On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:41:01 -0800, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

On 1/30/2011 3:03 PM tony cooper spake thus:

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:11:14 -0800, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

Let me use the example of the Vietnam War (esp. since "savageduck"
seems sorta fixated on this "conflict"): I offer proof of the
relative worth of human life by way of how the wrong number is
always used to describe this conflict.

I'm talking, of course, about 55,000.

As opposed to that other number, somewhere in the vicinity of 1 to
3 million. (It's actually not known just how many Vietnamese were
killed during this war.)

Taking the average estimate of Vietnamese killed (1.5 million), I
get a ratio of 27:1. Factoring out the "local vs. distant" bias,
let's divide this by two. That still leaves a ratio of 13:1.

Of course, even this could be dismissed as simply a matter of local
vs. distant interest, except for the implicit assumption (mostly
honored in the breach) that "all men are created equal"--not just
nationally, but globally. In other words, we (the U.S.) always take
great pains to claim how much we believe in the Rights of Man
everywhere, not just in our Homeland.

I believe my example proves otherwise. Either we're hypocrites, in
which case you can apply the 13:1 ratio of the relative worth of
human life, or ... I don't know what the alternative is here.

I'm not at all sure what you attempted to prove. The US government
kept track of how many and fatalities suffered by the US troops.
Evidently, neither the US government or the Vietnamese governments
(North and South) kept track of how many Vietnamese were killed. It
was not known by either government how many Vietnamese combat
participants there were. The North Vietnamese were really not into
sharing information, or - perhaps - even in gathering information.

The structure of the US military allowed the government to keep track.
The structure of the Vietnamese system did not. Is this somehow a
failing of the US?

You say the wrong number is used. From what perspective? If a number
is used by an American author, an American media organization, or the
American government, is not the number of Americans killed the number
of interest?

I think you're being excessively dense here, almost wilfully obtuse, but
I'll play along anyhow.

The point I was trying to make is that when discussing the Vietnam War
with an American audience, the number of dead is inevitably given as
50-something thousand. (Savageduck pointed out that the actual number is
close to 58K.) Never a *mention* of the far greater losses on the other
side. To me, this is an unconscionable omission. Even if it is written
by an American author in an American media organization to an American
audience.

For your point to make any sense at all, you would have to provide
some context where both figures would be required to provide a fair
and useful comparison, and then you would have to defend your claim
that there is "never" a mention of the other side's losses. That is
beyond your reach and smacks of no more than hand-waving.

Most books or instances of media coverage present an analysis from a
particular perspective. If that perspective is that of the US, then
an emphasis on US losses is eminently fair.

Either human life is worth exactly the same everywhere around the world
or it isn't.

That, in this context, is a non sequitur of nonpareil dimension. An
accounting of lives lost has nothing whatsoever to do with a valuation
of human life. It's a quantitative statement, not a qualitative
statement.

To conform to that rather absurd premise, the death of each individual
would have to be reported with equal space (print media) or equal time
(visual/audio media).
--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida