point about UN sanctions is also a very good one (which I have to admit I didn't know about). If I had plotted that into my diagram, it would have filled 80% of the area...
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On April 26 2011 21:35 ilmman wrote:
Why even watch the news anyways??? why let yourself be brain washed
You can watch good information providers and honest media, and do it with a very critical mind and a solid ideological background.
It's not because mainstream information is damn awful (it will always be) that you have the right to be pessimistic and give up. We live in democracies, it's our duties to be enlightened citizens.
Just my two cents.
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On April 26 2011 23:02 Biff The Understudy wrote:
You can watch good information providers and honest media, and do it with a very critical mind and a solid ideological background.
Ideology should follow after facts, not exist despite it. Ideology is, if assumed beforehand, like a looking glass that distorts everything you look at. Confirmation bias will let you only see that ideology and not whats actually there.
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On April 26 2011 23:30 Brotkrumen wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 23:02 Biff The Understudy wrote:
You can watch good information providers and honest media, and do it with a very critical mind and a solid ideological background.
Ideology should follow after facts, not exist despite it. Ideology is, if assumed beforehand, like a looking glass that distorts everything you look at. Confirmation bias will let you only see that ideology and not whats actually there.
Lean to "consider the opposite" and you will be fine. 
Thumbs up for more scientific thinking in everyday life!
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Haha, I knew someone would post a cognitive bias link. But my point in the end is that the truth is not being covered up George Orwell style but instead, hidden in a sea of irrelevance Adulous Huxley style.
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On April 26 2011 17:24 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 10:16 catamorphist wrote:On April 26 2011 09:04 Elegy wrote:On April 26 2011 08:54 catamorphist wrote:On April 26 2011 08:31 Elegy wrote:On April 26 2011 08:30 catamorphist wrote:On April 26 2011 06:22 Envy01 wrote:
People ask, why are we in these wars still? Or why are we in these wars at all?
Well, the Afghanistan war is obvious: 9/11. If anyone believes we should not be fighting the Taliban then please remember the thousands of innocent people who were slaughtered in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. Remember those families who were shattered with the news that a loved one was killed at work, or when flying home to see them...
Why do the documents surrounding these wars, and THE ALLIES of the United States need to be revealed? What purpose does it serve? ![[image loading]](http://is200.imagesocket.com/images/2011/04/25/civiliancasualtiesira5h.png) Is the best way to remember those thousands of innocent people to drown them out with a few million more? A few million? Don't be foolish. So, speaking of foolishness, your suggestion is apparently that the appropriate response for patriotic Americans upon experiencing 9/11 is to pursue Al-Qaeda by occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, causing this chart. Bearing that in mind, what do you think a patriotic Iraqi or Afghani's appropriate response towards America is after experiencing the casualties depicted on this chart? Feel free to take your best guess. Perhaps he should write an angry forum post, or vote in an election? Huh? All I said, or clearly implied, was that nowhere near a "few million" have died, unless you are using ridiculous sensationalist figures with little or no basis in fact. I'm just asking you about your position. lol I have seen people avoiding the embarassing question by answering completely beside the point, but in the case of Elegy it's just really comical. Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 17:13 chickenhawk wrote:Holy shit, it's been shown time and time again that torture creates REALLY UNRELIABLE INFORMATION. People with the actual information being looked for can still lie, people with NO information will make something up just to make the torture stop.
It's funny that you say torture is ok in the name of freedom. What if the FBI started capturing people in the US without due process (the court system) and tortured them on suspicion of some kind of law-breaking?
What you pro-torturers are essentially saying is that it is OK to completely break someone else's freedom in order to protect your own.... which is entirely hypocritical... stop pretending that you are 'pro freedom' and more or less just admit that you are scared shitless of life and want to abuse your status/power over others to further keep your status/power. I never said I am pro-freedom etc, what the hell that is?... I even said one post back that torture, although an option, should allways be done when some one with real power like a judge or something allows it. And torture does work, although you can get the random guy to say something stupid, you will not base you decision making in one guy words... Problem is not wether torture is efficient or not. Problem is that we are not animals. Problem is that we have a humanistic ineheritage that worths much more than efficiency of Intelligence Agencies. The problem with torture is that it brings us back to time which are behind, for the best. You know, the good old time when we were boiling people alive, impaling our neighbours of cutting hand of thiefs.
