The King Leopold thing is fake by the way. Bueno de Mesquita's account is based on "King Leopold's Ghost" which is a work of dishonest scholarship. Basically Hoschild used selective quotations and an intense blindness to the context to frame Leopold's adventure's in Africa as exploitative when they were really altruistic. For example, the hand-cutting quote "I will have to cut off the hand of every villager to meet my quota" is a cut from a longer passage that says "we have to adjust downward these quotas because the current demands on my unit are unworkable. To actually implement this I will have to cut off the hand of every villager". Even the policy entrepreneur's he quotes to make them seem anti-leopold were writing essays with the thesis "The Belgian's here are under resourced which creates problems, so we need greater Belgian involvement". Source https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/ So I think the importance of political culture and ideology is understated in the opening anecdote.
In general the model does make a good starting position.
Thanks this was really helpful!
That was a typo, there was originally a note explaining that the line is sarcasm.
Thanks I'm really glad you identified that before it went elsewhere to create problems.
"Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. " - Big Yud
I really doubt that people in the comment section will start siding with the RSF or the SAF and turning arguments into soldiers here. To almost all westerners Sudan todays is as distant as "Louis XVI during the French Revolution".
It's a good question. The obvious answer is that I was not comparing the current conflict with the most deadly conflicts since WW2, but with typical conflicts in Sudan and its environs over the past 20 years. I would guess Sudan has seen maybe 15k direct deaths so far (I believe official figures undercount Darfur and are far too low). Indirect deaths will be much higher due to the economic devastation from the war reaching Sudan's capital. The conflict shows no signs of stopping, so we can expect the ultimate death toll to be higher.
I don't have time to grab data, but only a small minority of conflicts enter the tens of thousands of battle deaths (which are easier to measure than civilian). By Wikipedia there are 62 conflicts since 1950 over 25k deaths. Total conflicts with 100 or more battle deaths is easily in the thousands, most of which you have never heard of like the Heglig War.
I expect that the death rate per month will decline over the course of the war until peace happens, at least in Khartoum and central Sudan. I don't understand the Darfur dynamics that produce massacres there so I cannot speculate on that.
I already have upvotes! Huzzah!
For new readers: SSA = Self-sampling assumption. Read that in Bostrums "Anthropic Bias". SIA might mean "Sampling independence assumption" but I am just guessing.
Those redditors have pretty weak arguments. The first comment is basically "the other academics all agree with the popular claim that Gilley is criticizing, so the popular claim must be true". The second guy basically states "Gilley correctly argues that Hoschild's evidence for a population decline is too weak. But if the evidence is bad, Gilley can't prove there was a genocide. Therefore Gilley is wrong".