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ductionist

Here’s Richard Branson’s blog post announcing this: https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/my-statement-kingdom-...

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40 dead Yemeni kids doesn't meet Branson's profit criteria though

Better late than never.

1 death is a tragedy. 1 million is a statistic. -Joseph Stalin

The history of that quote is actually older and much more interesting.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

This was quite the read.

Stalin's quote seems to originate from the 18th century quote which seems to apply as much today as it did then:

One Murder made a Villain, Millions a Hero. — Princes were privileg’d To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime. - 1759, Beilby Porteus, England

That would be bad enough, but I expect the salience of Khashoggi's murder has more to do with identity than numbers. It's not as if a singular dead Yemeni child would have dismayed anyone in the West. What made Khashoggi stand out was that he was a WaPo journalist.

I guess that's complicated by the fact that the insurgent government (Houthi movement) there have a slogan like "God is great, death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam" and the Saudis gave the defending government there $2 billion in food aid. War is bad, but is sometimes worse in tragedy then it is in morality. It is different from globally-orchestrated assassinations against political opponents in foreign countries, between peace-time nations. https://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-gives-yemen-2-billion-to-...

Oh no they have bad slogans, let's bomb them to hell, perfectly justified. It's the Middle East, where those sorts of opinions are pretty common. Saudis hate Shiites but other than that what exactly were the Houthis capable of doing to justify essentially destroying the entire country.

The context is that it's a proxy war with Iran, which has armed and supported the other side in the Yemeni civil war.

Saudi Arabia fears Iran acquiring another political control point - one on their border at that - in the Middle East and increasingly surrounding Saudi. So they're willing to scorch the earth to stop that.

Also, in terms of territory, with Iran + Persian Gulf, and Yemen + Bab-el-Mandeb straight, you can choke off Saudi Arabia's access to the Arabian Sea. That could heavily cripple their global oil shipping if it came to war, or at least cause a big mess. So Saudi Arabia views having a puppet and or friendly regime in Yemen, to be strategically vital. Saudi has wanted functional pipeline + port access in central Yemen for a long time, to get to the Gulf of Aden, to be able to bypass Iran's territorial waters just in case.

They bombed a school bus full of kids. A straight up war crime and just one of many by a foreign aggresor that is actively bringing death to thousands. That is much more evil than some slogan.

Listen, I am from European country where NATO by mostly US backing bombed and killed more than two thousand civilians, among the targets were train full of civilians, Chinese embassy, etc. And of course nobody would or will ever be punished for that. And that is only my country. So first please clean up your yard.

What’s the difference to bombing weddings, hospitals, schools etc.? Can you prove that it was intentional? It will be more difficult finding an excuse for killing a journalist in an embassy in a somewhat peaceful country

At least something hit it...

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