Ah yes, I must have forgotten how effective internet warriors are at extrapolating an opinion of mine based on a single sentence reprimanding someone for using insanely exaggerated death figures.
What is more comical is that, invariably, someone always brings up the infamous "war for oil!!!!" argument, which is factually unsound and illogical, and then avoids it from that point on.
And since apparently I am so comical, I will say that I can't fault an ordinary Afghan for picking up a gun and attacking a US soldier. It's a perfectly understandable reaction, given the circumstances. If I saw my family members shot, bombed, or wounded by a foreign invader (whether the invasion is rightfully justified or not is irrelevant in this case), it be perfectly logical to take up arms. Now, targeting civilians with suicide bombings is clearly not, but deliberately attempting to shoot the NATO convoy driving by when it was the West that effectively destroyed your country, your home, and likely that someone in your extended family has died/been wounded as a result of the instability and violence caused by foreign intervention is an understandable response.
Torture? I don't like it. I think it is unreliable at best, and gives blatantly false information at worst. There are people at Gitmo, like the NY Times has covered, that were not tortured, that were treated well in terms of interrogation, and were released, and promptly joined terrorist movements that killed civilians.
Do I have moral qualms about torture? Sure. Shoving raw pork down some foot soldier's throat is pointless. Waterboarding a top level commander? Probably a different story, but still, it's unreliable and largely ineffective. Torture should be done away with because, by most credible accounts, it just doesn't really work.
But there are people at Gitmo that shouldn't be released. There are some fucked up, crazy people there. Not everyone is innocent, that much is obvious. What do you do with them? It's like trying to bake a cake with two pieces of shit, no matter what you do, it's still going to taste like crap in the end.
Moreover, that chart is a joke, for obvious reasons.
Why isn't broken down by perpetrator? How many Iraqi civilians have been directly killed by Western forces? How many Afghans? How many Iraqi militants have been killed by Iraqis (or insurgents in general) from suicide bombings, accidental deaths, etc? How many Afghan civilians have died as a result of deliberate attacks by insurgent fights?
I would only hope that most people have the ability to look at such a chart and realize its inherent bias, and the terrible means in which it attempts to communicate information. A much better graph, or series of graphs, would likely break down deaths by perpetrator, just to start with. And it would provide actual figures.
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How can a chart be inherently biased? charts are not capable of bias just as a number is not capable of an emotion. Any bias given to it is on the part of human beings, the chart itself is simply a display of information comparing the scale of different casualties.
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On April 27 2011 01:14 XeliN wrote:
How can a chart be inherently biased? charts are not capable of bias just as a number is not capable of an emotion. Any bias given to it is on the part of human beings, the chart itself is simply a display of information comparing the scale of different casualties.
...Is it really necessary to start a discussion about semantics?
Obviously, with inanimate things not having thoughts or feelings, and charts being a visualisation of abstract ideas as an extension are also not able to do so. This naturally means that the chart itself can not be biased.
However, one can manipulate numbers, either by blatantly inventing them, by choosing the set of numbers from different sources which best suites ones own goals, or simply by choosing how to display them. If you are good at doing this, you can make numbers give the impression that they are saying what you want them to say. So, while the chart itself might not be biased because it not a person capable of such an emotion, the person producing it can be biased, and this bias can influence the chart in a very direct way.
I am pretty sure that i could convincingly produce a chart that would make pretty much any data support either side of a related debate. Very useful techniques for doing so is the labelling of axis, constructing the derivative of stuff (The growth of the economy is less than last year, we are in an recession!), not starting axis at zero, setting/not setting numbers in comparison to other numbers, and so on.
