gattsuru
1yr ago
A very prolific poster back during the reddit days, with a lot of very obnoxious habbits.
gattsuru
1yr ago
To give 0HP exactly the level of respect he deserves: he has little or no interest in the truth, quite happily demonstrates it often when writing, and to the extent there's ever any deeper point under the first level of bullshit it's often misaimed Bulverism. The man's a right-wing version of Darwin; I don't get the appeal, and it's more frustrating for the extent he often undermines legitimate criticisms on the occasion he stumbles past one.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The trivial version's pretty easy to steelman: whether people are raised with a language that distinguishes between two colours are able to identify them better/faster, classically with blue/green. This is still controversial, and there's a whole debate in linguistics about whether every language 'really' has the names for the same colours or not. But you can sit people down in front of a testing center and check this pretty quickly. The effect size isn't huge and I'm pretty skeptical about the evidence just because I'm skeptical of every study at this point, but it's not obviously false under its own premises. (Caveat: you'll have to specifically look for cross-cultural studies; there's a lot of attempts to check by brain hemisphere that are testing something more specific and kinda confused.)
While there's less academic efforts on the process, if you work with artists for long at all, you'll often find that they have a staggering array of terms for everything from color to layout to elemental design (cw: some artist nudes in the Greek sense) that isn't present among casual observers, and as you learn it you'll often find yourself noticing parts to art that you wouldn't have seen otherwise or before.
But that's not very interesting. Conversely, neither is Scott's version -- can we separate a language being changed by its culture from a culture being changed by its language -- particularly interesting to Sapir or Whorf. To some extent the strongest version, of whether removing words from common use a la The Giver would change minds is a fun question, but not a practical one. Most people are interested more in ... basically wordcelism, and whether Word Games can do anything.
Which is a lot harder to test.
Well, that's not entirely true. It's really easy to sit down a bunch of native speakers of a few different languages, especially in the MTurk days. And there's a ton of efforts that have done that. But that's also a space where the replication crisis has hit hardest.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not a huge fan of putting shooters (or other attention-seeking violent criminals) on blast, both for to avoid bad incentives and because of contagion risks. It's a good part of why I don't engage with the Unabomber fetishism here, even if there's some philosophically interesting points on the broader anarchoprim stuff. That said, I'm a pretty far outlier, and it had long gone from unusual to noteworthy how long it'd taken for these to be released or leaked, to the point where I was skeptical that they'd ever be released. The religious motivation seemed pretty obvious and just as obviously ignored, so I dunno what the point would have been.
There was a lot of speculation among more marginal left-wing spheres that the shooter was 'really' motivated by speculated physical abuse from the school (possibly sexual), and that was why a lot of the writings haven't been divulged yet; it's possible there's some details in other pages Crowder didn't publish, but what's present so far makes that look like a dud (and the refusal to publish them earlier a bad one, given how it let that speculation florish).
I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?
The f-word has a weird place inside internal LGBT discourse: there are major factions fighting over the extent the term can or should be reclaimed or turned against their enemies, where it's appropriate or inappropriate to use, and what it even means. This clearly isn't the reclamation side of things, and I'm not really familiar enough with the redirect side to speak on it in too much detail, but from the outside my impression is that it's less gendered and more about confrontation.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The one caveat I'll give is that filing taxes as a sole proprietor or self-employed worker can be fucked, even at fairly low incomes. In theory it's not the sort of thing that the IRS makes that much hay over unless you do something incredibly wacky, but there are some obnoxious penalties that can come up for stupid reasons.
... depends on how precise of an estimate you want.
The roughest value is to take your gross income, subtract the standard deduction, and then pass the value through marginal tax rates, for federal taxes. State (and sometimes county/city) taxes follow a similar process, albeit usually with much smaller marginal tax rates. There's also Social Security (6.2% up to 112k) and Medi* (1.45%) employee portions; while employers pay the same amount, this isn't reflected in income.
So for an unmarried US employee with no dependents (mostly means 'no kids') getting 100k USD, you'd take the single standardized deduction of 13,850 USD to give 86,150 USD of adjusted-gross income. The first 11k USD would be taxed at 10% (1,100 USD), the next 33,725 USD at 12% (4,047 USD), and the next 41,425 USD at 22% (9,113.5 USD), for a total of 14,260.5 USD in federal income taxes. SSI/Medi* doesn't use the normal deductions and applicable deductions for them are complex and rare (they're technically payroll taxes, not income taxes, but they're taxes based on income so fuck the IRS), so around 7560 USD for them.
State and county taxes vary a lot. A quick rule-of-thumb for 5% is wrong but not useless, and gives about 5k USD.
