• Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    Those… look it’s NOT hard to find data to show the death toll for the US, so why did you go with such horrible examples?

    There is no widely agreed on figure for the number of people that have been killed so far in the war on terror as the Bush Administration has defined it to include the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and operations elsewhere. According to Joshua Goldstein, an international relations professor at the American University, the global war on terror has seen fewer war deaths than any other decade in the past century.

    Like beyond how rough the numbers are: the wiki pages all include the total death counts, but those are both coalition wars and the total deaths are not broken down at all. This data exists, you can find it, but you can’t find it there so why use it?

    Similarly, the paper on jail deaths very much does not answer the question, as it is an analytical study on the impact of jail conditions on mortality and explicitly does not address the causal conditions of those deaths:

    […] health and mortality data for people who are incarcerated or in police custody have been shown to be “incomplete…incorrect… [and] anachronistic,”42 and jail data may underestimate deaths or contain inaccuracies related to causes of death. Finally, the associations found in the study do not suggest causality.

    It is not hard to show what you want to show. By instead providing such poor quality sources, you undermine the credibility of your point to a spectacular degree. Like. Just use real numbers? Hell, it’s not hard to find very reasonable estimates on death tolls from imperialism itself. But notoriously vague values from sources that explicitly clarify their own imprecision is just a terrible way to approach this.