So one should be very, very careful when looking at charts, and always consider who produced that chart, and why. Numbers technically can't lie, but one can make the same numbers say a large variety of things.
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On April 26 2011 21:36 iMAniaC wrote:
I thought about that, too, and decided it would be kind of pointless to start making theories about. If the US had done nothing, Saddam might still be in charge and he, of course, liked to minorities of his own civilian population.
One course of action I could have taken, was to take an average over his entire reign, in civilian deaths caused, and assumed that he would keep killing people at the same rate, then compared that number to the number killed after the US intervention. But it would hold just as much water as my previous diagram (i.e. very little), so I didn't bother.
The point about UN sanctions is also a very good one (which I have to admit I didn't know about). If I had plotted that into my diagram, it would have filled 80% of the area...
Well, actually such a study has been done, measuring the additional deaths in iraq during 2003-2006 above the normal rate which prevailed before the invasion:
http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/burnham_iraq_2006.html
"According to the researchers, the overall rate of mortality in Iraq since March 2003 is 13.3 deaths per 1,000 persons per year compared to 5.5 deaths per 1,000 persons per year prior to March 2003"
"This amounts to about 2.5 percent (654,000 deaths) of Iraqi’s population having died as a consequence of the war."
Now, you are right to say that the U.S forces haven't directly killed these many people.
These includes people dying from the living condtitions brought about by the occupation. Most of them from sectarian violence which we (if we respect international law) hold the occupying force responsible of.... just as we don't put the blames on the jews, polish and french that turned "on their own kin" during WW2. No, we say it was the germans who brought about the conditions where this was possible through the conduct of occupation.
And also... if we are to plot the victims of "The war on terror" we have to go back and start counting from 1981 when Reagan announced it.
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On April 26 2011 21:05 redviper wrote:Actually the chart ignores one of the worst atrocities the world committed against Iraq, which were the "UN" sanctions. At one time it was estimated that 1/2 million kids had died due to the effect on sanctions blocking the import of water sanitization equipment, food, medicine etc. Show nested quote +
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.
--60 Minutes (5/12/96)
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084Read the rest of the article, then go the nearest newspaper and spit on it.
Don't forget the Iraq Survey Group found that
Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability, which was essentially destroyed in 1991, after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities.
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On April 28 2011 07:13 theJob wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 21:36 iMAniaC wrote:
I thought about that, too, and decided it would be kind of pointless to start making theories about. If the US had done nothing, Saddam might still be in charge and he, of course, liked to minorities of his own civilian population.
One course of action I could have taken, was to take an average over his entire reign, in civilian deaths caused, and assumed that he would keep killing people at the same rate, then compared that number to the number killed after the US intervention. But it would hold just as much water as my previous diagram (i.e. very little), so I didn't bother.
The point about UN sanctions is also a very good one (which I have to admit I didn't know about). If I had plotted that into my diagram, it would have filled 80% of the area... Well, actually such a study has been done, measuring the additional deaths in iraq during 2003-2006 above the normal rate which prevailed before the invasion: http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/burnham_iraq_2006.html"According to the researchers, the overall rate of mortality in Iraq since March 2003 is 13.3 deaths per 1,000 persons per year compared to 5.5 deaths per 1,000 persons per year prior to March 2003" "This amounts to about 2.5 percent (654,000 deaths) of Iraqi’s population having died as a consequence of the war." Now, you are right to say that the U.S forces haven't directly killed these many people. These includes people dying from the living condtitions brought about by the occupation. Most of them from sectarian violence which we (if we respect international law) hold the occupying force responsible of.... just as we don't put the blames on the jews, polish and french that turned "on their own kin" during WW2. No, we say it was the germans who brought about the conditions where this was possible through the conduct of occupation.
Nice find! It's very interesting to see that the number reported by that study is 6,5 times higher than the one reported by Iraq Body Count project. I guess that says quite a lot about dark figures...
