Note to self: read Peter Singer.

A snippet of an interview (found via A&LDaily):

Singer: What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that [George W. Bush] doesn't have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos; I think that's certainly true, but in that I think he's simply focusing elsewhere, not looking at that and saying 'how can I justify my support for human life against what I do in Iraq'; he rather takes a view that's relatively widely held - he simply says we didn't intend these deaths, so therefore they somehow don't count.
Interviewer: Yes, you sometimes get a sense they're somehow less fatal, those deaths.
Singer: Yes that's right; the people are sort of less dead.

I disagree. I think the thought process - if you could track it through the subconscious or wherever it comes from - isn't that the deaths are less real. Rather, people living in remote and unfortunate parts of the planet seem somehow more removed from the real world, our world, and less able to communicate suffering in a way that we can understand it. No one argues that it's not different to see someone dead on television and to see them die in front of you. The people that suffer away from us: they're just less alive.