siglio21

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Heavy US losses in Afghan battle

and yet..."eight American soldiers and two Afghan troops have been killed in the deadliest attack on coalition troops for more than a year"

Longdaysahead

I understand what you're saying, but 10 people just died man.

UCSDJake12

respect the troops and be glad there weren't worse attacks.

siglio21

i agree...but it seems so vain to be worrying about 10 deaths when hundreds would have died in the past

10jarsle

It is scary to think about the death toll on a daily basis in total war scenarios vs. the total death tolls in our current conflicts, but it doesn't make it any less wrong. In fact, I remember reading study saying that people react far more emotionally to a story of one person being killed than several thousand. Its strange how the mind works. Thankfully, however, it seems the era of total war is over... with the advent and dispersion of Nukes, any war on that scale would be so disastrous that there is a tremendous incentive for both sides to avoid it. So, I guess we can be happy that war has degraded in that the massive single day casualties of the past are effectively obsolete... but it doesn't make our current wars any less sad!

Jimgotkp

Any casualty that happens you should be thankful for their service. One loss is actually quite a large loss.

siglio21

it is...but too often we forget the sacrifices that have been made in the past...and being vainglorious will ultimately lead to ruin

you guys see where i'm going with this?

WCF

What do you mean warfare has really degraded? As if our goal is to kill as many people as possible? Is there such a thing as good warfare? Would you rather we "improve" warfare and kill hundreds or thousands of people?

I don't know about you, but this "degraded" warfare sounds kind of nice. It's not an issue of being vain; they're just reporting on significant events in the conflict. It just so happens 10 people dying is considered significant and rightfully so, as it was the deadliest conflict in more than a year. If anything, the fact that warfare today is only killing dozens rather than thousands of people is an improvement. But, to me, this doesn't sound like it's significant to you.

siglio21

it's wonderful from a personal perspective, but to me "massive casualties" should be "thousands dead"...when one puts a superlative value on 10 people, we are making ourselves far too sensitive

we will compare current figures with past figure and the truth is that we are usually overwhelmed when we see big number such that big casualty figures don't matter much more than numbers...for example, 100k people died in the 2004 tsunami...that is a LOT of people, yet to many people those figures became fleeting after the first 10k or so were reported

MosbyMarion

Well said siglo21! That many people just died in flooding a ways downstream from where I live, and I hardly heard a thing about it besides half a page in the local paper. Get some perspective people! One more 9/11 could kill more than this whole war has so far!

siglio21

^^number = numbers

a big confusing grammar mistake