Wednesday Hodgepodge

• Five years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, RJ Eskow reminds us that…

More Americans have now died in Iraq than died on 9/11. Iraq didn’t attack us on that day, and our misguided policy there has now taken more American lives than Al Qaeda. Here are the numbers: 3,015 Americans have died in Iraq as of September 9. 2,666 of these were military deaths and 349 were civilians.

• Adam Kotsko explores the rhetorical shenanigans of the right (via A Blog Around the Clock):

There are some central rhetorical strategies I’ve noticed that seem to be closely associated with the right wing. In the spirit, though not precisely the style, of Mark Kaplan’s Notes on Rhetoric, I’d like to catalogue a few of them here.

• Video games have evolved since the days of Pong, and so have the purposes that those games can serve. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reviews the serious uses of games (via 3 Quarks Daily):

The serious games moniker provides a catchall for simulations that transcend traditional video and computer game fodder (gunplay, slick cars, and sports) and delve into heftier issues (responding to genocide, promoting democracy, and training first responders). Already neatly segmented, serious games exist for science, defense, health, conflict resolution, and social change. Their sophistication, target audience, and message vary. FAS developed Immune Attack to allow high school students to experience the challenge of defending the human body against invading antigens; PeaceMaker, a game created by students at Carnegie Mellon University, lets Palestinians and Israelis switch roles to better understand each other’s plight; and the U.N. World Food Programme’s Food Force teaches kids about the difficulties of delivering aid to the developing world.

• As always, Tom Tomorrow nails the rightwing nuttiness of The Path to 9/11, which of course bills itself as The absolutely true story of Bill Clinton and 9/11!