This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
New comments at the BOTTOM, please!
Working Title: Law of Statistical Sympathy: From YKTTW
Semiapies: I don't want to mess with a page quote willy-nilly, but the "a billion seconds ago Jesus Christ was teaching people" bit bugs me because one billion seconds is less than 32 years...
Muninn: Pulled the quote, due to both numerical inaccuracy (as noted above), and the fact that it really has nothing to do with this trope.
- "To put it in perspective, a billion seconds ago Jesus Christ was teaching people and a billion minutes ago dinosaurs walked the Earth. Congress spends a billion dollars in less then a single day."
Nornagest: Pulled the Real Life examples following a revert war. This is why we can't have nice things.
- * This is what some call the Monkeysphere, or Dunbar's number.
* Adam Smith said in Theory on Moral Sentiments that most people would rather 1 million die in an earthquake in China instead of sacrificing their pinky finger. This one is Older Than Steam.** He was probably quoting his contemporary (and fellow Scot) David Hume, who said something very similar.* There is an old joke that if you announce 50,000 innocent Middle East citizens were very brutally tortured and murdered, almost no one will really care until you announce a puppy lost a leg during the action! If you talk to journalists off screen on a regular basis, this kind of comment will show up about every war. The trope was tested after a video of a stuffed puppy being thrown off a cliff by a U.S. Marine was posted to YouTube.**In 1979, the Nicaraguan Revolution occurred. Up to then, the U.S. had been supporting dictator Somoza despite his brutality and deaths of 50,000 people under his family's dynasty. Then a U.S. journalist "[1]" was murdered by his National Guard, ending US support and he was overthrown by the Sandanistas. Nicaraguans allegedly remarked "we should have killed some Yanqis before, it might have made them care." Of course, that would only have made us bomb them. As the US then backed the Contras against the Sandanistas, another US citizen was murdered by Contra terrorists, "[2]" and helped shift American opinion again.
*** There's also the (holocaust-themed, potentially offensive) joke: A: "If I ever become a brutal dictator, I'm going to kill 6 million Jews and one clown." B: "Why the clown?" A: "See, nobody cares about the Jews."* The reason the news reports massive catastrophies abroad is to mention that none of "our people" were hurt.** Finnish satirist news blog Lehti ran an article titled "A Finn Equals 4 Alligators", also giving the "official" numbers of tragedy in news. Ten thousand Africans equal 1,000 Asians or other non-whites, equal 100 non-nearby whites, equals 10 nearby whites, which equals four alligators, equals one Finnish person "if you know them". They also ran an article assuring that there were "No Finnish Casualties Among the Dead Pope".
* A similar rule applied to some British newspapers: "One Brit equals 10 frogs (Frenchmen) equals 100 wogs (non-Europeans)".** A different version of that is, "One dead in Putney equals 10 dead in Paris equals 100 dead in Turkey equals 1,000 dead in India equals 10,000 dead in China."* Perhaps the ur-example in real life would be the great Chinese famine from 1958 to 1961, which killed roughly thirty million people. Do you ever hear it being mentioned nowadays?** To put it in perspective, these years are the only ones in the 20th century when world population actually went *down* a bit.*** I can't find anything to support that statement. The population of China decreased during these years, but the world population more than absorbed it. BTW, the event was (ironically) called The Great Leap Forward.** Well it was in a Paranoia supplement...** When mothers scold their picky children with "Think of all the starving kids in China!" this is probably what they're referring to.* Another recent example: the 2003 Iraq War and its aftermath led to the deaths of, at most, several hundred thousand (probably less). Contemporaneously the Congolese Civil War led to the deaths of four million. Three guesses which one dominated most news broadcasters (hint: which one involved Westerners?)** During the 90s, Saddam Hussein's regime embarked on numerous detestable things, from political purges to torturing the national soccer team because they failed to play as well as the Hussein sons thought they should, to taping the rape of women and sending said tape to the families as punishment. Guess when exactly we started caring about what happened in Iraq?* Wars, famines and despotic regimes are already listed, so now is the moment for lethal infectious diseases. Both Malaria and Tuberculosis cause more than one million deaths globally every year, with HIV/AIDS responsible for almost three million (and steadily increasing), yet if recent (2009) attention by major news outlets is any indication, a few thousand infected with swine flu is far more interesting.* Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the hardline government of Iran commited widespread election fraud under a Paper-Thin Disguise during the 2009 election. The Iranian people refused, en masse, to accept the fradulent results and began protesting, despite threats of violence and death from the Basiji. The death toll for non-violent protesters is rumored to be over one hundred, and it's difficult to even make reasonable guesses at how many people have been dragged into prison and held without charge. These news stories couldn't be dropped fast enough after Michael Jackson's death to clear up headline space for retreading every millisecond of the life of a pop-star.**Theres absoloutely no evidence to say that the vote was rigged.**...The election results were announced immediately after the polls closed, even though it should've taken hours/days to count the votes. Plus, the number of people who voted for Ahmadinejad turned out to be larger than the number of total voters.**Also, the counts were statistically impossible. The number of voters in a precinct should end in a random digit, but a far disproportionate number of the vote counts in precincts ended in 0. Further, the opponents lost significantly in their own home districts, and districts that voted against Admadinejad in the last election voted in favor of him in such record numbers that he would have had to garner every new voter since the last election and over half of those who voted for his opposition in the last election.
- *** Really he shouldn't have bothered, if he did it of course, as according to even most Western commentators, he probably would have won regardless. Still, no sense in leaving it to chance and being a close run thing I guess.
* When you mention "Ukrainian disasters", you probably think of the Chernobyl disaster, which killed about 4,000 people. You probably don't think of the Holodomor, which killed 2.6 to 10 million people, proving that people are more interested in bangs than they are in whimpers.
** News of it was deliberately suppressed for political reasons.* Inadequate health care due to inadequate or nonexistent insurance is responsible for approximately 200,000 American deaths every year. Any individual who killed that many people because they couldn't pay them a requested sum of money would be demonized as a mass-murdering sociopath. But health insurance is a lucrative enough industry that they're able to finance massive advertising and "Astroturfing" campaigns portraying themselves as American heroes holding the line against a bunch of Dirty Communists that want to take over health care. And they get away with it because that 200,000 is still a small enough percentage of the population of the USA that most citizens don't have a family member or close friend who was killed by their neglect.
RawPowerSomeone must mention Code Geass
RawPower: Someone should mention Code Geass. Played with: "My Tactics are AWESOME"/"OHSHIT I Killed her Father". And played straight: Tokyo is razed, but only Nunnaly makes us cry (with "Eternal Separation" as background music). And then there's Schneizel's Bomb Spam. And Lelouch's slave army which no one cares about... And whatever Lelouch did before Zero Requiem.
Zef: The Final Fantasy VII example should be restored, on the grounds that the party stormed ShinRa HQ ("killing dozens to hundreds of soldiers in the process," as the deleter said, ironically) mainly to rescue the kidnapped Aerith and revenge as very distant secondary goal. The point of the trope is which tragedies the fiction devotes more energy to. in FF 7's case, nobody can deny that Aerith's death is dwelt on for much, much longer, and is given a LOT more importance, than either the Sector 7 or the Mako reactor casualties, both by the characters and the narrative itself. I'll give it a while to allow for objections, then I'll restore the example.
Is the Cloverfield entry here accurate? I would think it's more played straight, since we don't care about the death of the masses, only for the mooks who happen to be carrying the camera around with them.
