Re: Inappropriate: Re: Humor for some, not for the overly sensitive

["Björn Cedervall" <bjorn_cedervall@hotmail.com>]

>I feel that the discussion created by this topic relating humor to 
>acts of war is not appropriate.  Should anyone like to discuss the 
>toxicity or radioactivity of Uranium this would be relevant.
---------------
The original construction of the uranium toxicity/dose question – 
relating to a DU exploding device was of course not humorous at all – in 
particular because it was pointing at a certain kind of people - rather 
than being stated in a general form. As I saw it, that original question 
was a way (although an inappropriate one) of conservatively placing that 
amount of DU close to somebody – in order to obtain upper dose limits. 
This could of course have been described in a better way – as a response 
to the claims of cancer caused by the DU devices.
It was an example of a calculational approach that through its 
construction became so removed from reality and normal ethical 
considerations that I of course intuitively filtered out the so called 
”humor” and then went on to the dose thinking – but without clarifying 
these aspects – a non-response would have been better.
I have no knowledge about the distribution of the hundreds on tons of DU 
that can be found in some areas of Iraq but must say that in the 
perspective of the general health tradegies (that go down to innocent 
individuals rather than statistically analyzed populations) due to 
malnutrition, diseases etc – caused in a number of ways by the war – I 
agree with Robert and others that much of the discussion of the 
radiation/chemical doses should be dropped. I was indeed interested in 
the radiology etc. of having DU scattered around but I think the 
construction of the "joke" destroyed the possibility of a serious 
radiological response and back in this regard. With this addition, I 
hope there will be no misunderstanding of my previous too brief 
reference to ethical aspects and health problems.

bjorn_cedervall@hotmail.com
The ideas stated above are those of mine.

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