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RichardKennaway comments on Collecting and hoarding crap, useless information - Less Wrong
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I don't follow the logic there. You link to a page describing a war, and say that refutes the assertion that ex-conscripts were a factor in the violence, on the grounds that some other historical upheavals were more violent.
"Malaria transmitted by mosquitos? Nonsense, smallpox is far worse!"
Your post seems to make an implicit claim not just for violence but for unusually intense violence (plus a causal explanation based on the availability of ex-military men). taw claims that the violence was not unusually intense.
With respect to what reference class? taw took "falls of empires" and dismisses 100k casualties out of half a billion people (half a billion? [1]) as tantamount to "never happened". I took "the state of things before the USSR went away" and rate 100k casualties and 2M refugees out of the population in the region where this happened as "going to hell in a handbasket".
But if you look at anything from far enough away, you won't see it.
[1] Half a billion in Eastern Europe? Eastern Europe here means that part of Europe which was under the control of the USSR. Estimating this to be all the non-EU European countries, plus all former subject states of the USSR that joined the EU since 1989, minus Switzerland, I get less than 200M (source: various Wikipedia pages). Adding Ukraine (which I don't classify as part of Europe, though some might; certainly nowhere farther east counts) gets another 45M. Maybe taw is including the entire population of the USSR and its subject states in his reference class for "where this happened"?
What the fuck????? Check what "Europe" means in any reference material. If you mean something else, use another word.
"Figures for the population of Europe vary according to which definition of European boundaries is used."
But then, if Ukraine is already in Europe, that means I was double-counting when I added Ukraine, and the lower figure of under 200M applies. The "non-EU European population" component of that is from here: 94M. You can look up for yourself which definition of "Europe" that uses. If you're going to include Russia as far as Kamchatka in "Europe", well, why not include the whole world. Bosnia was a mere speck compared with six billion. "Never happened."
Just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not taking a stand on either side; I'm not well-informed enough.