Subjunctive Death

I listen with dismayed amusement as the once Vice-President Dick Cheney continues to justify his paranoia and abuse of power by announcing, in escalating numbers, the number of people who did not die while he was president…err, vice president.

Lately I've been seeing it as "thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands". Frankly, I don't know why he stops there. Does he think "millions or tens of millions" might lack credibility? I don't see how those numbers can be less credible than the ones he uses.

How are we to count the deaths that did not actually occur, specifically those that did not happen because of terrorists attacks that did not happen? One also wonders whether all these deaths that did not happen did not happen on just one or two occasions or they spread out, not happening, all during Cheney's reign.

I hate to sound like a liberal, atheistic mathematician here but it sounds rather like we've got a classic "divide by zero" situation going on here with a result that is technically "undefined", "indeterminate", or "doesn't make sense". In layman's terms we seem to be evaluating the effectiveness of unicorn repellent. How many unicorns have you not seen lately?

The implication, as a corollary, seems to be that Cheney regrets not waterboarding even more people. The reasoning: if he had waterboarded, say, twice as many "detainees" ("torturees" is too hard to say), he could have prevented twice as many deaths: twos of thousands, twenties of thousands, perhaps two-hundreds of thousands!

Posted on May 22, 2009 at 16.16 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Snake Oil--Cheap!

One Response

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  1. Written by BearToast Joe
    on Saturday, 23 May 2009 at 10.23
    Permalink

    Such racism, as well. All those "amercans" who did not die vs. all the Iraqi civilians who did? and still do.

    Such arrogance and racism.

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