So an estimated post-tax-withholding income of around 73,089.5 USD. In practice, probably a little bit more than that due to other withholdings or lower state income taxes, but about that realm.
This presumes that you're taking the standardized deduction: for a lot of people this makes sense, especially at lower income ranges, but there are itemized deductions that can if you do a lot of charity donations, recently purchased your first property, so on. One that used to be more relevant was the state-and-local-tax (SALT) deduction, which let you deduct lots of state taxes from your federal income tax; it's since been capped at the same time that the standardized deduction was increased, so it's less likely to be a sole cause to itemize. There are also some tax credits that sometimes reduce this number (or even turn it negative for lower-incomes). I... honestly don't know off the top of my head whether income automatically directed to social security withholdings are part of your income for tax purposes or not, though the employer side definitely isn't considered part of your income for tax purposes (or even advertised to employees).
Note that this is specifically income taxes; the US does a lot with property and sales taxes, too. You will also probably have some other items taken out of your paycheck (health insurance usually being the big one), and your employer may have certain retirement plans you can choose to go with that are usually good deals but aren't liquid without some cost penalty.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The Haaretz list includes literally zero infants (or children under the age of 4). It includes one child of four years old, two five-year-olds, two six-year-olds, an eight-year-old, one 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, four 12-year-olds, two 13-year-olds, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, and four 17-year-olds.
There is a filter between civilian, police, soldier, and rescue services. There's a few people listed as civilians with a military rank (one Captain, three Master Sgt., a Cpl., two Sergeant Maj.), and one person marked without a rank but as a Lone Soldier (IDF member without family in the area). Looking through external sources, some of these look to be retired or off-duty, but I can't tell for the remainder.
Of the 1131 names (as of 11/5), 400 have no age listed. Most of those are probably not young children. Most.
There's some possible discussion to be had with someone who wants to engage seriously with the matter, and some deeper analysis available. I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.
Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that?
I think there are actually a pretty sizable number of reasons to suspect that dead children will be identified slower (they won't be in many photo databases, are less likely to have parents or siblings in other cities, may not be fully set up within any database given Kibbitz politics, and in extreme cases bones are easier to damage and dental records are less useful or present), and once identified that they are less likely to have their names released (there are broad norms not just in Israel against sharing the identities of deceased minors without parental permission, in many).
Meanwhile, there are absolutely zero under-3-year-olds (and only one 4-year-old), while there is photographic evidence that I am decidedly not going to link to of multiple dead <1-year-olds.
There are more complex and esoteric issues, but these are the ones that should have been pretty obvious to anyone looking at the data with even a passing familiarity with the situation. Meanwhile, groups such as the lqgist twitter account you link don't bother even to spell out that half of the dataset is missing entirely or missing names.
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
Someone with any degree of insight might ponder if it would be the slightest bit strange for that number to not have gone up across three weeks, even as the count of casualties on Oct 7 nearly doubled. Might think just the slightest about if there's something of relevance there
Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
And there's the punchline.
That is why I'm not going into any more serious analysis of the casualty counts, or comparing to other sources than haaretz. You don't care, and now you've said you don't care. The argument is nothing more than a soldier.
There are discussions I could present on the broader topic you want to make your point -- how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts? What responsibility does Israel have for insufficiently vetting strikes to minimize civilian harm, and Hamas for collocating military caches with civilian infrastructure or refuges? How many, if any, casualties can or should we accept for a valid military objective, and where and who does 'valid' military objectives come from? Where is the breakdown for civilian combatant casualties, and where does the line between combatant self-defense, police or pseudo-military, and terrorism fall? (How do you measure non-combat civilian casualties, which Israel has probably caused more of?)
But there's not really much point if you're not engaging with the most wildly concrete components with any degree of even-handed analysis. And you, specifically, have been following this long enough and in enough detail that I know a lot of the reasons you should be skeptical aren't a surprise.
gattsuru
1yr ago
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one
Wikipedia has a few different cites saying that at least one of the goals was to destroy paperwork linking the Jewish Agency to attacks, but even if you're skeptical of that, somewhere between half to two-thirds of the hotel had been used for the British Mandate's administration, which was heavily disrupted by the bombing. Clearly not worth the moral sin (or negative publicity), but very separate from the purpose of changing policy by violence (which they did use elsewhere) or violence for its own sake/'revenge' (ditto).
Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems
Well, of the two I linked... for the Duma arson, Amiram Ben-Uliel was found guilty of the Duma arson and sentenced to life imprisonment, though the minor who assisted in planned only got a short sentence (~10 months plus what had been served during the trial). For Abu Khdeir, Yosef Haim Ben-David got a life sentence-plus, one of the unnamed minors got life(ish) and the other 21 years (... probably will end up closer to ten).
