• Ericthescruffy [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    1: People will fixate on the morality of the two systems as a math problem, i.e., which system killed more people? According to the people doing most of these counts – largely anticommunist orgs – the communists killed more people numerically, and because the context of any of that is irrelevant, they must be worse.

    This is why I’m a fan of unfavorably comparing the number of kills by WW2 hero Audie Murphy with the Golden State Killer as a response to highlight that death tolls are one of the dumbest ways to evaluate morality.

    "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."

    • GnastyGnuts [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I'll add that it's common for these people to only count the Jewish victims of the holocaust who died specifically in the various death-camps, and leave out everybody else that the Nazis killed (most notably all the soldiers and civilians of the countries they invaded). So, they'll often arrive at only a ~6 million figure for the Nazis.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        In addition to the genocide at home, the Nazi army basically had shoot-to-kill orders for all Eastern Europeans - but those deaths get lumped into general Soviet deaths, which is part of the reason why their number is so much higher than everyone else's.

    • dat_math [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

      It makes me so sad that exposure to The West Wing in college taught me this quote

      • Ericthescruffy [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        In what context??? Isn't like 90% of that show characters spewing facts and statistics at each other as rhetorical flourish? I tried watching it a few years ago and I couldn't make it past the second episode.

        • dat_math [they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          lol it's the title of episode 21 of season 1I'm sorry

          edit: this isn't the clip where bartlet says it, but I refuse to watch any more westwing to find the clip, which I think was near the end of the episode.