Post #1123505

Everyone sharing that CounterPunch article estimating the death toll of the genocide in Palestine at 460k should possibly stop and delete their posts. 1. The author in their bio says he's an English teacher, not even a statistician or epidemiologist. 2. He does an awful lot of extrapolation that's assumed to be linear. 3. His basic math is even wrong as he doesn't understand that in a ratio of 3:1 that if one knows the value of the "1" component, to get the whole, one must multiply by 4. The author multiples by 3. His numbers are a guess and not an asserted minimum. The way this article is circulating has the same feel as pop-sci interpretations of another Lancet article from last year that estimated the long-term mortality in the event of an immediate cessation of hostilities, and people quoted these future deaths as if they were a factual number of currently counted deaths. The current death toll is almost certainly a significant undercount, but this quote from the article is absolutely false: > Anyone who claims to rely on the best scientific consensus today must report the current death toll in the Gaza genocide as “more than 115,000” violent deaths or “more than 460,000” overall. The author is likening his napkin-math to "best scientific consensus." This is, of course, absurd. This article gives the impression of "validating" what we already "know," but it doesn't. And actually a known death toll doesn't matter in the sense that genocide isn't determined by a raw number of deaths nor by a percentage of a population killed. If by some miracle only 10k had been killed, it would still obviously be genocide, and we should still oppose it. What purpose does inflating this number serve? Will it change politicians' opinions? Will it drive us to bolder action? Or even just to put more time into fighting for Palestinian liberation? I imagine neither. The purpose it serves to deliver us the liberal self-satisfaction of being able to say "told you so" more than anything else.