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by FredPret 739 days ago
First, the casualty estimates are just for US soldiers and is likely low. They fough against Japanese troops with a kill ratio of between 1:1 and 1:20 (in favor of the Marines) so it’s easy to extrapolate massive US casualties when fighting the then 80 million strong Japanese on home soil.

I don’t know much about the second point, so you may be right.

Third, you have to look at stats, not emotions. Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.
1 comments
pdonis 739 days ago
> Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.

After rising like a rocket when WW II started. If you leave out WW I and WW II, it's not clear that post-1945 was more peaceful than pre-1914.

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FredPret 739 days ago
My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945.

Even one battle death is too many but having them go down overall is very good.

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pdonis 738 days ago
> My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a well known logical fallacy. That is what you are doing here.

Also, the relevant comparison, as I said before, is not post-1945 vs. pre-1945. It is something like post-1945 vs. pre-1914, so that the comparison involves peacetime conditions on both sides.

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FredPret 738 days ago
I’m claiming a direct causality between how terrible the nukes were and how peaceful the subsequent decades have been.

The cold war was cold because of M.A.D.

And I will compare any periods I want. The nukes fell in 1945, so I compare all of human history before that and after that. There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.

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pdonis 738 days ago
> I’m claiming a direct causality

You are inferring direct causality based on one event following another. That is the logical fallacy I referred to.

> There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.

That's not what I see, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.

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