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A hilarious way to phrase it, but of course. Normal, mainstream, reputable medical organizations issued calls for doctors to volunteer in Gaza. Some accepted. That’s because they care about innocent human lives. Innocent life is not devalued because of the hegemonic political force in power.
Sure it is, if you define value innocence. If you value innocence, then coercing non-innocent actions devalues it by decreasing the degree of innocence.
This includes, for example, compromising information integrity as a condition for access. If you want to assist people in gaza under the administrative control of Hamas, your access to Gaza depends on your public statements aligning with their interests. If they do not like your position, then depending on who you are you may lose access, or people may lose their lives. Therefore, there is a systemic bias at play, and all participants who play to it (speaking only within the bounds Hamas presents) are complicit, and thus less innocent, and thus less valued.
This is why arguments to the value of humanity rarely want to focus on innocence per see. Innocence is too easily compromised.
Here are the problems with that: I don’t see evidence of that happening in the past; Hamas would like to maintain access to top medical care, which would be jeopardized if they began to threaten medical providers; Most of the volunteer doctors are not making a career in the Gaza Strip, so there is no reason for them to cowtow to the ideology of Hamas; the very same survey we are talking about has 20% of the doctors say they didn’t see shot children — so why did this 20% say that? Where’s the evidence that 20% were harassed or asked to leave?
What you presented is a story but the story has nothing evidencing it. The rest of your comment is just trying to obfuscate the fact that innocent Palestinian children ought to obtain medical care.
Then you ignored past evidence. As such, no reason to link it again when you can easily see for yourself if you search.
Hamas is not prioritizing civilian access to top medical care over things that jeopardize access to top medical care.
This is demonstrated when it regularly does things such as turn medical centers into military bases and steals aid from the public and co-opts local palestinian medical organizations into logistics and propaganda associates, all of which decreases the quality and availability of medical care. Hamas does them anyway.
Hence, there is no reason to believe maintaining access to top medical care prioritizes goals (such as control of the Gazan territory) that could be advanced by threatening medical providers (who could complicate narratives if allowed to be outspoken, but whose shortage serves as a useful propaganda tool for soliciting international sympathy).
Note that this is paralleled with Hamas's use of interior ministry regulations and enforcement of journalism coverage from within the strip, which itself has had observable not-back effects as while these rules nominally don't apply to organizations like the Assoicated Press, the reliance of these organizations on people within the strip, and thus subject to Hamas retaliation, shapes which relationships with the outside world can form in the first place.
Sure there is- access to Gaza in the first place.
In order for external actors to operate within Gaza, they must be permitted by whichever authority controls access to the ground the organization wishes to work on and from. Organizations which do not cowtow, do not gain or retain access. This is basic access-control policy.
You are reversing the cause and effect of a filtering process, and in turn running into the issue of the nature of small-scale surveys which you are conflating with the filtering effect.
The filtering effect is a pre-survey effect. The effect of filtering is not claiming that 20% of the survey respondents would be asked to leave after saying 20% say that they didn't see shot children. The filtering effect can be something like that 80% of doctors surveyed are willing to say they saw shot children because they are recruited from the sort of (permitted) organizations that include a higher number of doctors who would be willing to say they saw shot children on a survey if it benefited the palestinian cause, but also would not opine on who shot the victims, especially if doing so might work against the cause.
Which goes into the data on who was doing the shooting, rather than who was shot, which not even the NYT respondents cited claim were Israeli shooters.
Except even in this case there is a far more mundane explanation for radical scores, which is survey structure of small samples.
The author is writing on the basis of surveys that includes themselves and people/organizations they know. Groups of people who know eachother are also groups of people who have a stronger tendency to have heard about the same things, often from eachother. This is how you get cultural / information silos where people can get influenced by group thought dynamics that do not have to reflect reality, and why establishing the representativeness of a sample population is critical.
Medical care for being victimized by whom?
