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At 10/13/06 05:53 AM, cellardoor6 wrote: Goddamn you are a fucking moron. The point is that 45,000 is based on the body counts, not personal accounts and this LEGITIMATE finding is alot lower than the 665,000 number. Therefore I provided a link to document that, now you use your stupid sarcasm "we can spare a few more..."

Apparently 45,000 dead doesn't mean shit to you dude. I understand it's a figure MUCH lower than the 650,000 but dude... still... 45,000 dead... how desensitized are you?

Oh and this statement was unsettling.
“Change the channel”
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops.

Source???

Your own website which your provided me with, thank you much. If you're going to question that quote, we might as well start questioning their figures as well, and it would further-prove you reject anything which isn't pleasant to you.

If US forces had the policy of just killing every Iraqi civilian they saw and weren't trying to avoide civilian casualties like they are ordered to, there would be millions of casualties, the whole country would be a pile of burning rubble.

Hm I suppose a pile of burning rubble would be a little worse than a pile of sand and smoking rubble aye?

Besides, it's hard not to "kill civilians" when the people you are fighting wear civilian clothes and are SURROUNDED by civilians don't you think?

Yes, and you have your beloved administration to thank for leading us into a war they damned well knew they could not win, would turn out to be like Vietnam and would later admit they would have no choice but to gradually pull troops back and leave each faction/group to its own territories.

At 10/11/06 07:37 PM, lapis wrote: Even more precisely: "Does your count include deaths from indirect causes?
Each side can readily claim that indirectly-caused deaths are the "fault" of the other side or, where long-term illnesses and genetic disorders are concerned, "due to other causes."

Dude, I was talking about the official count, i.e., that from the Health Ministry in Iraq or whoever publishes it. It states that a much lesser number of people have died. Seeing as how 90% or more of those people produced death certificates, you'd think that the Health Ministry would know about these deaths that are supposedly attributable to the war and thus include them in its official tally.

At 10/11/06 07:23 PM, Altarus wrote: Oh noes, more criticism from highly respected sources:

You know, it would be convenient if you stated your sources. I don't feel like searching the entire internet for what this guy considers to be wrong about the methodology of this survey.

Source: Reuters.

Also, you have been begging for some specific criticism about the study's methods to respond to, so here is yet another criticism I found (from the Contra Costa Times):

Mark van der Laan, professor of biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley, said he wasn't sure he trusted the statistical adjustments the Johns Hopkins team performed to adjust for the small sample of households surveyed and varying levels of violence in the sample areas.

"Given the design of their study, it is likely (the data) should be taken with a large grain of salt," he said.

There is a much more extensive critique here, which points to several problems (note: you should read the article yourself to receive an accurate presentation of these points):

1) The report uses convenience sampling, drawing samples from large urban areas where only about 37% of the Iraqi population lives. Anyone who has followed events in Iraq knows that this is where most sectarian violence and other types of attacks have occured. Thus, the results would be exaggerated by this.

2) This next one is technical, but short, so I will quote it all:

With a population of 27 million people in Iraq and 50 data clusters, they allocate 1 cluster per 540,000 people. That's fine. The problem is that they then distribute the data clusters based on the governorates, which are political divisions and do not have evenly distributed populations. This means that when a governorate's population is not evenly divisible by 540,000 they round up or down to determine how many clusters to locate there.

This creates an instant problem because the areas where they round down the number of clusters will be underrepresented and the areas where they round up will be overrepresented in the final numbers. As it works out, the most overrepresented governorates are two of the most violent, Diyala (+28%) and Anbar (+36%) and the most underrepresented are some of the most peaceful, Wassit (-45%), Qadissiya (-41%) and Tameem (-37%). The pattern is similar but less dramatic with the other governorates, plus two entire governorates in the more peaceful regions failed to return results at all. This leads to a cumulative effect of more violent areas likely being overrepresented by at least 20%.

3) Many deaths are insurgents and terrorists or are because of insurgent or terrorist attacks, while many other deaths are not directly related to any kind of attack. Note: I know you already responded to this, just including it here for completeness. The author goes on to "adjust" the results in his own way to arrive at 130,000 deaths, but he does not much of a justification for these adjustments.

4) The authors of this report have made little effort to correct mistakes made in the first report in 2004. In fact, they re-assert the results of their last report in this study, which had an error of 80%. This report has a supposed error of 20% -- not as large, but still huge. Basically, the authors have made a imprecise, inaccurate estimate that they are trying to pass off as indisputable fact, which it is clearly not. These same people released a similar report in September of 2004, right before that election, and this report comes in September 2006, right before this upcoming election. It is hard to believe that this is pure coincidence, and it is disappointing to see so many people in the media and elsewhere jump on this report purely for political reasons right before a major election -- just as they did last time.

