A factor of four is not conclusive evidence with a measure this crude. Certainly not for a charge as serious as packing a court of law. Particularly when another, not notably cruder, measure using the same data essentially breaks even.
If you massage the numbers enough and then cherry-pick the "right" metric, you can make them say virtually anything (which is why we spend so much time around here taking popular econometrics apart to see how they work).
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Now, you may argue that this test is too crude (guilty as charged - it's a ballpark figure using a ballpark metric, nothing more). But then I invite you to construct a better metric - and argue that it is indeed better - and run the numbers on your own. Show your math, because when I do my math, it does not add up to your conclusion.
Besides, it's only 1:4 by one of the measures. The two other measures that have been put forward in this thread call it even. Furthermore, the measure that's 1:4 is the least appropriate one, because it assumes that all sides had an equal hand in all deaths that weren't from their own side, which is obviously nonsense.
JakeS: ...you have to base your model on assumptions that aren't pulled out of my ass
Exactly which of my assumptions have come out of your ass?
None of these are trivial assumptions.
The first is pretty blatant nonsense. The second is something that I would be willing to bet money on. The third is not necessarily true: It might be the case that if there are more war criminals, they leave more evidence implicating each other, and picking up one end of the web and unravelling the whole thing might be easier. Or a larger number of war criminals might be indicative of a superior organisation, which might include better cutouts between individual members and better cover manoeuvres, which would make it harder.
So, actually, you can add an assumption to the list: That all countries have been equally unwilling and/or unable to prosecute their own war criminals - because ICCY only has jurisdiction when it is clear that the country of origin is not going to prosecute of its own volition.
But I think that's a pretty fair assumption, all things considered...
I'm working on a statistical analysis which I'll share with you - whatever the results.
But that does not matter. The figure you used to state your case was based on those assumptions, no matter who came up with them. Which means that its validity is limited to the validity of those assumptions. I explicitly stated at the time that this was a ballpark figure, not a precise measure. And I used it only as a ballpark figure, not as a precise measure. So when you use it as if it were a precise measure, you're violating the assumptions that went into it.
In plain English: That number does not say what you seem to think it says. I should know; I built it.
I'd also like to know why the other two measures seem less adequate to you? That the number of war criminals is anti-correlated to the number of civilian casualties on your own side does not strike me as an unreasonable assumption - or at least not any less reasonable than to say that all sides are equally responsible for all the civilian casualties that are not from their own side.