((This complaint about too-short sentences isn't specifically tied to the Israel-Palestine stuff; see Schlissel. But obviously there's both more options and more harm in the context of the West Bank.))
There have been failures to convict (or even try or find) some Israeli civilian murderers of clear homicide, and the environment there makes claims to self-defense extremely difficult to treat fairly, so there's a reason I say usually. And the rules of engagement for the IDF specifically are a very bad joke. But there's a lot of summaries of settler violence that try to give the impression that it's a no-bag-limit hunt, and the presence of any convictions makes that hard to support.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The occasional news item about a fraudulent researcher just reinforces the idea that scientific malpractice consists of a tiny number of evil researchers who clearly violate scientific standards by fabricating data and that all other researchers do a great job.
Perhaps, if every fraudulent researcher found themselves as news items, or if academic research appropriately handled the well-established cases as they're discovered.
This is an old post, but I'll highlight it for three reasons: you've never heard of the researcher (and I'd never heard of the entire university), it hit a 'hard' science field, and (most unusually) the publisher explicitly and publicly said they weren't going to treat fraud as fraud where usually that's just decided privately.
I can only demonstrate clear intentional fault in a small portion of all papers and don't know how prevalent this is, that's fair. No one knows how prevalent this is. Attempts to discover research fraud occur almost entirely at the hobbyist level, and the people trying to catch that overt fraud are dependent on tells like photoshop goofups or division errors, with only rare opportunities to see the raw data. Ariely's only coming to light after failed replications, followed by the man sending over Excel spreadsheets with the fakest data imaginable. There's basically zero institutional interest in discussing even the highest-profile and most explicit fraudsters. It's not that we're only seeing the crashes; we're only seeing the crashes that happen in the middle of the city, after which the pilot steps out of the aircraft and recites a five-stanza poem about how they mismanaged the flight. We don't know if the fraud is extremely rare or it's as common as the bad-but-not-fraudulent science.
I agree with and recognize that a lot of people have been trained to do bad-but-not-fraudulent science. I'll caveat that this division isn't always so cut-and-dry -- Wansink is my go-to for salami-slicing, but there's some evidence at least a couple of his studies depended on fabricated data rather than 'just' p-hacking -- but it is relevant to keep in mind.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... your defense, when someone points out that the first and only number you provided in this context is wildly inappropriate as a value, is to point to a higher count, which is over three weeks old, and which is no more clearly a complete total.
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one, and (allegedly) tried to minimize deaths by calling ahead multiple times -- there's a mix of conspiracy theories about who didn't forward what messages. Which is still bad, but if you want really atrocious early Zionist efforts, the Irgun bombings targeting markets as explicitly retribution and random on Arabs are very worth being aware of and absolutely beyond the pale (see here for a fuller list, though it does mix both terror attacks and pseudomilitary ones).
Most of these ranged from merely non-productive to hilariously counterproductive, and Irgun's claim to pioneer pre-attack warnings was both wildly self-serving and sometimes just a lie. I don't think you can honestly claim that they caused Arab unwillingness to recognize Jewish peoples -- the 1920 immediate reaction to the Balfour declaration and Faisal-Weizmann say a lot, despite predating almost all of the violent riots and having little to no detail about what or wear -- but even contemporaneously Irgun (and Lehi) were well-recognized as having cemented and legitimized that response, for very little gain.
More recently, you have the Duma arson and Abu Khdeir torture-murder, or (while not successful) a number of attempted or encouraged attacks on Peace Now activists (aka other Israelis, sometimes Jewish ones). Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems, but non-fatal incidents pretty regularly result in No Suspects Being Found.
gattsuru
1yr ago
(The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s)
This is a list of names cleared for publication, not all killed.
I've seen the document bounced around, in some cases by people that consider it alone sign of IDF illegitimacy and possible (charitable) motivation for a lot of the heavier resistance by Biden et EU. I'll caveat that the Israel Intelligence Ministry looks like one of many Likud sinecures, rather than a group with power or even particular competence.
That doesn't prevent it from being a trial balloon, but this document is definitely not a 'plan' in the wargames-invading-Canada sense. I've seen more serious analysis done on cocktail napkins.
The paper's "Option C" might be persuasive if you squint, but only under the assumption you can do five impossible things before breakfast. You just have to pressure Egypt (1) and Europe (2) to intake millions of refuges, without massive loss of life (3), get the new refuges to move (4) somehow filtering out at least a large portion of those with terrorist interests (5). The point where it's trying to send an advertising campaign(!) to tell Gazan residents that they're going to permanently lose their land (!!) because "Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership"(!!!) is the most word game of word games possible.
