The Duke
JohnD.Ford
Junior Chimp
Posts: 9,270
Political Matrix
E: 0.13, S: -1.23
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« on: November 29, 2004, 01:56:41 PM » |
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« edited: November 29, 2004, 01:59:33 PM by John Ford »
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Gabu,
I don't have to take the quiz to differentiate. One group likes to shoot their mouths off, the other likes to fly planes into buildings. That's the difference, and its why one is a real danger and one is a sideshow.
khirkhib,
Your 100,000 figure is wrong. That number comes from a study that is garbage (and on top of that, it only concludes that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war, and I will now demonstrate, even that claim is not accurate).
The study deriving that figure was poorly sampled. The sample was 33 neighborhoods in Iraq, and they tried to extrapolate from these neighborhoods to figure the total damage to the country.
Of course 33 neighborhoods is too small a sample. The neighborhoods were not selected randomly either, rather selection was guided by the scientists perception of war damage in Iraq (surprise! Fallujah and the rest of the Sunni Triangle got oversampled!). Combat damage is not spread over the country evenly, so if one area that has been hit by fighting gets sampled, it will outweigh the other neighborhoods (Surprise again, Fallujah accounts for 75% of the recorded casualties!). Non-combat deaths are included (AIDS deaths are included for example, which cannot be rationally attributed to the US military, as are deaths resulting from insurgent fire, also cannot e attributed to the US military).
As a result of the small sample and bad sampling of neighborhoods, the margin of error was huge. The study concluded that the number of casualties was between 8,000 and 194,000. We need a study to tell us this? Of course, credible estimates not come to by idiots that slander America and social science research at the same time put the death toll of Iraqis at around 13,000, the large bulk being killed by suicide bombings.
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