Again, I return to the data points that not only do the shooting-cases not claim that the shooters were Israelis, but that the majority of the article is focused on medical consequences of things like malnutrition and psychological damage that are the responsibility of Hamas, who have been stealing aid, compromising medical organizations, and perpetrating the conflict.
Which, while you certainly had a... take on the evilness of da joos, seemed rather light on equivalent religious analysis on the rulers of gaza.
If it's easy, you should do it and paste the links here.
If it's not easy, but you expect persuadable people (at least persuadable third parties) to be reading, you should definitely do it and paste the links. (this is the case I suspect is true, as a persuadable third party who didn't see anything on the first results page for "gaza doctors access", although I vaguely recall seeing stories along these lines before)
If you don't expect anyone persuadable to be reading, why bother writing at all?
Because the argument wouldn't be as effective if I were the one to provide a link.
If someone is actually interested in whether Hamas uses child soldiers, they can very trivially google "Hamas Child Soldiers" and find multiple reports on the history by organizations including Amnesty International, Child Soldiers International, and the United Nations, among others. This doesn't even include self-publicized material such as from the Hamas Youth Wing. These aren't even 'new' reporting- there are easily observable reports from the early 2000s during the tail end of the Intifada years to late last decade, well before the current conflict. Any observer of the conflict with any significant experience has read any one of these over the last few decades- they are old news, not particularly controversial, and numerous.
The reminder of the existence of such reporting isn't just the function any link would provide- it is remind the reader of past reports they've heard of and can easily find again (thus appealing to their own understanding of the conflict), and thus the contrast to the OP's dogmatic dismissal of contrary evidence published over the last decades. Their own trust in their own memories and experience is the legitimizer of the position.
While nominally the target doesn't work as well on people not as experienced in the topic, the prompt that they could easily search for it serves a second level of argument, in which if they do look they will find, and their ability to find evidence of child soldiers if they choose to look for it will be contrasted with the OP's dismissal. This, too, utilizes their agency in the search to bolster the argument.
People who refused to do the search, as a third category, in turn expose themselves to audiences one and two, and thus discredit the OP's objection even fuller when people who are aware recognize they are denying international records that aren't obscure.
None of these three layers of effect would be as effective if a link is simply provided, which can be dismissed on the basis of coming from a partisan regardless of what reference was linked to. The searcher's own agency is what legitimizes the discovery.
Additionally, there is a fourth level, which is a rhetorical trap for the less aware if someone tries to do a surface-level search. One of the easy top-searches is a past UN report that also criticizes Israel for 'child soldier' use (primarily in the context of proximity when searching tunnels / etc.). If this were to be raised in a way to try and establish moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, not only would a choice to focus on that report validate the relevance of child soldiers as a mitigating circumstance (by acknowledging that the children are not necessarily automatically moral innocents in a combatant sense), but it would also be a demonstratation of a motive for why someone besides Israel might have shot the children (as in, rather than be shot by the Israelis, they are shot because they are associated with the Israelis).
This snare was non-central to the point on the ease of finding evidence that the OP looked to, but was on hand to use if pulled, which again would not work as well if proactively linked to and explained by myself.
The way you write is… interesting to say the least. Is it strategically vague, or a sort of wailing wall of text defense?
We are not speaking about “child soldiers” the legal category, which includes teens. We are specifically talking about below-teens children being used by Hamas. Especially being used in a way that would lead them to being shot approx daily. What I can find from HRW is that Hamas once used a 17yo but that they made commitments to not recruit below 18. That was back in 2004. Something similar was published by Amnesty in 2005.
This is barely intelligible. If you make a surprising and significant claim, you should provide a source. That’s a combo of obligation, politeness, and efficiency. If Hamas is equipping 12yo with IEDS then obviously it’s not a big deal if they are shot by Israeli soldiers. This does not appear to be the case.
