How many Iraqi civilian casualties are acceptable?

[loinburger]

loin: How many civilian casualties are acceptable?
kuci: $20,000
loin: What the hell?
kuci: You obviously didn't understand your intent behind the question you asked

[Kuciwalker]

Okay, so each peasant tortured lowers the GDP by what, a thousand dollars? Two thousand?

What is your point?

Since when? I didn't specify that in the OP.

You yelled at the people who considered the effect on other countries (namely stuff like "as many as it takes to make them stop being terrorists").

I asked how many Iraqi civilian casualties are acceptable to bring about a relatively stable US-style democracy. I didn't ask you to turn this into a GDP optimization problem.

And I didn't.

[Kuciwalker]

This is a depressingly poor showing on your part. Given that "human welfare" has multiple components that are not immediately comparable, one of which is material wealth (measured in dollars), it is obviously necessary and proper to convert all of the components as best as possible into the same units.

[loinburger]

Alright, now I'm convinced you're trolling.

[Kuciwalker]

Is this the loinburger equivalent of "nice try"?

[loinburger]

Would you prefer that I call you deliberately obtuse? Because you're being deliberately obtuse.

[loinburger]

To clarify, I consider this to be primarily a moral question. You turned it into a strictly economic question. I questioned the wisdom of turning a moral question into an economic question. You replied by saying that I didn't understand my own question. My conclusion is that, at best, you are being deliberately obtuse.

And inferring that I was dismissing the effects on other countries because I called Sloww dumb for making a dunderheaded reply? C'mon, what the hell?

[Kuciwalker]

To clarify, I consider this to be primarily a moral question. You turned it into a strictly economic question. I questioned the wisdom of turning a moral question into an economic question. You replied by saying that I didn't understand my own question. My conclusion is that, at best, you are being deliberately obtuse.

You're right, you understand your question. You just, bizarrely, don't understand that by its very nature the answer is an economic one. You are asking us to find the difference in value between two societies and express that value in lives.

[loinburger]

Welp

[SlowwHand]

What?

[HalfLotus]

The question then becomes how. We can't exactly nuke them, we'd lose all that oil.

That's actually a desirable outcome for the powers that be, the political problems of nukage notwithstanding.. We're there to "secure access" to resources, though not necessarily use them.

It's fairly easy to convince people that the world is running out of oil when you plug the wells and then rely on oil production data to push the "Peak Oil" scam.

[loinburger]

That scenario is only applicable in 1984-ville

[MOBIUS]

I'd like to know how those who answered "more than 2,000,000" justify their answer, given that there's no proof that the Iraqis participated in 9/11, retained any WMDs, or gave any support to al-Qaeda prior to the invasion?

I voted for the >2m option, because the more dead Iraqis, the better!

The real world war now is not on terrorism, but on the climate. Frankly all those dead civilians are less people spewing CO2 into the atmosphere, so that can only be a good thing…

In fact, if you look further, increasing the number of US casualties is actually much more preferable than killing Iraqis as their per capita CO2 footprints are much greater. Indeed, this is one time where you can truly say that a dead American is actually worth 6 dead Iraqis…

Come to think of it, were those Islamists who perpetrated 9/11 actually guilty of a terrorist attack – or concerned citizens making a symbolic strike in the name of preventing climate change?

After all, the colour of Islam is green…

[loinburger]

Come to think of it, were those Islamists who perpetrated 9/11 actually guilty of a terrorist attack – or concerned citizens making a symbolic strike in the name of preventing climate change?

That's probably only a valid argument if one or both sides are almost exclusively using biological and/or chemical weapons (or something else with a relatively low ecological footprint). F'rinstance, the CO2 released from the WTC burning and collapsing may have surpassed the lifetime outputs of the buildings' occupants, and almost certainly surpasses their outputs when you account for the CO2 expenditure of rebuilding over the site.

[Dauphin]

As the adage goes, Kuci knows the price, but not the value.