Dan, the fact that even personal issues get put through this partisan lens is fascinating and disturbing. Do you have a link to your paper on this?
13.03.2026 19:18
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Dan, the fact that even personal issues get put through this partisan lens is fascinating and disturbing. Do you have a link to your paper on this?
Getting this requires a high abstraction ability. Humans evolved (both biologically and culturally) without stats where all relevant information was local and anecdotal; it shouldn't be surprising people have trouble reconciling how different information types interact, and or are or not relevant.
It is very simple: Data that supports what I want to be true is accurate. Data which disagrees with what I want is politically compromised.
Spouse and I didn't realize you had written the first one until the credits, which was good, because we said multiple times in as we were laughing that it felt very Scalzi. The ending bit was particularly brilliant. I suspect that if we had known it was you we might have seen more coming.
Possibly? That's admittedly a war I know less about, so I'm not so sure I can usefully discuss it as an analogy.
Yes, that's a good distinction to make. Unfortunately, almost all wars end up being unjust in how they are prosecuted, hence my attempt at focus on justification. And for civilians, it doesn't matter how righteous the justification or the prosecution are if you or your loved ones get killed.
Yes, but the situation after World War II almost everywhere is an utter mess. Unclear given the situation what was a better option at the time other than the partition. A lot of the post World War II world had good-enough-at-the-time which end up being a lot more long-term than anyone anticipated.
I don't know about Levy, in my comment I tried to use the lowest plausible upper and lower ends that I've seen in the literature. (E.g. A few years ago, I saw someone claim 90 mil for WWII but it just wasn't plausible so I'm ignoring it.)
Russian example I agree isn't a perfect analogy. Point is that there's always some complications which can make something sound reasonable. Both NK and RU had a way of pointing to history as making their actions make sense. (Or look at how many MidEast wars have sides use historical justification.)
No, problem, no feeling of hostility. I do thing these things are worth discussing, and I might even be wrong, in which case hopefully I'll learn something!
Because once one is in a functionally peaceful situation with a functioning government, someone invading is a problem, and defending a government that is trying to actually peacefully function is what matters.
Agreed that the US engaged in bad civilian massacres at points during the war. Unfortunately, once war starts, no matter how righteous the cause, some war crimes on all sides happen. (See for example US in World War II.) Exceptions exist (Falklands) but are rare.
World War II was 69-78 million civilian with around 20-25 mill military deaths, for a 1-3 ratio. For Korean war, around 800,000 military deaths, and about 1.6 to 3.1 civilian deaths, so ratios are pretty similar.
The peninsula was certainly a mess. The question though that mattered the most in this context though is what was happening in 1948 to 1950 before the war started, where there were some border clashes but the biggest violence was from NK supported insurgents in the South.
It was working in the sense that there were *functional governments* in both regions, and one side decided to invade. Almost every war has some complicated history behind it. (To use a different example, Russian narratives about Crimea don't lesson the degree to which Ukraine should be supported.)
The civilian death totals were largely due to the sheer scale of the war, along with all the other problems that come from large scale wars. A norm where countries are not supported when invaded because there might be resulting civilian casualties is going to result in more, not less war.
Re: Partition, Every single war in history has a complicated history behind it. The partition had occurred years before, and was working. Once there's a functioning border in place, yes, a war of aggression is a problem, and stopping it is the right thing to do.
The US involvement was to protect South Korea from an unprovoked war of aggression by North Korea.
The problem with that sort of plan wasn't that it was unlikely to work. The problem is how many people suffer and how much long-term damage there is as a result.
Korea, World War II, first Gulf War, and the campaign to protect Kosovo in the mid 1990s, all come to mind as unambiguous examples.
Two immediate questions come to mind 1) What is the asymptotics? 2) Is the sequence strictly increasing after 1, 0,1,1?
Unfortunately, attention it's going to get from that is dwarfed by the damage of now being called a supply chain risk. Almost every very large company or university has US government, and will then be unable to use/pay for Claude and related products. Much more damage on that side.
Yeah, it seems like they need to read all of Brett Devereaux's essay collection on the topic: acoup.blog/category/col... .
Hmm, if the difference is that small, that makes me wonder how much of it is due to Trumpers refusing to answer polls which we saw as a contributing factor to underestimating his performance before the election itself.
This doesn't include a link for the current numbers, and I can't find the current polled recollected claimed numbers. Does some data for that that shows a trend line?
Neither of those can be prime for the same factorization one needed on the 1111...111 problem. 9 is composite.
Well, I have a lot of Algebra II level problems to get through that are thematically similar. Here's a related one: find the largest prime factor of 2^36 - 2^19 +1 . I do this one right after the factoring polynomials unit and I tell the students explicitly it after that test for good reason.
Ah, but different of squares has a nice generalization which you can use here.
Yes, and in this case it is not a coincidence. In order for 111...1 to be prime the number of 1s has to be prime. This is a fun exercise which if I had time I'd probably do with my Algebra 2 students. (But there's never enough time.)
Note also that one prime known in the last series is 1031 1s in a row. If you know this you can tell people you have an 1031 digit prime memorized and then go "1111...." They'll likely walk away, but then they'll also now have an 1031 digit prime memorized.