[JohnHaugeland]

> Victims: there are dissenting opinions

Nobody cares. There's truth.

No evidence exists of these fictional things you're trying to discuss.

Anti-vaxxers speculate that vaccines secretly killed millions of people. That seems absurd, no? Like. We'd be able to find them?

Then why does this seem any different?

We're able to find evidence of deaths from 20,000 years ago, in caves, buried under 500 feet of dirt

Why can't any of the anti-nukes find any evidence of these giant mysterious waves of death during our lifetime?

When do you apply skepticism?

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> Power-producing dams failures are very rare and preventable

Dude ... no.

Go learn about Banqiao, which alone killed more than 10x as many people as all non-hydro energy disasters of all kinds put together.

Dams are the single most common form of power source failure by nearly two orders of magnitude.

Six of them have happened in the last ten years, five of those in first world countries.

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> This Banqiao case is a fluke

No, it's not. There are three other six figure death rates from dams, as well as 55 five figure and almost 800 four figure.

They fit the Zipf distribution essentially perfectly.

Also, holy shit, Chernobyl actually was.

Get it together. You're making things up.

[natmaka]

Russia's demographics show surges of deaths during this period, there is no doubt about it. The causes are a matter of polemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#After_W...

Russian Academicians publish a scientific meta-study about Russia, let me prefer this over "JohnHaugeland" bluntly pretending "nobody cares".

Past victims statistics: I referenced Ourworldindata's work, their detailed work seems pretty clear to me and you didn't propose any counter-argument

Banqiao: the perspective ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436 ) seems clear to me, "no it's not" is IMHO, at best, a rather weak counter-argument.

[JohnHaugeland]

I'm not interested in holding a discussion with someone who denies the Banqiao dam burst deaths, and wants to take unsourced blog statistics by a single dude over the World Health Organization and the United Nations

I am not interested in someone who says "here's a list of numbers, the United Nations must be wrong, the causes are a matter of polemics."

Polemics are generic archetypal verbal attacks. The United Nation's health statistics do not get interpreted in terms of verbal attacks.

You make vague references to "Russian academicians" and claim they said things, but don't provide evidence. The Russian academics still haven't admitted Kyshtym happened.

There is a point at which if someone listens to clowns but not the world's authorities, they and everything they believe should just be discarded without further commentary

The science is clear: arguing with an anti-vaxxer or a flat earther just drives them further into their delusion. The common sense is also clear: the regular person does not get satisfaction, but rather more frustration, at the end. The current position of psychology is that the reason anti-vaxxers exist is that they have genuinely mis-identified their addiction to argument as being seen as knowledgeable, and that even when legitimate experts show up with evidence, their unwillingness to budge convinces them that they're even righter. They really think this makes them look good.

Psychology currently frames this as the result of severe self doubt, as "you need to argue with me so that I can show myself that I could win."

Of course I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who denies basic facts, and refers vaguely to evidence they haven't provided. Nobody should. That's how you get flat earthers.

Deniers don't deserve argument, and trying to talk to them like normal people hurts them mentally.

[natmaka]

Sorry but I see no argument here.

I referenced published documents, everyone is free to read, counter-argument, and even rant on.