Thank you for demonstrating your continued retreat from your opening positions. I look forward to seeing how much of a motte you retreat to over time.
And no, for others, 17 year olds is not the limits of what one can find regarding Hamas child soldier reports.
And if you wish to claim that Israelis shoot children, and then launch screeds on the jews being uniquely evil, you should provide a source that accuses the Israelis of shooting children, instead of claims that children were shot without an attribution as to by whom.
Which serves as another basis of the non-linking, since the lack of relevant sourcing to support a surprising and significant claim (like 'the Jews are deliberately one-shotting children') has been a reoccuring theme of this thread.
And yes, that was left for you specifically to walk into.
If we’re just going to ignore my whole OP post, then I’ll recap all of my posts from the thread. Thank you for the opportunity —
There is an anomalously high amount of children being one-shotted in Gaza. This is according to a survey of doctors conducted by the most reputable mainstream newspaper, currently managed by a Jewish CEO and chief executive, owned by a family with Jewish heritage, located in New York City, and employing many Jews. There is no reason for the NYT to have fudged this reporting, and not only did they oversee the polling, but they took the unusual step of publishing a defense of the reporting, consulting a new assortment of medical experts to look at the C-Scans and photography.
At the highest levels of Israel, there is support for soldiers who have sexually tortured enemy PoWs.
In the joint rabbinical/military academies, at least one rabbi has explicitly called for killing children.
There has been an increase in IDF soldiers who come from an extremist background, and these soldiers have already caused trouble in the military and worried their secular peers.
There are unique aspects of Israeli Judaism that promotes extremism and de-emphasizes interpersonal morality to non-Jews.
The available evidence in the context of the Libyan Civil War shows that stray shots to the head and chest should not be so prevalent. This is an upper-bound, because IDF soldiers are better trained and because the study did not look at multiple gunshot wounds.
The NYTimes reporting reinforces the Guardian reporting from earlier this year, in which yet another non-Arab, non-Muslim doctor talks about an unusual amount of children one-shotted. (this is new evidence I am presenting.)
In response to this, you have claimed that Gaza is using pre-teen soldiers, which has no evidence to support it; you have accused the doctors of being pressured by Hamas, which has no evidence to support it; you have accused me of calling Jews uniquely evil (lmao); you have claimed that Hamas is selecting which doctors enter Gaza, which has no evidence to support it; and then you have alleged that these volunteer doctors were only presented with the worst one-shotted children, which is an unreasonable assumption. In the cases of zero evidence, the absence of evidence qualifies as an evidence of absence for one reason: pro-Israeli advocates would report on this information immediately, abundantly, and continually. Child soldiers would be all over the news, if it were happening. Doctors being vetted and pressured by Hamas would be a well-published fact, if it were happening. For these claims, an absence of evidence does actually qualify as evidence of absence.
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This isn’t how it works. You’re asserting that there’s a normalized phenomenon of Hamas threatening or pressuring the testimony of temporary Western medical workers. There have been hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand Western medic workers who have volunteered in Gaza over the years.
As per a previous comment, it was the WHO and a major American medical association which called for doctors willing to go to Gaza. Now you are alleging that the WHO is controlled by Hamas? Or are you alleging that Hamas is interviewing every doctor who passes into the territory? This also needs evidence. If this occurred, we would know about it, per above.
Again, you are making a claim that is empirical. Are you saying Hamas has a hand in selecting doctors? We need a source on that. Are you saying that doctors would only work in Gaza because they are pro-Hamas? This is disputed by major medical organizations wishing to send doctors into Gaza. You are also conflating sympathy to the Palestinian people with the wilingness to publicly lie about the health of children to benefit Hamas. You have to imagine all of the doctors who are not radical pro-Israel supporters, but instead focused on mitigating the harm affecting children. That’s going to be a lot of doctors. Doctors willing to volunteer are predisposed to care about the plight of children, rather than the ideology of political organizations in obscure parts of the world.
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