Enjoy!

I am a big Robert Kaplan fan, but I limit my blogging to transatlantic affairs, especially German-American Relations. I write with two other German Fulbright Alunni for the Atlantic Review http:atlanticreview.org and organize the quartely carnivals of German American Relations http://america-germany.atlanticreview.org/

Perhaps you are interested in participating. That would be great.

I don’t have the power to make people do what they don’t want to do. That requires hard power, execution squads, and Marine Regiments.

I think one reason why I favor emotional impact over rational statistics is just that, I just tend to think it is more effective. In the end, you get the same results anyway. What does it really matter if someone feels one person’s pain or knows a million died, if that person fights to end it? We are talking about the same problem here, after all, only different methods to communicate the problem.

Bookworm was writing about this pile up at San Fran because it snowed and the roads got ice on it. Huge crash, 300 + cars. If people could do the math, perhaps they could have calculated how much time extra their brakes would need on a close to frictionless surface? But they don’t. If people did the numbers rationally, then they would not go broke and would be king of the stocks and have 50 mutual funds. They also wouldn’t go bankrupt after winning the lottery.

I just have to recognize that rational numbers don’t win a lot of people over as pure emotional impact would. I’m a pragmatist at heart, so as a rational thinker, I end up supporting emotional impact…. hrm, why does that sound ironic.

Romans at Cannae was something I was always amazed at. Link

Because not only did they lose so many people. But they then just recruited a bigger larger army afterwards. Then they LOST that army, the new one, and then they kept fighting. It was surely the most supreme time of the Roman Empire, when the Republic was strong in virtue and in patriotism. I cannot help but wonder that if those Roman citizens had lived, would the Roman Empire had lasted longer?

Analogous to us. When Rome had most of the world, she got weak. America is now the topdog, and we act like we’re 5 month old kittens. And I cannot help but think this is due primarily to the fact that our casualties were very very low compared to what they might have been. (Soviets in WWII)

I can’t really say what Steve would think about the numbers, douglass. It is as you say, the numbers make sense to me, but I am unable to see it from another person’s perspective where the numbers don’t make sense.

Well, the thing I can say, is perhaps steve believes that any loss of life is bad and that relative margins don’t matter. So if he can stop the lives lost in Iraq, American lives, then that is good. Regardless of Iraqi lives lost or whatever.

I don’t speak for steve of course, and I’m probably wrong. But I just tend to think, that for some people, isolationism is still strong and the idea that all lives have equal value is not something they believe in. Neither do I for that matter, but I at least believe all lives have instrinsic equal value.

Y- I agree that it is difficult to fully comprehend what the numbers mean, but there are ways to bring it into the realm of understanding- for instance when I posted the number of Saddams victims in this format:
Saddam may have killed as many as “between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power”
That’s 780,000 give or take a few ten thousand.
780,000 is a big number- but 70-125 per day is pretty tangible (2-4 high school classrooms), and 8,000 days is only 22 years- certainly tangible to anyone over 35 or so.

And a little context for this:
In ONE DAY, the Romans lost approx. 65,000 dead to Hannibal’s forces at Cannae. ONE DAY.
That’s nearly double what we lost in Korea in three years, and about 7000 less than we lost in Viet Nam in around eight years. I think that gives it some perspective- and I’m just asking for a statistical understanding, not an emotional one. In fact, that was the whole point of my post- if you step back from the emotional reaction of people like Steve, and look rationally at the numbers, how can you take a position like Steve’s?

And then a little perspective for this:
In 2002, in the United States, for the age range of 16-34 (covering the main ages of our military casualies in Iraq), 27,267 died just from Motor Vehicle Crashes and Homocides.
I think everyone knows someone firsthand who either died as a result of a motor vehicle crash or a homocide. Multiply that personal tragedy times the population of Laramie, Wyoming, and you start to get the picture. Every year America wipes out a Laramie in car crashes and homocides, and that’s just 16-34 year olds.

I didn’t expect it to do much to you, Y, you already know this stuff I’m sure, and you get it anyway, but what does Steve think? I’d love to know.

“The neo-neocon, a former liberal mugged by the reality of 9/11, offers an extraordinarily insightful analysis of what we face in our struggle against Islamic evil. Deep thoughts for deep thinkers.”

2,726

It does support my contention that large numbers are abstract in basis, and that if you try to manipulate them in your head, it becomes non-intuitive.

?

