DON’T BELIEVE THE FEARMONGERS …
As the American war drums continue clamoring along the banks of the Potomac (thanks to the likes of Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham and others), wafer-thin justifications for American intervention are everywhere.
They tell us Russia’s Vladimir Putin shot a Malaysian plane down … or that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons … or that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.”
More often than not, the claims are patently (often deliberately) false … and the ensuing intervention accomplishes nothing (except of course to feed the beast that is the American military-industrial complex).
Anyway, when warmongering fails … fearmongering begins.
“The world’s not getting safer, it’s getting far more dangerous,” Cheney said last week.
“If you look at what’s happening around the world today, it’s almost impossible to say that we’re safer,” Gingrich echoed this week. “The worldwide scene is not a very safe scene.”
McCain added this week that he believes the word is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime.”
Really?
McCain, especially, needs a refresher.
“I’m sure he remembers what happened in, say, 1973, the year he and 590 others were released from imprisonment in Vietnam,” columnist Fareed Zakaria writes. “That year, in Vietnam alone, several hundred-thousand people died as a result of the war. And that doesn’t include the tens of thousands who died in the Yom Kippur War, also in 1973.”
This week The Cato Institute’s Stephanie Rugulo published several charts and graphs from the website Human Progress … data directly contradicting the mindless, self-serving rhetoric of the American warmongers.
Here’s a chart showing how wars are less deadly than they used to be …
(Click to enlarge)
And one showing a decline in deaths from genocide …
(Click to enlarge)
And deaths from terrorism (which remain less prevalent than bathtub drownings) …
(Click to enlarge)
And last but not least the “American Homeland,” which is the only place our government has an affirmative constitutional obligation to defend …
(Click to enlarge)
“Why should you care that fear-mongers try to make the world seem less safe than it is?” Rugalo concludes. “Because, in so doing, the hawks drum up support for policies that may make us less secure and less prosperous.”
Indeed … not to mention deeper in the budget hole.
29 comments
We are one released microbe or one nuclear “Dirty Bomb” away from a hugh spike in your graphs…Just saying.
Aye, and government operatives stand ready to make that happen, when given the order from the MIC upper echelon.
No need to release a microbe; they evolve and have been for millennia, unless you’re one of Greenville’s Bob Jones grads. Then its all purple dinosaurs riding horses or something.
OOOOOO…..religion SLAM.
I recall asking my co-workers in 2004 whether they were fearful enough to again vote Republican, and they were.
You are correct. Cheney got them to double down on the Iraq War, and look what resulted from that decision. But I don’t blame Cheney; he’s just an evil SOB. I blame the dumbass Republicans too scared and stupid to think for themselves.
Obama is an evil SOB and a federal court ruling just handed down about subsidies and the IRS just gutted Obamacare which is more dangerous than a nuke or biological weapon on human beings.
I don’t really want to start the whole Iraq debate but “coitus interuptus” always leaves a mess. Our endgame in Iraq could very accurately be described as “pulling out for the money shot”.
So we should stay in, get her pregnant, and pay child support for the next 18 years?
I have no children. Pulling out works.
I recall asking my co-workers in 2008 if Barack Obama was the messiah and if he would really stop the rising seas. They said he was and would.
Ron Paul is a crazed lunatic…about as stable as Putin.
America needs to fight the war on our border as an influx of illegals will bankrupt states , Medicaid and the perpetual welfare system. If that happens we will have a civil war in this country.
Bring our troops home and nuke the middle east after relocating theJewish population .Barry Goldwater wanted to nuke the ‘dykes’ in North Vietnam and starve the commies by flooding the rice fields.
Problem solved.
And this doof calls someone else a “crazed lunatic.”
And it’s “dikes,” doof.
The irony of his comment is that Putin actually seems more stable than our last 20 Presidents.
Damn right! After December 7, 1941 we should have pulled all armed forces back to our shores and fortified Fortress America. That would have shown all those Axis powers that we mean business. We should have fought them on our beaches, not France’s.
Wonder how much the rape and homicide rates are actually going down and how much of it is just toying with the stats.
But the Global Warming Kook-Job Scientists: say beware of MAS FLOODING in SC: Establishment media is reporting it as Gospel, too.