Conclusion--the report suffers from major structural problems that were also present in the last such report. The authors have attempted to address criticisms of their last report, but these attempts were mostly directed at fixing cosmetic problems and are, in essence, "putting lipstick on a pig."

---

There is an extensive critique of the report's methods you wanted. Go for it.

At 10/11/06 03:42 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:

At 10/11/06 03:37 PM, KemCab wrote: Only 650,000?

Let's go for a million.

The US doesn't plan on a complete withdrawel until at least 2010.

YAY!!! LET'S START TAKING NORWAY!!!!!!!111 =D

Read this, and you'll understand!

This is the same group that told us that 100,000 Iraqis have died before the 2004 elections, and that bombs dropped on Iraq only kill Iraqi women and children. It's a perfectly credible...for socialists, Marxists, and other propagandists.

At 10/13/06 03:41 PM, Grammer wrote: those in charge even admitted it was released in time for the 2006 election.

Don't act as if that little tidbit destroys, or lends, credibility to the study.

Think about why release dates don't really matter in a study that finds such a staggering difference in statistics.

Hm... A post made by Begoner, and brought up by CNN while at the same time everyone else (even Iraq) is finding the statistics as heavily over exaggerated.

Yep, sounds like bullshit to me.

At 10/13/06 07:21 AM, Altarus wrote: Dude, I was talking about the official count, i.e.,

"Accurate death tolls have been difficult to obtain ever since the Iraq conflict began in March 2003. When top Iraqi political officials cite death numbers, they often refuse to cite the source of the numbers.

The Health Ministry, which tallies civilian deaths, relies on reports from government hospitals and morgues. The Interior Ministry compiles its figures from police stations, while the Defense Ministry reports deaths only among army soldiers and insurgents killed in combat. "

First of all, this only deals with the violent deaths and the study deals with excess deaths as a whole. Besides, gathering exact data is hard in Iraq and the Iraqi government benefits if the death count remains low. If you want to prove that the 92% death certificate show is an outright lie, please do, because you're accusing the Johns Hopkins University and the Lancet of forging evidence. They're highly venerated research institutions, does this simple fact validate all their research by default? No, I'm sure you had figured that one out all by yourself already. But it does imply that I consider their findings to be more valuable than the opinions of random bloggers and forum lurkers.

Prove they lied and you'll have discredited their study. Until then, the 92% death certificate show rate stands.

Source: Reuters.

Thanks for stating that 32 hours later. What you posted seemed like a direct quote and since I assumed nothing had been printed on paper by then you must have got it from a website somewhere. If you copy/paste excerpts from an online source, it's rather customary to state where you got it from. Google's spiders only find websites that have been linked to by other websites so I wasn't able to find it using a simple online search engine. You found the website, so give the hyperlink. If you don't, I discard the source.

Besides, all Cordesman said was that the results were way too high in his opinion and that they were released just prior to an election. Any schmuck could have said that.

Mark van der Laan, professor of biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley,

And once again, I didn't find shit. Post a direct link or you could just as well have pulled this out of your ass.

There is a much more extensive critique here, which points to several problems (note: you should read the article yourself to receive an accurate presentation of these points):

You gave a link, good. It's a weblog, not exactly a respected source, but okay.

1) The report uses convenience sampling, drawing samples from large urban areas where only about 37% of the Iraqi population lives. Anyone who has followed events in Iraq knows that this is where most sectarian violence and other types of attacks have occured.

Anyone who has followed events in Iraq knows what the media reported. Nobody even knows for certain what's going on in the most rural places of Iraq, not even the media. From the comments on your own source: "Dave, I am echoing what Troll said. In the US, rural and urban crime/murder rates are generally pretty equal. I need data to support your assertion that the rates are different in Iraq; do you have any? I am willing to bet that most foreign reporters hang out in cities, and that the Iraqi media and government pay more attention to urban events than to rural ones. Today, fourteen bodies were discovered in an orchard outside Baghdad... would it have made the news at all if they were farther from the big city?"

At 10/13/06 07:21 AM, Altarus wrote: 2) This next one is technical, but short, so I will quote it all:

With a population of 27 million people in Iraq and 50 data clusters, they allocate 1 cluster per 540,000 people. That's fine.

