A Nagasaki A Year

[mindstalk]

100,000 Americans die of hospital-acquired infections every year.
http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2007/09/the-silent-kill.html

The "Islamofascists" can't kill nearly as many people as our lax hospital procedures and abuse of antibiotics. How much scrubbing and autoclaving could the Iraq Fiasco buy?

Alternate post title: "Evolution in Action"

Related, the low hanging fruit of flu prevention
http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2007/09/influenza-and-l.html
Hey, it's only ten 9/11s a year.

"There are very few problems can be solved solely by throwing buckets of money at them (although buckets of money are either helpful or necessary). Annual influenza is one of those problems than can be solved simply by investing more resources."

Comments

[mlc23.livejournal.com]

My husband, who as you know has a career fighting islamofascists, would agree very much with your point and has argued it himself (although he uses heart disease as his example). Diseases and infections are known threats with (largely) tangible solutions, while future 9/11s are vague and unknown. Where does it make sense to put the money?

Some of the money we've spent on security has been useful as a deterrent against future attacks and some bad guys do get caught, but a lot of it has also been wasted. It wouldn't be so awful except that we spend our time having people take their shoes off at the airport and confiscating their sodas while shipping containers continue to go uninspected.

Decent diplomacy, of course, would be the soundest investment and wouldn't cost much at all.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Would he agree with the Islamofascist label itself? Jordan linked to a vaguely convincing essay on that, but I'm suspicious of spreading labels like that around. (Plus, I just realized, even if Al Qaeda is fairly labelled such, not everyone involved in kidnappings or explosives in Iraq need have the same motivations. Over here an Islamist attacking Western civilization, over there a couple of tribes duking it out.)

[mlc23.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the label, but will ask. When he talks about Iraq he usually just says "bad guys", which I like, because you know sometimes the simplest label is the most accurate.

"Plus, I just realized, even if Al Qaeda is fairly labelled such, not everyone involved in kidnappings or explosives in Iraq need have the same motivations"

I'm not an expert, but that sounds right to me.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

As a standard nuanced liberal who has the luxury of not being shot at, "bad guys" as a generality makes me twitch. Not to say they don't exist... actually, I guess the real problem is the implication that the person using the term is a "good guy", and a standard nuanced liberal response is to suspect that people who talk about good guys and bad guys are in fact themselves bad guys.

Which is of course not a comment on Z's specific experience, about which I know hardly anything but would love to hear more.

Vetinari, paraphrased: "There are only bad people, but they are on different sides."

[slow-war.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting term which I have never really used. One problem I can see with it is that it encompasses parties that are violently opposed to one another (e.g. the ruling Shia mullahs in Iran and the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan). On the other hand, "Islamist" or "Islamicist" are pretty broad terms that include people who are inspired by Islam in the same way that many politicians in America are inspired by their religion but do not seek a theocracy or any other form of fascism (e.g. some of the political parties in Turkey).

I do use the term "bad guys" a lot, because the motives of most players in Iraq, at least in Al-anbar where I was, are difficult to define. Most of the adversaries we faced (by which I mean people who were dangerous to US forces or to their own communities) were either tribally motivated or were simply thugs who draped themselves in the green of Islam. The Iraqis themselves tended to refer to these people broadly as "bad guys" - the term they used was "irhaabi," which our interpreters applied whenever we said "insurgent" but which the Iraqis use to mean "trouble-maker" in general. I had an interesting conversation with some local leaders in the town of Gharmah north of Fallujah in which they asked me what I thought of George Washington, to which I replied that he was an irhaabi (there are, by the way, some interesting similarities between our insurgency against the British and the Iraqi insurgency against us). We often talked about bad guys being Wahabbis (or for the cognoscenti, Salafists), but it was hard to tell if the local "emir" who runs a Sharia court and execute wrongdoers (we rescued one old man a couple hours before he was scheduled to be beheaded) was a religious zealot or just a local gangster.

In short, very few of the insurgents in Iraq seem to fit the "Islamofascist" label. There was a hard-core Salafist cadre present who may have provided some doctrinal guidance, but for the most part the "bad guys" seemed to be hoodlums or loose bands with a tribal axe to grind.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Danke! Makes sense. Though, hoodlums with explosives, ick.

Wouldn't mind hearing more about those similarities.