Read: http://scdigest.blogspot.com/2014/07/sc-coast-in-danger-of-mass-flooding.html
And you should be concerned about “MASS FLOODING” as well…
You punch-drunk idiots are some Desperate Son of a Bit#h#$, aren’t you???…LMAO…
You totally control media, and Obama is still flat-lining. Imagine how badly you Dumb@$$#$ would get your @$$#$ kicked if you did not have a corrupt mouthpiece giving you a Billion Dollars in, in-kind servicing every day? …Hahaha..
PS: You see the Rick Perry piece?…he’s showing Obama how to lead. Making Obama and Hillary (and you) look stupid.
I’m sure that your stuff is interesting (at least an interesting take on what’s posted here or at The State ) but I can’t get past the horrid, unreadable format you write and post in. It is almost as bad as your use of punctuation in place of”bad words”.
It’s not meant for Dumb@$$#$. You get fed everywhere else. I’m a departure from that. So I’m glad you’re having trouble with it. FITS is far more your speed.
I write and post in a “format.” WTF does that mean?
I write and post in a “format.” WTF does that mean?
It means dumbasses won’t understand it. Lol!
Ha. Statistics instead of anecdotal evidence and fear mongering. Well done.
“They tell us Russia’s Vladimir Putin shot a Malaysian plane down … or that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons … or that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.”
More often than not, the claims are patently (often deliberately) false …”
You list 3 items, only one of which can even plausibly be put in the false category (let alone described as “patently false”) at this point. Hardly evidence for the “more often than not” claim, let alone the assertion of fraudulent motive.
Does anyone other than Russian apologists or conspiracy theorists actually buy that the Syrian rebels, rather than Assad, used chemical weapons in a false flag operation to unfairly malign the Syrian dictator?
Similarly, Russia’s attempts to blame Ukraine defy belief. The best evidence is that Russian supplied separatists did this. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/383343/course-russia-has-nonsensical-explanation-mh-17-patrick-brennan It is generous to describe Putin’s alternate theory (yet another false flag operation!) as implausible. The Russian side has been busy denying access and corrupting the evidence, so it may never be possible to complete a comprehensive forensic investigation of the crash. But that is because Putin wants it to be so. Maybe you should read as much into that fact as you do into the contagion of hard drive failures at the IRS.
I am not in favor of war with Russia, but your Randian delusions are preventing you from even accurately assessing the threat Putin poses to world security generally, and more particularly in regards to those countries we have obligations to defend under NATO.
Look–it’s a graph! Data! It must be true!
A few questions:
1. Why do all the graphs stop after 2000 or 2006? I don’t know if current fears are valid or not but if we’re going to judge people for nervousness about the state of the world today it might be good to have some data from the last 8-14 years.
2. Why are Iraq and Afghanistan excepted in the graph of terrorism deaths? Dead Iraqis and Afghans don’t count? Didn’t fit the author’s hypothesis?
3. Was 1973 a particularly bad year for rape and homicide? Did the author intentionally pick this year for baseline to skew the data in support of his hypothesis that things are so much better today (or, as it were, in 2006)?
Lots of other issues, as with much of Steven Pinker’s stuff, but that’s enough for now.
“The world’s not getting safer, it’s getting far more dangerous,” Cheney said last week.
“If you look at what’s happening around the world today, it’s almost impossible to say that we’re safer,” Gingrich echoed this week. “The worldwide scene is not a very safe scene.”
McCain added this week that he believes the word is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime.”
________________________________
You’re right, major major. Not one of the these statements are disputed by the data and claims made in this article or the sources referenced. The data does not include Ukraine, Syria (150,000), Nigeria, Libya, Egypt or CAR. All have started after this data ends. And continuing conflicts in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan would only add to this.
There is no discernible difference between the foreign policies that Paul, Ravenel and Folks would advocate and the policies of an ostrich burying his head in the sand.
Preach it Brother!
Heres a stock tip!BUY HALLIBURTON!
Don’t forget 1973’s Cambodian killing fields or Argentina’s Ezeiza massacre . The Establishment is setting up another disaster against America. Obama is homosexual. Michelle is a Tranny. Does any of this bother you people?
So dangerous now I can’t even sleep at night. Was a lot safer when 4,000 nuclear missiles where pointed at us and we weren’t speaking with the guys who had them – and the guy we had with his finger on the button suffered dementia.
That first chart shows that the steepest and greatest percent decline occurred when “the guy we had with his finger on the button suffered dementia.”