Here's an unpopular criticism and invective: why do people on the internet, when comparing genocides, treat human lives as if their sole value varies inversely to the degree that it is expendable?
Monkeysphere. People don't value each other unless they actually know the other people in question. 7 billion anything is hard to wrap even the most intelligent mind around, and people are no exception.
Sure. But arguing Timur's deathcount is comparable to Genghis Khan's,
purely because they killed a similar proportion of the world population, seems... I mean, when people quote Stalin's "A million is a statistic", it's not to
recommend it as a way of viewing the world. Because that's exactly what this is. I mean yeah you need to get a grip on the numbers somehow, but ultimately the actual number of lives is more important than their
relative value. And when we talk in terms of the "killing XYZ number of millions is 5% of the people who are alive", its easy to forget that "5%", "one-in-twenty" are all semantic games we play, and
not what's actually important. 5% is just supposed to be a mental tool to mentally grab onto what matters, but when you start comparing Timur and Genghis Khan, and you hear "well they both killed 5% of people on earth" it's easy to start thinking "well I guess they did the same amount of damage" and "those two things were basically equivalent". Well no, the Mongols killed about 40 million more people than Timur. That's not comparable at all. Not in the slightest. That's every single person living in Poland, dead, and you're still 2 million short.
My point is it's one thing to use things like "oh this killed every x of y", but as soon as you start
comparing proportions, you lose sight of the fact that the proportions do not have any meaning in-and-of-themselves. The proportions are like metaphors: means to an end, where that end is understanding something that is difficult to comprehend. Comparing the proportions is like confusing metaphors for reality; like if you describe a tense diplomatic situation as being like chess, but then start going into the minutiae of Chess rules and forgetting the reality. In short: It's missing the point.