You must have read the comments:

"Your analysis is incorrect in many ways. At this time I'd like to point out two ways.
You suggest that high violence areas were oversampled by 20% because of rounding error. I've assembled the data from Table 1 of both the Lancet articles to attempt to determine the over- and under-sampling. I assigned each governate to High, Medium and Low violence categories according to Figure 3 of the Lancet article. These assignments are congruent with the ones you made, except you mentioned only the overrepresented high violence areas and the underrepresented low violence areas. There also happen to be under-represented high violence areas and over-represented low violence areas. I then calculated the under/over representation for each of the 3 categories. I did this with and without weighting the governates by their proportion of the total population, but the results are nearly identical. Here are the results (2006 sample only):

Three hundred and eight thousand excess civilian casualties!
And that's assuming your other adjustments are justified, which as others have pointed out, they are not.".

The guy who wrote the article you linked to doesn't even understand the most basic principles of mathematics. Yeah, that really discredits the Lancet and the Johns Hopkins University.

3) Many deaths are insurgents and terrorists or are because of insurgent or terrorist attacks, while many other deaths are not directly related to any kind of attack.

The CNN also noted this: "They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer." There's no way you can directly blame cancer deaths on the invasion, like you can never blame the lung cancer that a smoker attains with certainty on his habit of smoking. However, it could be possible (I'm not stating this as a proven fact) that the increased cancer rates are due to the use of depleted uranium in Iraq. So the increased mortality rates could still be blamed on the invasion, even though an official body count can never prove a direct link.

4) This report has a supposed error of 20% -- not as large, but still huge.

It's called a confidence interval. You never know for certain what the exact excess death number is but you pick the most likely number as the estimate. And this guy is completely distorting the truth here: like I stated in an other post, the CI is 426,369 to 793,663 so the "the highest possible estimate" is far from 654,965. You're trying to provide counterevidence by quoting a guy who appears to know next to nothing about the concepts of statistics and mathematics as a whole. Seriously Wyrlum, what the hell.

At 10/13/06 08:48 PM, lapis wrote: Even if you're adjustment percentages were correct, you applied them incorrectly. Your calculation was:
654,965 * (-.3 + -.2 + -.3) = 130,993

Haha, this is also incorrect, sorry. The commenter is correct in his other observations but what the blogger really did was:

654,965 * (1 - 0.3 - 0.2 + 0.3) = 654,965 * 0.2 = 130,993

And of course, totally false. Never trust bloggers and their commenters to discredit studies conducted by universities, I guess. Bunch of assclowns.

654,965 * (1 - 0.3 - 0.2 + 0.3) = 654,965 * 0.2 = 130,993

Arggh typo, I mean 654,965 * (1 - 0.3 - 0.2 - 0.3) = 654,965 * 0.2 = 130,993

Fucking hell, I apologise for the quadruple post. Others have done it before me I guess.

At 10/13/06 06:00 AM, EnragedSephiroth wrote:

Apparently 45,000 dead doesn't mean shit to you dude. I understand it's a figure MUCH lower than the 650,000 but dude... still... 45,000 dead... how desensitized are you?

Are you aware of how fucking retarded you are? The issue was never whether or not the deaths in Iraq affect ME EMOTIONALLY. The argument was whether or not 665,000 was an accurate, credible, and honest estimate...WHICH IT ISN'T.

Now since I made my point you have to throw out bullshit trying to paint the picture that I am content with the death of innocent people, which I'm not. You have to resort to attacking me personally instead of sticking on topic. The topic of argument was the ACCURACY of the 665,000 figure, not whether or not the ACTUAL number is something to be happy or sad about... You use the typical liberal tactic of adding emotionally-charged rhetoric to discredit your opposition rather than argue the points.

Oh and this statement was unsettling.
“Change the channel”
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops.

Source???

Your own website which your provided me with, thank you much. If you're going to question that quote, we might as well start questioning their figures as well, and it would further-prove you reject anything which isn't pleasant to you.

Hmm thats funny, I don't see it anywhere.

If US forces had the policy of just killing every Iraqi civilian they saw and weren't trying to avoide civilian casualties like they are ordered to, there would be millions of casualties, the whole country would be a pile of burning rubble.

Hm I suppose a pile of burning rubble would be a little worse than a pile of sand and smoking rubble aye?

Are you retarded, seriously? Because it seems you lack the ability to argue coherently and actually stay in-context to the argument.

What my point was that US troops already do avoid civilian casualties and are ordered to do this by their commanding officers. If US troops had the policy of killing every Iraqi civilian like was suggested, if they WEREN'T trying to avoid civilian deaths, then there would be barely any Iraqis alive and the entire country would be rubble (which it currently isn't despite the isolated media pictures of small areas of Baghdad, or by the out of context photos of Iraq when the media leaves out the fact that Iraq was a unsightly 3rd world country long before the Iraq war.)

