The estimates of the body count over the course of the Iraq war range from military estimates in the range of 200,000 to public health estimates that are between 500,000 and one million over the course of roughly eight years. So I guess even if you believe the higher estimates, (and being a public health guy, I trust those sources more) the raw fatality rate-- while in a similar range-- is still considerably higher.
The key words in your post, Mr. C., are "This from populations much smaller than America, with lower birth rates." Yeah-- so far, at least, this conflict has proved to be considerably more devastating.
I just think it's important not to minimize the devastating impact of the Iraq war, and its utter pointlessness. It was a watershed in US aggression, many countries will never forget what we did, and rightly so. We squandered whatever international goodwill we had left after Vietnam. It's inevitable-- and should have been predictable -- that tyrants would use this level of aggression to justify their own depravity.
That argument is still a fallacy, but it's an appealing one to many people, unfortunately.
Yeah, this.
And absolutely this. My own take, which is not a popular one, is that unrestrained capitalism is both a humanitarian disaster and desperately inefficient. There has been little meaningful innovation in the last half century, and even less in the last 25 years. There are no cars I'd want to buy today, computers were faster and easier to use 20 to 40 years ago, benchmark testing is meaningless, and who cares if memory is cheaper? Touch screen sucks, voice recognition is still slower than typing for most people, social media is an open running sewer, and texting is awful-- I had far more meaningful communication with my friends 15 years ago, when we wrote emails like letters. Now no one has the patience; language has been destroyed.
There are outliers where capitalism has done well-- HIV drugs, eBikes, a few really useful strides forward. And 'capitalism' isn't just a private sector problem, either. Most non-profits are structured similarly; they have almost identical issues with bureaucracy, cronyism, you'll find the same stupid notes taped to the refrigerator in the break room.
I totally agree that there is a dangerous moral shift here, and we need to stay focused on it-- it's one of the reasons I do the work that I do. And if I think about it, even my closest friends are probably more likely today to treat other humans inhumanely than they were even 10 years ago.
However, both problems are related, and I would argue that unrestrained capitalism is part of the reason we've lost respect for human and animal life-- not the only one, but one of the most important. People work in dead-end, meaningless jobs, advancement is often impossible, when people step off the straight and narrow, we cage them or drug them or send them back to the neighborhood they came from so the whole cycle can repeat again.
We used to understand that capitalism only worked with regulation to keep it in check. There's a reason that every house on the block doesn't have different power outlets that supply different voltages. There was a day when you could rent a car without having to read the manual to figure out the climate control, when you could buy a mobile phone and not have to budget half a day to figure out how to disable the bloat and spyware.
Capitalism has gotten really crazy, it means something different now. I have several students in my office every year just because of the way economics is taught. "My parents nearly bankrupted themselves to send me here, and the texts I'm reading and what the professors are saying makes absolutely no sense." This absolutely contributes to the current epidemic of human depravity. Sure, violent video games don't help, but the depersonalization comes from vast institutions in the public and private sector that make sure we never forget: The market doesn't exist to serve your needs. You will buy what we tell you to, be interested in what we say you'll be interested in. If you buy a 50 pound bag of dog food, we will bombard you with more ads for dog food even though you won't need any for three months. We don't care about you. You are nothing. You are nobody."
If this sounds familiar, I hope those on the other side of the political aisle realize that we have a lot in common. We are being exploited and turned against each other. I'm sick of this. I don't want to do it anymore.
