Since we’ve recently learned that the value of a lost life is inversely proportional to the population of the country, we need a way to concisely and conveniently discuss tragedies and their relative values. Using 9/11 as the defining constant, we define one (1) Bush as the death of 3000/285,000,000 ≈ 0.00105% of a nation’s population. Perhaps easier to remember, 1 kB (kiloBush) is approximately equal to the death of 1% of the population.
Some examples for reference:
- 9/11 is 1 Bush (of course)
- total annihilation of a countries population is 100 kiloBushes (the largest value possible under relativistic models)
- 1 man in Vatican City choking to death on a hotdog is approx. 124 Bushes.
These changes will be voted on in the 2024 General Conference on Weights and Measures and are expected to pass unanimously.
I know this is a bit but honestly I genuinely like this idea. Yes at the moment Israel is using proportional deaths as a cudgel, but generally in is very useful to look and rhetorically powerful to look at this metric and gives the savagery of US invasions of Korea, Vietnam etc a unique potency.
It’s not the only useful lens for comparing tragedy, but to say that The Korean War inflicted 20 kBu is an extremely damning statistic.
Whenever I tell a lib about this, I like to put it into perspective by comparing it to the Nazis, who killed 25% of Russia’s population in WW2. The US did 4/5 of a Generalplan Ost to Korea.
Whoah I genuinely didn’t know Russian deaths from the Nazis were so large. I mean, I knew it was around 25 million but I didn’t realize how many kBu that was.
This metric is already demonstrating its utility
Yeah, Russia’s total population at the start of Barbarossa was around 100 million.
Wikipedia puts the population of the USSR in 1941 at 190-200 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union. Are you talking about Russia specifically? Doesn’t the 25 million number include people from other SR as well?
Yes, although dispropoprtionately from Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs.