when you can't keep your numbers right they get away from you. caitlin may have given up attempting to quantify the dead in iran from protesting, as we all are; 

The most common pro-war talking point about Iran is that they massacred tens of thousands of protesters in January of this year — but what’s funny is that they never cite the same number. Because it’s a completely fictional story, they can just make up any number they want.

In online discourse with empire apologists these past few months I’ve been told that the number of dead protesters is thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand, seventy thousand, eighty thousand, ninety thousand, and a hundred thousand. 

They really do seem to just throw out whatever number feels believable in a given moment. I recently saw an exasperated Glenn Greenwald ask an interlocutor on Twitter, “How do you decide when to claim that Iran killed 30,000 protesters, or 45,000, or 70,000? Does it depend on the day of the week or lyrical flow or something else?”.........more..........