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Comment by cm2187

2 years ago

A war that would only kill 10% civilians would be a massive improvement over any recent conflict.

Well, that was a 10% failure rate supposedly on selecting the primary target of the attack.

The attack itself was allowed to have a 15x to 100x number of civilians killed depending on the supposed importance of the target.

I imagine that's very WW1-y and is a sign that the military leadership is just sending soldiers to die without care

Isn’t it close to Russian-Ukrainian war ratio?

  • That ratio is by all estimates lower than 10%.

    UN Estimates, as of March 1st, are "10,675 [civilians] killed, 20,080 wounded" -- on both sides.

    The number of soldiers killed on both sides (combined) is certainly no less than 100k, and might even exceed 400k.

    In Gaza, more than 25,000 civilians have already been killed. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145742

    This is a callous, inexcusable massacre. By comparison with the Israelis, the Russians look like "gentle and parfait knights." But the former are presumably on our side, and the latter are our geopolitical opponents. So.

    • That's not true. The UN themselves state that their numbers for Ukraine are likely severely undercounting the total casualties simply because they don't have any insight into what is going on in occupied territory. They do not give "estimates" for Ukraine, the numbers are what they have been able to confirm. So for you to call that very specific number an "estimate" is incorrect - which should probably have been self-evident.

      >> The U.N. human rights mission in Ukraine, which has dozens of monitors in the country, said it expects the real toll to be "significantly higher" than the official tally since corroboration work is ongoing.

      https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/civilian-death-toll-ukr...

      https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/more-than-8000-civilian...

      There are more than 10,000 fresh graves in the city of Mariupol alone and many of them appear to contain multiple bodies - which was the case in other graves uncovered in places like Kherson and Lyman.

      https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariup...

      The actual civilian death toll is almost certainly in the tens of thousands, not a singular ten thousand.

      Also consider the death toll caused by the withholding of medical assistance to those who refuse to take Russian citizenship, and the flooding caused by the destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam.

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    • But this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison: we happen to use the word "war" to describe both what's occurring in Ukraine and what's occurring in Gaza, just as we use the word "surgery" to describe both the removal of birdshot following a hunting accident and the removal of a brain tumor, since, after all, the two phenomena we call war share many characteristics (violence, mutual non-recognition of legal authority, etc.), just as the two kinds of surgery do (anesthesia, scalpels, etc.). But it would be an obtuse medical review board that faulted the tumor surgeon for damaging a higher percentage of healthy tissue, or for causing a greater loss of post-operative function, or for having a higher number of her patients die on the operating table, than the gunshot surgeon. After all, the pellets will be close to the surface, easy to distinguish from benign human cells, and unlikely to be hiding behind anything as delicate and vital as the blood vessels of the cerebellum. Of course, if you weren't such a review board member making careful medical-ethical judgments but instead a malpractice lawyer trying to convince a jury of ordinary citizens of the ineptitude and even malice of some neurosurgeon, you might not be quite as scrupulous about pushing an emotive analogy too far.

For every militant they correctly identify (90% of the time, they'd have us believe) and kill, they also kill dozens of innocents. This doesn't give them pause; on the contrary the Israeli public revels in the carnage and bring out lawn chairs to watch. It's genocide.

  • Many people in the west enjoy it too. Lots of Europeans and Americans don't like Muslims (or even Jews or just people who don't look 'white'), and they like turning on the news to find out how many have been killed each day because it wouldn't be acceptable to carry out in their own countries, especially in the era of DEI.

    There's the two-wrongs-make-a-right atonement for the holocaust aspect on the German side and the promise of the rapture for Americans also.

    Maybe most importantly willingness to show eager support for something that may seem 'bad' such as genocide functions as a shibboleth to display allegiance to one's political party and society because ultimately what's happening in the news has no deep significance for most westerners beyond that of a football match. Showing you're not an anti-semite is the most important thing one can do, and there's no better way to do that than support whatever the current Israeli government feels like doing (perhaps sparking a large regional conflict) and rounding up any Jewish people who object on charges of being race traitors.