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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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That Hamas is utilizing 8 year old child soldiers to lob grenades is a level of propaganda that the IDF hasn’t even reached yet.

You seem to have misunderstood the point of the opening, which was to contest your characterization of the limit of child soldiers, which itself wasn't limited to Hamas. A child soldier is not a 16 year old. A child soldier is a child who is used in the function of war, regardless of their age, and as such age alone does not disprove someone someone from being a combatant unless the age is so low that they physically cannot.

There has been no information coming out of Israel that Hamas is using preteen child soldiers in their operations, neither is there drone or other footage which would immediately shift public opinion in favor of Israel. This isn’t happening.

Sure it is. It's denied and disparaged as Israeli propaganda or otherwise that it shouldn't matter because children, but it is in no way hard to find information of Hamas using pre-teen children as human shields to military operations, of using preteens as messengers or conveyers of military goods, of Hamas opening fire into crowds of civilians which would involve pre-teens, of stealing and depriving the Gazan population of resources which lead to murder over or due to a lack of resources, of Hamas deliberately murdering families of dissidents for the purpose of intimidating the populace, and otherwise setting conditions in a warzone in which people are regularly shot for less-than-maximally-nefarious-reasons by maximally-nefarious jews.

This is not true. Emergency nurses will deal with children shot in all places.

There are two problems with this contestation, both demonstrating separate logical errors leading to data issues.

First is a dynamic which can be summarized as 'tell me you didn't think about triage without telling me you didn't think about triage.' Triage itself is screening function when medical issues over overwhelming and resources- included the doctors themselves- are limited. Not all injuries are emergencies to a triage, and in turn not all injuries will go to emergency treatment in the first place. If you then cite numbers of medical emergency cases, you are starting to count after triage has already filtered relevant contextual numbers.

Second, the NYT isn't citing a representative sample of emergency nurses- or even exclusively emergency nurses- in the first place. It was specifically citing people who were willing to claim observation of children being shot, which is itself a selection bias. '100% of the people I cited claimed cases of X' means nothing on a statistical when you are not citing people who do not support X, and that's if you had a representative survey basis in the first place, which the NYT opinion presenter does not.

As would surgeons, parademics, and critical care doctors. Any child shot is going to see these professionals. There’s not some “child shot in the head super-specialist” at these clinics. I mean, maybe neurosurgeon, but that’s not even a listed specialty in the article.

Thank you for admitting another issue in the article's data base, I was hoping to lead you to that point.

Yes, the lack of professional characterization is a separate issue for the brilliance of the research, as it conflates the medical supporters who might have a more representative understanding of general child injuries as part of the triage process (who, in the article, aren't even claiming Israeli snipers or the such in the first place) from more specialized medical experts whose expertise in specific things- like, say, chest surgeries- who would only be under a significant selective survivorship bias of what they are exposed to (both the nature of the injury, but also operating on people who survive long enough to get to them).

This conflation of category of medical experts, in turn, can be and is used to conflate the different viewpoints to distorting effect. As the viewpoints of people with wider-but-less-serious issues are presented in equal ground with more narrow perspective that are narrower-but-more-severe (because the person in question is primarily dealing with the most severe cases). This is a technique to shape audience perception by insinuating that the equivalence of the reports suggests that the conflated categories are a single category that is both more common and more severe on average than the spread actually is.

But since relevant medical and surgical specialties do exist, and the volunteers of any previous or accumulated experience will be allocated those cases as a matter of course, we can infer from organizational practicalities (and some parts of the article itself) that there is a relevant degree of case selection filtering going on.

Who do you believe is the lower specialty on whom they drop off the children only merely shot in the abdomen or thigh?

Or the hand or the foot or the arm?

The person with clearly vestigial wounds is clearly the lower priority and will receive more limited care by less trained or specialized people. A surgeon who specializes in opening up chest cavities to remove things that can kill people is not going to spend their time resetting dislocated joints or applying splints, when that level of care can be provided by a more-numerous non-surgeon whose use in that role can free up the surgeon to do surgeries.

Now, if you wish to make the argument that the Gazan medical situation is not so dire such that there is no need to triage and thus more specialized medical professionals see a representative selection of wounded children...