Thread: Violence, Iraq
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Old 03-29-2007, 02:59 PM   #4
Fred Little
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Re: Ueshiba on the future of Aikido

Quote:
Mike Sigman wrote: View Post
Because Saddam Hussein took the money, food, etc., that was allowed in during the sanctions and thereby starved Iraqi children, etc., that was the fault of the sanctions? What sort of reasoning is this? Or is it simply a desire to point a the bad old western democracies? "Documented"? The Lancet studies, both of them, have been publicly laughed at by many statisticians. The Lancet is not a reputable non-partisan scientific magazine; it gained a reputation for left-wing views quite some time ago, Fred. I'm not particularly concerned that you hold any views, however; what concerns me is that information about Saddam's part in starving children and information about the Lancet study are pretty readily available to anyone who is interested in checking on sources, as opposed to emoting. Emoting is not reasoning.

Regards,

Mike Sigman
Mike:

The larger issue I was addressing was Erick's claim regarding is the tolerance of mass violence, in which regard my point is that we are now simply more tolerant of covert than overt mass violence. It's just displacement, not elimination or even reduction.

WRT to the sanctions regime in the interrugnum between wars, my argument certainly isn't that Saddam was a good guy and the Western governments were bad guys. My argument is that Saddam was a bad guy and the Western governments used an ineffective nstrument (sanctions) that had foreseeable consequences (high infant mortality), and continued to use that instrument even after the consequences became documented historical facts. While that doesn't change the fact that Saddam was a bad guy, about the best it says about Western governments is that they are fatally stupid.

As for the statistical robustness of Johns Hopkins study appearing in The Lancet, aside from noting that reality has a well-documented liberal bias , I would suggest that the criticisms levelled against the methodology and conclusions are about as credible as the "science" that passes for "global climate change skepticism."

Both the first and the second Lancet studies are generally accepted by experts in the field of epidemiology and the naysayers are a distinct minority.

Third hand reports of anecdotal anomalies are not a counter-argument. They are noise. In the instances of epidemiologists who have raised methodological concerns, even they have generally said that their concerns have been painted in much starker terms than they proposed them, and do not extend to the broader conclusions of the studies.

Whatever your personal views of The Lancet, notwithstanding the fact that individual articles it has published have aroused controversy, your characterization of the publication as "not a reputable non-partisan scientific magazine....a reputation for far-left views," is overblown at best.

But as I said at the outset, these are distractions from the major point, which is my contention that the Western World attitude about mass death has changed only to the extent that we have accepted the principle that it is bad if it happens among Western peoples, irrelevant if it happens among non-Western peoples, and a cause for celebration if we can define it as the West vs. the Rest with a triple digit multiplier on the kill ratio.

Best,

FL
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