Besides, it's hard not to "kill civilians" when the people you are fighting wear civilian clothes and are SURROUNDED by civilians don't you think?

Yes, and you have your beloved administration to thank for leading us into a war they damned well knew they could not win, would turn out to be like Vietnam and would later admit they would have no choice but to gradually pull troops back and leave each faction/group to its own territories.

Once again you can't argue in a coherent manner you have to rant uncontrollably...

The points of your statement are immediately repudiated by the sheer stupidity of the statement itself. You're just a ranting lunatic.

I found the quote by the Brig General, so scratch that part of my post.

At 10/13/06 09:32 PM, cellardoor6 wrote: I found the quote by the Brig General, so scratch that part of my post.

hahah, dumbass.

At 10/14/06 05:01 AM, goozebump wrote:

At 10/13/06 09:32 PM, cellardoor6 wrote: I found the quote by the Brig General, so scratch that part of my post.

hahah, dumbass.

It doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of the argument so big deal.

At 10/13/06 09:30 PM, cellardoor6 wrote: Are you aware of how fucking retarded you are? The issue was never whether or not the deaths in Iraq affect ME EMOTIONALLY. The argument was whether or not 665,000 was an accurate, credible, and honest estimate...WHICH IT ISN'T.

Alright you want to get back to the issue at hand. Yes 665k is less than 45k, however, just as you remain speculative of the 665k figure I remain speculative of your 45k figure.

Now since I made my point you have to throw out bullshit trying to paint the picture that I am content with the death of innocent people, which I'm not. You have to resort to attacking me personally instead of sticking on topic. The topic of argument was the ACCURACY of the 665,000 figure, not whether or not the ACTUAL number is something to be happy or sad about... You use the typical liberal tactic of adding emotionally-charged rhetoric to discredit your opposition rather than argue the points.

No. You come out here cellardoor, rejecting anything which doesn't sound good to you as you always do. The 665k figure did not appeal to you so you had to present evidence for a 45k figure which was much lower than the 665k. That's fine and dandy and obviously 45k is less than 665k, however, I'm also saying 45k is still a pretty high number though and should not be undermined just because it's smaller than the 665k in the other statistic. In case you didn't notice, that was a separate argument.

Are you retarded, seriously? Because it seems you lack the ability to argue coherently and actually stay in-context to the argument.

Says you and you lack the ability to not be precipitously slanted in your arguments, so what?

If US troops had the policy of killing every Iraqi civilian like was suggested, if they WEREN'T trying to avoid civilian deaths, then there would be barely any Iraqis alive and the entire country would be rubble (which it currently isn't despite the isolated media pictures of small areas of Baghdad, or by the out of context photos of Iraq when the media leaves out the fact that Iraq was a unsightly 3rd world country long before the Iraq war.)

You also forgot to mention photos of decimated innocent people, schools, jobs and facilities such as a baby formula factory all reduced to "smoking rubble" by our own bombs and tax dollars as you say.

Once again you can't argue in a coherent manner you have to rant uncontrollably...

Right and you feel you have to attack me personally and viciously whenever I say something you don't agree with me. You wonder why I said you didn't care about 45k deaths? So you know how it feels when people insult you personally for trying to prove a point.

The points of your statement are immediately repudiated by the sheer stupidity of the statement itself. You're just a ranting lunatic.

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

At 10/14/06 05:08 AM, cellardoor6 wrote:

At 10/14/06 05:01 AM, goozebump wrote:

At 10/13/06 09:32 PM, cellardoor6 wrote: I found the quote by the Brig General, so scratch that part of my post.

hahah, dumbass.

It doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of the argument so big deal.

We know but we had to cherish you making a fool of yourself and missing a prominent statement like that... in your own evidence no less.

Hurray for lying and exaggerations!

I say we blame bush.

We can blame him for everything.

At 10/14/06 05:55 PM, MortifiedPenguins wrote: I say we blame bush.

We can blame him for everything.

Except for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

That was the Jews fault.

At 10/14/06 06:04 PM, o-r-i-g-i-n-a-l wrote:

At 10/14/06 05:55 PM, MortifiedPenguins wrote:

Except for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

That was the Jews fault.

No, that was the Guinnes' fault.

Jews were responsible for the Ice Age's.

At 10/14/06 06:06 PM, MortifiedPenguins wrote: No, that was the Guinnes' fault.

Jews were responsible for the Ice Age's.

Ahh, my mistake...