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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Blaming every civilian death on the US isn't really reasonable to me (nor would I blame every civilian death in Ukraine on Russia). Yes, it's true that they probably wouldn't have happened without an invasion, but that kind of logic also makes it okay to execute prisoners of war- after all, so the logic goes, they wouldn't be here if their country hadn't decided to invade, therefore it is the fault of their country when we shoot a bound, complicit prisoner in the back.

It is very unfairly shifting the entire blame upon one party, when I can assure you it was not only the US that got its hands dirty, and I reckon if you took a look at who actually directly caused those 200k deaths, it would be a lot muddier. Really look at that chart. I love it because it really does paint the American occupation in such a good light. Look at how much those deaths decreased after the US established greater control around 2008-2011 and spiked in the years following, due to the withdrawal of US forces. This paints a picture where a higher American commitment leads to fewer deaths, not more, which is just one factor that leads me to believe that America was not anywhere near the primary source of these civilian deaths.

Really look at that chart. I love it because it really does paint the American occupation in such a good light. Look at how much those deaths decreased after the US established greater control around 2008-2011 and spiked in the years following, due to the withdrawal of US forces.

All the data in that table (which I assume you are talking about, as I don't see a chart) is still after the US initially invaded and plunged the country into chaos. "We invaded and caused lots of civilians to die, then after a while for three years we briefly tried to do a better job and had somewhat fewer civilians die, and then got tired of doing a better job and had lots of civilians die again" hardly paints the occupation in a good light, any more than a domestically violent spouse being nice to their spouse for a while and taking them to Disneyland paints their marriage in a good light. In terms of a comparison to the hypothetical where the US did not invade, the 1 million excess deaths figure from the introductory paragraph seems more indicative, since those presumably would have been calculated relative to demographic trends identified before the invasion.

Blaming every civilian death on the US isn't really reasonable to me (nor would I blame every civilian death in Ukraine on Russia).

I mean, I agree, but how many do you blame on the US and Russia respectively? I'm suspicious of reasoning that amounts to "the situation is not so clear-cut, so by gut feeling and some non-quantitative reasoning, the ingroup is probably not as guilty as the outgroup is".

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