site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Of course, the Guardian is not happy with this:

Reports continue to come in but, with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in dozens, if not hundreds, of coordinated explosions the episode demonstrates a ruthless and indiscriminate desire to target Hezbollah.

I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here. Per Wikipedia, "From the inception of Hezbollah to the present, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah's primary goals." Of course, the tactics employed by Hezbollah have included suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel.

I think that if you manage to kill your mortal enemies without turning their neighborhood into rubble, that is commendable. Of course a few civilians will also die in such attacks, but certainly a lower number than would in any conventional form of warfare.

Given that the pagers were meant as an alternative to a trackable cell phone which could attract Israeli missile strikes, it seems reasonable that the persons using them were mostly people who thought that they might become a target of such strikes otherwise, that is military personnel and especially leadership.

My main beef with Mossad would be purely operational -- nine killed, (one of whom seems to be a ten years old girl who was unlikely to belong to the higher echelons of Hezbollah leadership) with 3k wounded seems pretty inefficient. Of course, without knowing how these are counted (are most of them pager owners who survived, or is everyone who had ringing ears after hearing the blast counting as injured here), it is hard to say for certain. And I get that there were operational constraints -- if the pagers suddenly weighted as much as a 1995 phone, the terrorists would have become suspicious. But even if we are generous and say that the eight killed were all military commanders, and that another sixteen were permanently injured in a way which prevents them from continuing to destroy Israel, I don't think that the outcome is very impressive.

Of course, this is just an armchair analysis. Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile because they were scheduled to be swapped for fresh, uncompromised ones in a week. Perhaps using something deadlier than mere explosives was not politically feasible.

While I think Hamas and Hezbollah are quite similar in a lot of ways, I think I still have more understanding for the Hamas grunt than for the Hezbollah grunt. The former has been raised on Hamas propaganda in fucking Gaza, which is not known for its economic growth and upwards mobility. The latter is much more likely to have heard the opinion that destroying Israel is perhaps not the most important thing in life, and has a Lebanese passport which offers economic alternatives to 'become a jihadist, Iran pays well' of which Gazans could only dream.

I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here.

It's not the targeting of Hezbollah but the method that is indiscriminate. If you can't see your target and you detonate an explosive device, you've probably committed a warcrime - you can't be sure you didn't blow up a pager in the pocket of a terror cell member currently working his day job as a bus driver, or while he was pumping gas at a crowded station, or carrying his 10yr old daughter on the hip directly over the pager. It's a lot less indiscriminate than peppering an area with antipersonnel mines, and quite a big improvement over bombing houses in civilian neighborhoods* but it's still bad.

*even though the latter is explicitly not a warcrime if the enemy has stationed military assets and personnel among the civilians - or rather, the warcrime was committed by the other side by using human shields. So why are the pagers no good if blowing up suburbia is ok? You don't know where the former is going to go off, and you need to know. A bomb you can aim, though the collateral damage may be horrible it is something you can estimate. You can choose not to bomb a school, or a hospital, at the very least without 'knocking' first. When you fire blind, you're saying that the worst possible outcome is acceptable, and IMO that's a bright moral line in the sand that should never be crossed. **

**And yeah, Hezbollah and Hamas and their like go there all as a matter of course, which is precisely why I'm fine with blowing them to pieces in a discriminate fashion.

I think that any method of warfare comes down to statistics. Just about any attack has a risk of collateral damage.

For some attacks (such as targeting a wedding reception with a hellfire missile, which I am generally against), you know the exact amount of dead civilians beforehand. For some, you only have an estimate of the distribution beforehand.

I would argue that the correct thing to worry about is the expected count of civilians killed (or QALY lost, if you are into that). 'The pager blows up a crowded gas station' is on the far tail, high body count but also unlikely.

It helps that the pagers were extraordinary weak explosives, not enough to kill the person holding them in their hands in most cases. If instead they had the deadliness of a fragmentation grenade, obliterating any unarmored target within a six meter radius, then the calculation would be quite different.

The context of the attack is that the IDF is fighting Hezbollah's sister organisation Hamas in Gaza, and the collateral damage there is abysmal (because IDF killing Palestinian kids are a great outcome for Hamas). In one case the IDF killed a high-ranking Hamas commander and 50 bystanders in a refugee camp (which was a bad call to make, IMO).

I will assume that out of the nine killed by the pagers, only the girl is an obvious civilian -- if there were more dead kids, Hezbollah would be sure to tell the world. Likely they were the intended targets. Let us say that the tail risks of vehicular accidents and causing larger explosions amount to another expected civilian death.

An enemy:civilian ratio of 4:1 is not bad for an enemy who is likely to fight an asymmetrical style of war a la Hamas. It is sad that civilians were killed and injured, but if you need to kill your enemies, you can do a lot worse.

Of course, one can debate if Hezbollah needs killing, or if they were in the middle of deradicalization, building hospitals and slowly forgetting that there was something about destroying Israel in their mission statement. Extrapolating from Hamas, I think it is likely they need killing, though.

Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile

My guess is that this wasn’t a useful option for the same reason that Hezbollah opted for pagers in the first place: pagers are passive, lacking transmit capabilities, meaning that Israel would not be able to collect useful data from the pagers remotely.

That is a very good point.

Mossad could certainly replace the circuit board with one which has an additional UMTS modem and a GPS tracker on it, but this would be rather trivial to detect once you open the device and compare it to the manufacturers PCB.

If you assume that Hezbollah is smart enough to do the that, but not smart/paranoid enough to short circuit one of the lithium batteries to verify that it will not cause a bigger fire or explosion than normal.

Of course, if I knew Mossad was after me, I would at least disassemble the PCB layer by layer, looking for any chips hidden within it, then open up any chips, compare the silicon to the original under a microscope, then worry about how programmable they are, then consider the possibility that Mossad would build custom chips which look identical to specs on the top layer and finally decide to find myself a job compatible with the continued existence of Israel so that I don't have to live a life full of well-justified paranoia. Thus I would make a terrible jihadist.

TX capability also requires much more power, and these pagers run off a AAA battery.

Agreed that most of the fun 'send real time GPS coordinates every ten seconds' options are off the table.

OTOH, with a capacitor, the pager could still send out a short, triangulate-able burst when it receives a certain message.

I was kind of assuming the pagers were coming with their own lithium batteries, which would be a pain to replace. Someone here claimed the devices were in use for months before exploding. I would think that most of the devices would no longer be running with their original (rechargeable, presumably) battery at that point.

Edit: The Guardian says (or implies) that it was an Apollo AR924 pager powered by a 90g Li battery. This is roughly similar to the ~115g battery found in Nokia phones from ca. 2000 and should easily be powerful enough to do the odd transmission.

I don't think that the outcome is very impressive

There's another point you brushed against, but moved past: the pagers were used as a safe alternative to cell phones. As a morale downer and paranoia increaser, this will hit Hezbollah pretty hard.

I agree, the impact is mostly morale. Getting maimed by your pager is certainly not the most glorious kind of martyrdom.

Of course, I would also not oversell the psychological impact. The more senior commanders will simply keep some expendable kid nearby to handle their pager.

Yeah this is psychological warfare par excellence; the message is clear that the enemy can reach you at any time and you’ll never be safe.