Heartland

markfiend wrote:

nowayjose wrote:

markfiend wrote: They were not killed by Muslims,

By whom then? Martians?

By Americans. Most of whom are Christians.

[citation needed]

For f*ck's sake. Are you going to keep on with the Muslim-bashing or are you going to admit you're wrong?

I'm bashing? I was just asking a question.

Almost as ridiculous as the idea that Muslims in general, a small and oppressed minority in Europe and the US, are going to destroy our whole way of life. It may not be clear, but what I am trying to do is a reductio ad absurdum of nowayjose's argument; if these ideas apply to Islam then they apply equally to Christianity.

However, I will say, as a citizen of the US or of Europe, if you're going to be killed by someone, chances are very high indeed that it's going to be by a white man who is (at least nominally) a Christian.

nowayjose wrote:[citation needed]

Touché.

However do I really need a citation for a claim that the massive casualties of the Iraq war were inflicted by the Americans on the Iraqis rather than the other way round?

nowayjose wrote:I'm bashing? I was just asking a question.

Funny looking question...

nowayjose wrote:The vast majority of religious terrorist acts are not done in the name of the Pope or Martin Luther. Stop relativising issues. The primary problem today is not Christianity, nor is it Buddhism. Neither Taoism, nor the Hindu faith. Not even the American evangelical idiots are that much of an issue. Not even a tiny fraction of that. Islam is the worst thing to happen since the Aztecs ripped out beating hearts for the rain god. It probably is even worse than that because, at least, the Aztecs didn't aim for world domination. Almost all religious killings today are done in the name of Allah. Islam is (in accordance to Churchill) the most retrograde force in existence today. It must be fought at all fronts. It is the antithesis of enlightenment, the antithesis of humanism, the antithesis of modernity. If you defend what noone sane could possibly defend, you're part of the problem.

markfiend wrote:...what I am trying to do is a reductio ad absurdum of nowayjose's argument;

Good luck with that. Either it absolutely believes that Islam

nowayjose wrote:is the worst thing to happen since the Aztecs ripped out beating hearts for the rain god...[and]...must be fought at all fronts

in which case perhaps it's time it stopped believing everything it sees on television, or it's doing a marvellous impression of a troll.

Either way, I'm done trying to reason with it. I'll be keeping an eye out for when it finally decides to declare war and gets righteously lamped by a couple of mild-mannered muslim kids outside the chippy who are tired of this shit.

markfiend wrote:

nowayjose wrote:[citation needed]

Touché.

However do I really need a citation for a claim that the massive casualties of the Iraq war were inflicted by the Americans on the Iraqis rather than the other way round?

No. Just for your original claim that Americans killed "600,000+ Iraqis".

"Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey" (PDF) puts the death toll at 601,027 deaths (range of 426,369 to 793,663 using a 95% confidence interval)

Edit: to be clear, not all these deaths were the responsibility of the US forces; I misremembered. However, they are deaths over and above the figures expected if the Iraq war had never happened.

markfiend wrote:"Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey" (PDF) puts the death toll at 601,027 deaths (range of 426,369 to 793,663 using a 95% confidence interval)

That's an estimated number. I don't dispute it but here's a source with documented numbers: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/ ... ten-years/

I did the math from the numbers published therein, and the deaths directly caused by coalition forces (both civilian and other) over the ten year period sum up to 15181 (approx.), if I didn't miscalculate.

Everyone of those is one too many (well, maybe except for a few particularly nasty f*ckers) but that's a wildly different number from 600,000+. It's also just about 1/10 of the total casualties documented in the report (ca. 174,000).

The remaining, non-coalition deaths may have been caused indirectly by the toppling of the Saddam regime but that might have happened also if Saddam had died of natural causes, or if he would have been ousted by a coup or some other uprisal. If the status quo is upheld only by brutal repression through a leader figure, then it is inherently unstable.

There are a number of difficulties with the Lancet study, not just wide variance between Lancet numbers and other sources. There are some methodological issues involved in deriving their numbers as well (not my area of expertise).

They are against HS2.

Bahamas wrote:They are against HS2.

So are The Greens. http://stophs2.org/news/11052-greens-ukip-interview-hs2