I'm still not entirely convinced about the notion that the disturbing force should bear all the responsibility for any atrocities commited by everybody else, even though such atrocities might not have happened had the disturbing force not disturbed. It makes it seem like any nutcase or asshole is excused for his actions, as long as someone else is responsible for moving the barriers that kept him at bay. In a fictional scenario, if one person disrupts the security around a nuclear power plant, and then another person, a terrorist, upon realizing that the security is disrupted, decides to cause a meltdown, would it then be the guy who disrupted security at the power plant who'd be responsible, or the actual terrorist? It seems like the same situation. If Saddam was the only thing keeping Iraqis from blowing up each other's cars, and you move Saddam, is it the responsibility of the US or the car blower? It's a difficult question, and I'm not sure what to think...
But however you turn it, there shouldn't be any doubt that the US should've known that removing Saddam came with a cost of quite a few civilian losses. Along the way, someone would have had to decide what "an acceptable number of civilian losses" would have been. Would it have been more or less than 650,000? A million? Is perhaps one person already one person too many? If nothing else, it's definitely something to keep in mind for every new country in which one intervenes; Libya, Syria(?), Bahrain(?), North Korea(?)...
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A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour.
This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).
Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year ... As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.
Source
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Wal-Mart has unions in China but not the U.S. Wow.
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On August 25 2011 00:40 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Wal-Mart has unions in China but not the U.S. Wow.
To be fair, the All-China Federations of Trade Unions is more of a source of government bargaining power than worker bargaining power. After all, it's China's only trade union.
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On August 25 2011 00:40 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Wal-Mart has unions in China but not the U.S. Wow.
I had a summer job with Wal-Mart once.
When undergoing routine training, you get to watch an hour long video about how unions hurt the work force. The best part is at the end they say something along the lines of "We aren't anti-union, we're pro-workers".
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On August 25 2011 00:47 Chargelot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2011 00:40 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Wal-Mart has unions in China but not the U.S. Wow. I had a summer job with Wal-Mart once. When undergoing routine training, you get to watch an hour long video about how unions hurt the work force. The best part is at the end they say something along the lines of "We aren't anti-union, we're pro-workers".
Wow, that's brainwashing of its finest. Though, not every union is good for the workers and not every union is able enough to help.
Anyways, regarding Wikileaks, I am sad that the German guy who left Wikileaks decided to erase a ton of stuff regarding the German neonazi-scene. I would've been very interested to see some of that stuff and the people saying that stuff go to jail (depending on what nazi-stuff you say, you might commit a crime just by saying it, the freedom of speech does not reach that far as in the u.s.).
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On August 25 2011 00:53 JustPassingBy wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2011 00:47 Chargelot wrote:On August 25 2011 00:40 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Wal-Mart has unions in China but not the U.S. Wow. I had a summer job with Wal-Mart once. When undergoing routine training, you get to watch an hour long video about how unions hurt the work force. The best part is at the end they say something along the lines of "We aren't anti-union, we're pro-workers". Wow, that's brainwashing of its finest. Though, not every union is good for the workers and not every union is able enough to help. Anyways, regarding Wikileaks, I am sad that the German guy who left Wikileaks decided to erase a ton of stuff regarding the German neonazi-scene. I would've been very interested to see some of that stuff and the people saying that stuff go to jail (depending on what nazi-stuff you say, you might commit a crime just by saying it, the freedom of speech does not reach that far as in the u.s.).
The neo-nazi scene in Germany is hardly worth the attention. The neo-nazi scene in Russia is probably the most dangerous one out there.
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On August 25 2011 00:47 Chargelot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2011 00:40 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Wal-Mart has unions in China but not the U.S. Wow. I had a summer job with Wal-Mart once. When undergoing routine training, you get to watch an hour long video about how unions hurt the work force. The best part is at the end they say something along the lines of "We aren't anti-union, we're pro-workers".
That is fawking retarded, living in a european country really opens your eye up to how crappy the US system is
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EPT![[image loading]](http://www.prosebeforehos.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/civilian-casualties-iraq-afghanistan-911.png)
