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Israel-Hamas War Megathread, November 6 to November 15
Thought I’d start a new topic since it’s been a while and there’s more to discuss. Here is the previous topic.
Thought I’d start a new topic since it’s been a while and there’s more to discuss. Here is the previous topic.
Why Palestinian death counts are generally considered accurate
(I decided to post this in a new megathread instead.)
Here’s an explanation about how Palestinian ID cards work:
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Here is a tweet explaining how this connects to Palestinian death counts:
It seems to me that there’s room for doubt about the cause of death (a common problem with death certificates) and whether it should be considered a military or civilian casualty. But id’s do include things like gender and date of birth. The possible amount of fudging is limited.
Also, here’s a “fact checker” article from the Washington Post that gives their perspective:
Biden’s dismissal of the reported Palestinian death toll
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If Hamas adds names of live civilians to the death toll, then each of those citizens would have personal incentive to claim they're alive - so they can open a bank account, get medical care etc.
So Hamas would have to give them all hefty bribes to stay in obscurity, or it would have to blackmail or kill them. Both blackmail and killing would be difficult because those living people have serious retaliatory power i.e. the ability to give an interview recording how Hamas is blatantly trying to fake death toll numbers (and if there are thouusands of "dead", a few dozen of them would do wonders for Israel's propaganda arm), and killing would cause serious harm to Hamas's narrative about Israel being the enemy, if the killings were ever proven. Again, Israeli Intelligence would have a field day. Especially since they'd be the first to know if deaths cropped up that Israel's own internal orders don't seem to match up with, and they don't find evidence of insubordination by their troops.
In other words, making the claim is not only a very costly signal, but it would also be hard to fake in the first place.
Biden's dismissal of these numbers makes him look more blatantly biased, and a disingenuous steward of the "rules-based order".
Hold up a second, last I checked, Biden's statement predates the release of names. At least for this current conflict. If I'm not mistaken, Hamas' release of the names was a pretty direct response to that particular comment by Biden.
Fair. Although, I doubt Mr No Red Line will change his tune unless Netanyahu starts personally running around with a machete.
Hamas said a hospital blew up once and it ended up being their own munitions hitting a parking lot. I don't think they're super reputable right now.
Here's a napkin math assessment on the accuracy of the civilian death figures.
Well, Israel has claimed that their tunnel bombardments have been very effective, so I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there is a sizeable amount of terrorists under the rubble. I think that we won't get an accurate death toll until the fighting is done; even then, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything concrete.
There's also allegations floating around that Hamas is killing civilians in order to prevent them from fleeing south. Nothing I'd elevate above the level of a rumor, and nothing I'd like to cite or claim as fact in anyway. As far as I know, it's a coin toss whether the video (no link to gore unless you must see it) depicts the aftermath of Israeli or Hamas attacks, so I really don't want to go there. Let's just say both sides have motives and means here. [1]
Caveats aside, if there are Gazan civilians directly attributable to Hamas actions, I don't doubt one bit that Hamas would list them too. And just to be clear, I don't think that that would materially affect the numbers, if it was what is happening.
All that aside, I'm coming around on the assessment that the big-picture numbers are broadly accurate, at least in that they are in fact listing 9000 actual dead people. Where I think there's room for propaganda is how the big-picture numbers fit in with smaller-scale events. I mean, I don't know about you, but at the rate that we see mass casualty events in Gaza reported by Hamas, 9000 seems not all that much? Either the distribution is that there's a few strikes leading to massive, outsized casualties, while most do almost nothing or actually nothing? Or the initially claimed or suggested casualties are massively above the final count. This is of course a bit of a guess; I haven't collected all of Hamas' individual incident reports and tallied them up, then modeled the scale and frequency of less-than-newsworthy events to come up with a figure of "this is what the total casualties would be if Hamas' initial claims were accurate". But my hunch is that these two don't align. Which, if true, means that Hamas is doing massive amounts of propaganda with inflated "guesses" of casualties, and "substantiating" that with their more realistic (but markedly different) estimates being verifiable.
[1] In case I need to spell it out, Hamas profits massively from the presence of civilians in the north via human shields. They have previously countermanded the Israeli evacuation order.
Hope I got all my subjunctives right writing this.
Though dates could be a little inaccurate, graphing deaths by day would result in a rough picture of what this war is doing. It’s sort of like looking at excess death counts to understand COVID. For a war, I would expect to see spikes for major incidents.
Much like COVID, deaths are only one statistic. It doesn’t even include injuries, which are typically included in military “casualties.”
This sounds like the plot of a crazy dystopian film, but it's real life. My heart goes out to everyone who is losing their homes and lives due to terrorists in the area. While I am not pro-Israeli government, I am Jewish and believe that Jews have a right to live in Israel in peace. I also believe that Palestinians deserve their own homeland and that they have the right to live in peace as well. The leadership of both groups is to blame here and I just feel so much for this dentist and his family and community.
a group of self-described "autonomous anti-Zionists and anarchist saboteurs" sabotaged a recent "Friends of the IDF" fundraiser in the Bay Area.
(I won't link to the source, because it also contains diagrams and instructions on replicating the attack)
wow, what a nasty form of sabotage. obviously it's not justified to cause such expensive damage to a privately-owned building like this, merely for a single act of hosting a fundraiser for a group you disagree with.
on a totally unrelated tangent:
video from B'Tselem in August 2023: Israel pours concrete into well and destroys irrigation system in the Palestinian village of al-Hijrah, south of Hebron
op-ed in Haaretz in July 2023: We even destroy their water wells (archive link)
article in The Guardian from May 2023: A precious resource: how Israel uses water to control the West Bank
from Amnesty International in November 2017: The Occupation of Water
I'm having trouble telling if you made any of that up. I guess the bay area sabotage didn't make the news? Or maybe the website you read made up the story?
