The total body count for US military in the past 30 years is almost certainly less than the total body count for Russian military in the past 9 months.
The vast majority of the deaths in middle eastern conflicts were caused by locals, not US troops. Not to even mention that hardly any US troops died, but Russian troops are dying by the tens of thousands.
For Afghanistan it’s harder to find numbers, but given the vastly higher casualties among local forces, it seems fair to assume that they’d have been doing most of the fighting.
Given the doctrinal differences between US and Russian forces, it’s completely unsurprising that Russians would be killing way more people. US relies on air superiority and PGMs whereas Russia is stuck fighting WW1 style artillery battles.
Not to mention that US doctrine does not really involve terror attacks on civilian targets, whereas Russian doctrine clearly does. You don’t see US bombing power plants many months into a conflict in order to cause civilian misery to gain an upper hand in negotiations.
I wonder: does it seem possible that humans might choose (and psychologically/epistemically favor) one source over another according to how well it supports their pre-existing worldview?
Similarly: might people also "calculate" causality (which directly affects attribution of responsibility for death) differently for similar reasons (assuming they don't just ignore it entirely, even when it is explicitly mentioned in a conversation)?
> For Afghanistan it’s harder to find numbers, but given the vastly higher casualties among local forces, it seems fair to assume that they’d have been doing most of the fighting.
Do you have any interest in the causality that preceded that fighting, and if so: how many years do you go back in your model, and how many variables are in your model? (Perhaps I should also ask: do you even have a model, or might you be using a different technique/phenomenon to produce your values?)
> Given the doctrinal differences between US and Russian forces, it’s completely unsurprising that Russians would be killing way more people.
Perhaps...but then there's also this rather unpopular question: what is actually true?
> Not to mention that US doctrine does not really involve terror attacks on civilian targets, whereas Russian doctrine clearly does.
"Clearly".
> You don’t see US bombing power plants many months into a conflict in order to cause civilian misery to gain an upper hand in negotiations.
You see mostly what is shown to you, and what your mind allows you to see. I recommend against the premature formation of belief, as well as being mindful of the mind's tendency to conflate belief with knowledge.
> Another common reference is this one, which has numbers as high as 1,000,000+
But that source does not speak of US forces.
> I wonder: does it seem possible that humans might choose (and psychologically/epistemically favor) one source over another according to how well it supports their pre-existing worldview?
This is exactly what you are doing, yes. You’re picking a number intended to quantify something entirely different and comparing it against mine.
> "Clearly".
What else would you call Russia repeatedly using low precision missiles to strike population centers? They’ve done this with fucking MLRS, an area denial weapon.
What else could you call Russias extensive campaign against the power infrastructure in Ukraine? This can’t possibly achieve any military goals this long into the war, the only purpose is to hurt the civilian population.
Rumour has it that the US Military had some involvement in the Iraq war.
> This is exactly what you are doing, yes.
Technically, this is your perception/interpretation of what I am doing.
> You’re picking a number intended to quantify something entirely different and comparing it against mine.
I'm not asserting "my number" (actually, it is just one example among many on that page) as factual, but I get the impression that you present yours as such.
Am I mistaken in that? Do you actually wonder what is true?
>> "Clearly".
> What else would you call Russia repeatedly using low precision missiles to strike population centers? They’ve done this with fucking MLRS, an area denial weapon.
I was just teasing a bit about the phenomenon where humans tend to believe that what is "clear" to them is synonymous with what is true. Feed incorrect training data to a neural network and then ask it questions, and it will give incorrect answers, but to it, the answers would be "clearly" true.
> What else could you call Russias extensive campaign against the power infrastructure in Ukraine? This can’t possibly achieve any military goals this long into the war, the only purpose is to hurt the civilian population.
I would call it: an unfortunate turn of events...yet another consequence of ongoing human folly, and in this case: a cultural inability (reinforced and enforced in numerous places) to desire to speak truthfully.
> Rumour has it that the US Military had some involvement in the Iraq war.
Yes but their point is that the US army didn't kill most of those civilians. Now you can make moral arguments that we deserve some to most of the blame for destabilizing the country but its still pretty different from killing the civilians
Now you could say we should have known that possibility existed and should still get a good amount of blame from not preventing it but no one is a fortuneteller
Some people say that the first prerequisite step in solving such problems is that one first realizes one has a problem. In my experience, people are not very good at self-awareness...in general, but particularly during the discussion of certain topics. There is no shortage of evidence of this archived in social media conversations.
Defend my claim against what? I made a specific claim about deaths caused by US forces, nobody has seriously tried to dispute that.
You’re trying to push some absurd logic that would also imply that Gavrilo Princip was personally responsible for the tens of millions of deaths caused by WW1.
No you didn’t. At no point did you attempt to present conflicting numbers.
Instead you sunk to lazy trolling with “is anything true?? question everything!”. Yeah, you can dismiss literally any conversation like that.
You started playing games with meanings of well defined words like “terrorism”. It’s like arguing that the sky being blue is just a matter of opinion, completely pointless.
b) Presenting a competing theory is not even a requirement of disputing a claim - dispute: "to question the truth or rightness of dispute a statement"
> Instead you sunk to lazy trolling with “is anything true?? question everything!”. Yeah, you can dismiss literally any conversation like that.
Do you lack the ability to see what you are doing here? Are you not literally asserting that appealing to what is actually true is necessarily ~invalid, and can only be "trolling"?
> You started playing games with meanings of well defined words like “terrorism”. It’s like arguing that the sky being blue is just a matter of opinion, completely pointless.
I often wonder: what would people like you do if someone was to ever take away your memes...do you have anything to fall back on?
I challenge you to utilize the same mode of thinking that you would apply when discussing code, processors, or that sort of thing. If you instead choose to continue with your current mode, I will continue to mock you as I am doing now (and to moderators: if people can engage in insults and bald-faced lying, is some teasing in response really that inappropriate?).
The vast majority of the deaths in middle eastern conflicts were caused by locals, not US troops. Not to even mention that hardly any US troops died, but Russian troops are dying by the tens of thousands.