President Obama To Remind America That Chemical Warfare Is Bad

Killing over a thousand people with one campaign is exceptional. If 100,000 people were killed in two years of conventional warfare, that would be approximately 13.7 a day. If 1000 people were killed per day, that would add up to 730,000 people killed in two years and would also include scores of survivors suffering chronic neurobiological damage that might also include psychiatric effects.

Anyone who doesn’t see the difference doesn’t want to.

The ‘what’s the difference between being killed with a bullet, and being killed with a nerve agent’ is some seriously solipsistic, pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing. Gee. I don’t know. What’s the difference between a person being killed and their entire family being killed? Or between one family and an entire neighborhood? Does it matter what weapons are used for “ethnic cleansing?” Assad might as well use a nuke, then, huh? How is being vaporized en masse any different from being killed with nerve agents? Dead is dead, in the head of an observer who has the benefit of reducing death to an abstraction and doesn’t consider themselves to be at risk for any kind of violent death at the hands of others.