Banned because I forgot to quote some of the things people said when I surveyed them.
First a little background, from my own post way earlier in the thread.
The survey was pretty simple. We asked people to estimate the number of military dead in the Iraq War, the number of civilian dead, and then we told them the real military number and asked them to do civilians again:
We got enormous understatements of civilian deaths and overstatements of military deaths from people, and when I administered the survey dressed as a soldier, I got even BIGGER numbers for military deaths and even smaller civilian numbers than when my friend administered it dressed as a hippie. We also got a few more people refuse Hippe than Soldier, but it wasn't a significant difference. I can post a graph with our actual numbers...
So, anyway, what I forgot to tell you was that we got quite a list of moronic answers:
- "What's a civilian? Are they the terrorists?" (This one went on for a while)
- "And how many civilians were killed?" ... "Well, I don't know how many but I hope we get them all!"
- "And how many civilians were killed?" ... (Completely serious)"A billion."
- (From "Soldier" surveyor)"And how many civilians were killed?" ... "Three thousand. I was in the service, so I know! (the actual number is closer to 100,000) It's a thankless job, innit?"
- "Civilians? They prob'ly killin' them guys left and right, man!"
- "Maybe if they'd stop shooting themselves they would stop dying."
- "I don't think we can trust the numbers the government gives us."
- "Which Iraq War? We fought three!!" (The US did, in fact, fight two wars in Iraq)
- "Ok, and now that you know the official number of military casualties, do you have a new estimate of civilian deaths?"... "Yes."....... (long pause).... "What is your new estimate?"......... LOOOOOOOOOOONg pause..... "Oh, it's the same."