Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Inconsistency

Six Fallujahs
Mary Anne — (archived)

Gunfire at the roadside, a grenade here or there, a shell that hits the wrong thing, a not-quite-precision bombing raid, in a wide range of locations over time, can equal one pitched battle in the number of casualties. The casualties for the pitched battle are all together, and somewhat easy to count. The assorted varieties are scattered, and less easy to count.

And the war has gone on how long? You don't think it's possible to kill that many people, or you don't think it has happened?

Here in the United States, we have black-and-white procedures to deal with people whose birth or death certificates were never filed with a government agency, or whose records were destroyed by flood or fire, which means that it happens often enough, here and now, to warrant a procedure. We haven't had a war that involved a significant proportion of the US since 1865, we have modern methods of filing this data, and still cases of nonfiling or lost documents turn up. You don't think that maybe, just maybe, a country whose administrative center was bombed and looted, that's in the midst of a war, and whose infrastructure has gone to hell might possibly have problems with consistent collection and storage of personal data?

What looks like common sense to you doesn't strike me as so obvious.

If the authors of the study believe that they have gotten correct what has been wrong for a long time, it makes perfect sense for them to be proud that their data don't match previous estimates.

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