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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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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

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.

Here are the problems with that: I don’t see evidence of that happening in the past;

Then you ignored past evidence. As such, no reason to link it again when you can easily see for yourself if you search.

Hamas would like to maintain access to top medical care, which would be jeopardized if they began to threaten medical providers;

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.

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;

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.