From some googling, the Friends of the IDF Gala 2023 was held at the Hiller Aviation Museum, at which there were large protests. But there's no mention of damage to the infrastructure, though no one emerged from the facility to speak to reporters.
Any idea why the Hospitals thread started yesterday got locked/deleted with no comment? It seemed to be productive conversation...
It seems the moderation approach for this conflict has been to remove threads that turn even slightly heated, particularly when it comes to specific events. To me, discussion is a bit stifled as a result, but it prevents things from escalating to the point of causing widespread division, so I think it's ultimately a positive thing. Wars are tricky subjects and this one particularly is so rife with misinformation and false reporting that it's much safer to just remove questionable content until more respectable articles are available with concrete information.
For what it's worth, I pretty much agree with the approach. The heated threads just have comment after comment going over the same arguments that have been had for decades, with very little real interaction or knowledge to be gained.
While it's not always obvious, I'm positive that measures have been taken against those who are having trouble discussing the topics in constructive ways.
As for leaning left, yeah i'd say that's most online discussion space, but tildes, in my experience, has been able to handle more middle ground discussions on most things. Doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of people who aren't in favor, but it's not outright shutdown or downvoted into oblivion or whatever.
This conflict is just an especially messy subject given it's usually a lot of people trying to assign good and bad to a situation that's way way way more complicated than that.
I don't know which "Hospitals thread" anyone is talking about, but I don't think that strategy would work because usually moderation is more selective than that. If one thread of comments in a topic gets very heated but the rest of the topic is okay, usually just the thread will get deleted, not the whole topic.
Agree with the problem, disagree with the solution. I don't think that'll help. I think the solution would be for tildes to make good on its promise to be community-moderated. Something like everyone just labeling things they find disturb the peace, and then in the background we can have a system that compares users to a gold standard, to establish which users' labels to trust. Some users might consistently label mildly conservative comments as malicious, but we don't have to assign that any trust and can just ignore it.
Of course there's the question of what the gold standard is. The simple solution would be to just have Deimos or other trusted users be that gold standard. The slightly more experimental approach could be to show each user the view where their own labels are the gold standard, i.e. the content is moderated the way the user themselves would moderate it. Of course this means that different people see different things and I don't know what that does to the community, and downright illegal content would have to be hard-filtered too.
And then we probably need a label to cool down discussions - something different from noise, that communicates to the labeled posts' author to dial it back, but is does not assign blame the way that "malice" does. In an ideal world, if someone posts a calm, but ultimately hurtful or misguided or misinformed comment, and another user responds with righteous indignation, I want to be able to call both of those people to dial it back. But right now I can ascribe malice, or bury the thread but not do anything about the contents.
I've felt somewhat similar about the heated label, but I do feel like that could quickly become a "disagree" button. I like that tags are NOT something you're supposed to use often (or at least that's the vibe I get). Exemplary isn't supposed to just be an "agree more" thing.
That said it's ultimately up to the admin/whoever helps with all this in what tools they want to identify problems, and when.
Periodically people make suggestions in ~tildes. I always learn more about how and why the site is run the way it is when those discussions occur. I also believe leadership pays attention to what gets suggested and discussed.
Hillary Clinton, in March 2022:
she was referring to the Mariupol hospital airstrike in Ukraine.
the Russian justification for bombing the hospital was (stop me if you've heard this one before) that it had been occupied by the Ukrainian military:
strangely, when it was a hospital in Ukraine being bombed, there didn't seem to be much controversy about calling it a war crime:
President Zelenskyy even went so far as to use the G-word:
meanwhile, Hillary Clinton in November 2023:
Hamas Must Go (archive link)
she describes her role in negotiating a 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas:
as much as I hate to fact-check the former Secretary of State by citing wikipedia:
she presents it as a straightforward and one-sided "Hamas violated the cease-fire", and it doesn't seem that simple.
fun fact, you can read the text of the 2012 ceasefire agreement.
one of the conditions of the ceasefire was that Israel lift the blockade of Gaza that had been in place since 2005 (the one that has been described by multiple United Nations officials as a crime against humanity)
Israel didn't lift the blockade (and still hasn't, more than 10 years later). which, I dunno, seems like a violation of the cease-fire that they agreed to?
earlier in her op-ed, Clinton said this:
love the framing here.
Israel has a right to defend itself. no mention of Palestinians defending themselves.
Hamas has to face consequences. no mention of consequences for Israel.
and Hamas has a history of breaking agreements and can't be trusted. but no mention of Israel breaking agreements. even when the story she's telling is centered around an agreement Israel and Hamas both broke.
that's right, we cannot have a cease-fire, we need to continue the violence. a cease-fire would *checks notes* perpetuate the cycle of violence.
rather than a cease-fire, it seems like she thinks the Israeli military should continue fighting in Gaza, until they reach some poorly-defined "all of Hamas is defeated" state:
maybe the IDF could find some US veterans of the war in Afghanistan and ask them for advice. we have quite a few of them, I'm sure we can spare a couple. and after spending 20 years "dismantling
Hamas’sthe Taliban's infrastructure and military capacity" we surely must be experts at it.