Have 600,000 Iraqis died violently since 2003?

Do you have anything at all to support this assertion?I know you don't because I have actually read the study. What is it you base your pronouncements on?Even just reading the material related to the study in this thread should be enough to show that your claim is wholly untrue.So instead of bitching that you can't find any source which gives... ...why not actually read the link this whole thread is based around which gives very specific details of their exact methodology for obtaining their figures.Conclusion: Whether or not the estimate in Lancet is accurate and reliable you don't know what the hell you are talking about.TTFN,WK

Everyone understood you, what you said was very clear. You even provided a quote from the second paper by the relevant authors to emphasise what you meant. It just happened to be bullshit and now you are furiously backpedalling and dishing out the soft soap to reframe what you said as something more defensible. Wow, so it's like when I said that if you actually read the paper you would realise your position was bullshit you actually went and read the paper and discovered that indeed your position was bullshit. But for some reason rather than coming out and saying that you were wrong you are trying to pass it off as if you understood what the paper really said all the time and we just didn't understand you.TTFN,WK

Um, no! What the paper actually says is... So the proportion of deaths attributed to coalition forces has gone down but the actual number has gone up, exactly the opposite of what you claim.It is this sort of fundamental misunderstanding of very simple facts that makes people doubt the extent to which you understand the research you are supposed to be discussing.TTFN,WK

I think you misunderstood NJ's point. He was saying that that is what the news sounds like, but that if 400 people a day were dying the reports would be more like "80 civilians dead after being caught in crossfire as coalition troops battle insurgents. 100 die in indiscriminate airstrike".It may not be a particularly good point but it isn't the utterly ludicrous one you seemed to think he was making.TTFN,WK

Sure, but googling is an active news seeking behaviour. If one were to only get ones news , passively as it were, from one or two limited sources on radio and television then the sort of reports NJ suggested might be all you hear, giving the erroneous impression that there were only 14 war related fatalities that day simply because your news sources only considered those 14 to be particularly newsworthy.My point was that Crash was trying to disagree with NJ by saying that you did hear news of the type NJ suggested when NJ's argument was also that you heard that type of news. So in fact Crash was agreeing with NJ that the news only reported about 14 casualties a day.Perhaps Crash should have done what you just have and suggested or shown that in fact the news is reporting casualties in numbers considerably in excess of what NJ suggested and more in line with the figure suggested by the study.TTFN,WK

You also agreed, although at the time you seemed to think you were disagreeing, with NJ's claim that the reports were along the lines of... ... and that you wouldn't be getting reports with such low numbers as a whole days reporting if the actual number of deaths was ~400/day.I didn't agree with NJ that that was what the reports were like you did.He said if casualties were that high you wouldn't be hearing reports with the low figures he suggested. You then replied saying that you did hear such reports. If what you meant to say was "No, the reports I hear have much higher figures" then you didn't do it very well.It has nothing to do with what is being reported and everything to do with you misunderstanding NJ's argument and effectively agreeing with him when you obviously meant to do the opposite.TTFN,WK