I thought the yearly average KIA in Iraq was like 800. Or are you counting friendly Iraqis as well?

There are ways to make people understand and comprehend the numbers, but they involve intense psychological pain, mental anguish, and extreme personal loss. Such things as 9/11, can be comprehended, by taking any personal losses you had and multiplying it by 3,000. That is the only way a person can even come close to understanding the pain of a 1,000 or 3,000 people. As I said before, if you ever felt fully the pain of a 1,000 or even a 100 people, in full HDTV color, you’d go insane from the grief.

Humans are not empaths, therefore not only are we insensitive to emotional pain but our minds also have failsafes designed to prevent mental damage.

The methods by which you can make a person feel the emotional pain of other people, has to do with visual images and that’s probably about it.

Since you can only write on the internet, and visual images are hard to communicate just by writing comments, talking a 7,000 dead at whatever compared to whatever dead at Iraq, makes no significant difference.

Either you already understand the significance and I don’t need me to tell you, or you don’t understand the significance and never will just by reading what I try to tell you.

An easier to understand example is if someone told you that you now have 200 trillion dollars. Do you really comprehend how much money that is?

Do you have in your mind, exactly what you can buy with that money? Do you have in your mind, exactly how many cars and of what type and color, 200 trillion dollars can buy?

No, of course you don’t. 200 trillion is an abstract number, it is a statistic. It isn’t the same with 1 million, 1 million can buy 4 250,000 dollar houses. Everyone understands that.

Just as everyone understands what it is like to lose a child, or imagines what it would be like to lose their child. So they see the deaths in Iraq, the stories, how young the soldiers are, their pictures, and so on, and they attach emotional connections to these people that they can comprehend. So when they die, not only are the immediate family members affected, but the rest of America as well.

You cannot counter-act that very subtle and effective propaganda effect with simple written words. That’s like firing a gun using only your thumb.

You just don’t have the leverage. And without the leverage, it won’t be moved.

Does it really make sense to say things that imply that our military personnel are getting killed in unacceptable numbers in Iraq?

Yes, it does make sense to me to answer your question.

Even though it may not make sense to anyone else.

The psychological aspect of humanity is pretty diverse. For example, I could make Saddam’s whatever understandable to someone, by giving them the context. The context in this sense, would be actual videotapes of the torture and rape rooms.

You see, to give human context, requires human pain. So if I were to make a propaganda film to combat the media’s propagandization of American deaths, I would probably start with happy day style pics of the Kurdish or Iraqi family, hopping around in a bright sunny day. I’d show their compassion, their wit, and their kindness. Then I’d show how Uday or Qusay would pick the family up and torture them to death.

That would supply the necessary context. If Fox ran the propaganda film as I would design it, the approval for the Iraq war would jump about 10 to 20 points.

It might jump more if I could fit in American soldiers and their stories, lives, and deaths with the Iraqi ones. That would be harder however.

It’s not hard to do. The Marines found boatloads of torture and execution films in Fallujah. I wouldn’t even have to make anything up.

No lie is ever as consistent as truth is.

But the President won’t do propaganda, so you have people talking about 2,000 American deaths and not anyone else’s deaths.

It is as simple as it is immutable.

At Gettysburg, over 7000 killed in three days (both sides).

In ONE DAY, the Romans lost approx. 65,000 dead to Hannibal’s forces at Cannae. ONE DAY.

Saddam may have killed as many as “between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power”
http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/
iraq_deathsundersaddamhussein42503.html
That’s 780,000 give or take a few ten thousand.

In 2002, in the United States, for the age range of 16-34 (covering the main ages of our military casualies in Iraq), 27,267 died just from Motor Vehicle Crashes and Homocides. More than four times our yearly average KIA in Iraq.

Does it really make sense to say things that imply that our military personnel are getting killed in unacceptable numbers in Iraq? Each individual death is a tragedy, immeasurable in it’s own reach- but one has to see things in context… Death can mean something, and should- but if we do not look at it closely, and understand it, and get over any irrational fears about it, we will be paralyzed into inaction. If we are willing to allow 17,706 people from 16-34 to die in a year so we can drive cars, then we sure as hell can risk losing a few thousand in four years to change a dangerous world.
If one still holds to belief that our losses in Iraq are too great, than I am sure you would also believe that over 17,000 deaths of 16-34’s per year is far too many, and automobile transport should be severely limited, or even eliminated, right?