{"id":51084,"date":"2020-02-10T21:04:49","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T02:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51084"},"modified":"2020-02-10T21:04:51","modified_gmt":"2020-02-11T02:04:51","slug":"body-count","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51084","title":{"rendered":"Body Count"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.epsilontheory.com\/body-count\/\">Body Count<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.epsilontheory.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/body-count.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-26205\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news.&nbsp;<\/p><cite>Karl Marlantes, \u201cMatterhorn\u201d (2009)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Have you read&nbsp;<em>Matterhorn<\/em>, by Karl Marlantes? You should. It\u2019s not just the best novel I\u2019ve ever read about the Vietnam War, but it\u2019s also one of my irreplaceable sources of inspiration for understanding The Maw \u2013 that unlimited gluttony of the violent State to chomp on our bones and suck out our minds \u2026 and the oddly not-so-rare instances of individual human bravery to persevere regardless.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>I would bet my life that there are thousands of instances of individual human bravery persevering against The Maw happening&nbsp;<em>right now<\/em>&nbsp;\u2026 in Wuhan \u2026 in Wenzhou \u2026 in dozens of other quarantined cities throughout China.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>And in Xinjiang, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.epsilontheory.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/cronkite-fe04-kurtz-main-tease-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-26203\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What was my first experience with The Maw? It was as a seven-year-old boy watching the nightly news on our little black-and-white set, where every night \u2026 EVERY NIGHT \u2026 we were told&nbsp;<em>exactly&nbsp;<\/em>how many American and South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese soldiers had been killed that day.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The American numbers were accurate, I guess, and the South Vietnamese numbers were probably in the right ballpark. But the North Vietnamese numbers of wounded and killed? Pure fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The daily body count of killed and wounded North Vietnamese soldiers was, in Epsilon Theory-speak, a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.epsilontheory.com\/the-icarus-moment\/\"><strong><em>cartoon&nbsp;<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u2013 an abstraction of an abstraction in service to the creation of Common Knowledge.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong>Hey, everyone knows that everyone knows that we\u2019re winning the war in Vietnam. Didn\u2019t you see the body count numbers on CBS last night?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once you start looking for cartoons, you will see them everywhere.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Inflation numbers? Cartoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Employment data? Cartoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Body Count Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news.&nbsp; Karl Marlantes, \u201cMatterhorn\u201d (2009) Have you read&nbsp;Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes? You should. It\u2019s not just the best novel I\u2019ve ever read about the Vietnam War, but it\u2019s also one of my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[130,28817,28999,499],"class_list":["post-51084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-liberty","tag-china","tag-coronavirus","tag-fudged-data","tag-manipulated-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51085,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51084\/revisions\/51085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}