But there are deeper issues, even presuming it could be done. Hamas-in-Sinai will not stop hating Jews. They will not, as Lebanon has shown, stop lobbing rockets into Israel. The goal is that it'll be harder for them to do worse, but the tradeoff is that after that point kinetic action becomes a possible act of war. The closest relevant city is Arish in northern Sinai: note that <200k population. Northern Sinai isn't as mountainously untraversable as the middle and south, but it's still a desert. Maintaining a million-plus population tent city might be possible (if at a massive financial and humanitarian cost), and people have successfully built cities-in-deserts before, but there's no real honest way to expect it to happen here.
That doesn't put it off the table -- I don't have any good ideas myself! But I don't think these three options are the only available choices, nor that this paper evaluates them honestly.
gattsuru
1yr ago
other factors(Islamophobia, superstitious fear of opposing Israel, dislike of the people siding with Palestinians, lack of concern over settler colonialism and a general principle granting states the right of self defense, genuine pro-democracy sentiment, etc).
Boy, this summary sure makes me think that you've given a particularly charitable analysis of motivations. Let's go get a big drink of water and:
Red tribers in general are likely to see actual-religious evangelicals as moral exemplars even if they don't intend on waking up that early on Sundays, but IME the way that filters down, even to the ones that go to church, is usually more "God will punish us for not intervening if Israel falls" and less actual love of Israel.
most of them don't know what a nakba
Would you actually find it useful to see a steelman, or is that not really the point, here?
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't have (and don't have the expertise to make) a biology textbook example written up, but I do have a pretty serious nuclear science one written up for you, where a man with no serious bias and far greater technical knowledge than I can legally get still has bizarre faults that I can verify. (If Atomic Accidents doesn't count as textbook, Radium should, and probably is the source of one of Mahaffey's miscites.)
In one sense, you're not wrong -- if you scrawled down every single fact mentioned in the book onto sticky notes, and put the ones that were strictly true on one side of the scale and the ones that were strictly false on the other, the scales would lean toward truth. But if you were looking at ones that were core claims for the book's theme, and then separated your sticky notes into those you can confirm and those you can't... truth might still win out, but it's not be lopsided victory.
And this gets worse the less concrete the topic. The problems for psychology are legendary (and often-hilarious), and even the strictest focus on textbooks have pretty sizable faults. Nutrition science is a joke, both in academia and on wikipedia. We've hit the point where the literal definitions of words get redefined for have their definition updates streamlines for political relevance.
It also gets bad where a lot of the 'experts' aren't. That's most obvious for the political stuff, where the same people who bash randos for 'doing their own research' will take a long stiff drink of water before opining on topics where their expertise is limited to having gone to journalism school and slammed too much alcohol down there. Yet there are fields where the experts and textbook writers are plain liars and no one cares because it's not going to end up on the news even if it does end up on television, or leverage training in entirely one field as expertise for an entirely different one.
But even for material science, as concrete as can be, there's a lot of stuff that's just a mess; not that anyone's lying, but that they genuinely don't know. I've got an essay I've been working on, but the punchline revolves around this stuff. It's been around a decade, has no wikipedia page, won't be in any textbooks, and is subject to literally millions of dollars in grants for analysis of a material that can be mixed in a garage and I don't know if it 'reals' or not, or what extent that the claims benefits are of the claimed magnitude. There's a lot of red flags in all nano-whatsis stuff but especially the stuff around it, but it's weird for the DoE and Argonne and a dozen other labs to be looking at it seriously. But they've also all been looking at it seriously and not publishing a ton, for a material that you'd expect to see in cars and boats and household electronics.
The problem isn't an lackluster number of people I could point to who could be more serious investigators of this than myself. It's that they don't have an answer, or to the extent they do they have a half-dozen different ones.
gattsuru
1yr ago
This is interesting, and I don't disagree for some of the broadest tactical (ground war in urban combat sucks) or political (Hamas had as goals to undermine Israeli normalization and for the economics of terrorism) components, but :
- I'll accept the joke about borders and despotism like a libertarian should, but as a matter of law and policy there's actually a lot of restrictions on exit or export from most modern countries. It's technically illegal to leave the United States as a citizen without a passport, there's a biometrics scan that's required for air travel and keeps getting floated for sea and land, and if you don't do all the paperwork for a serious export you'll risk getting pulled over by anything from a cop car to a literal Blackhawk depending on situation.
- "Starve the Garrison" works only as a pre-modern tactic: in the modern era, any anti-Israeli forces that embeds with civilians will receive humanitarian aid before any serious literal starvation, and most of these groups have turned smuggling arms and material with aid shipments into an art form. That doesn't mean the IDF is too smart to try it (motions at Netanyahu), but it means you really need to consider other possible plans. Given other constraints (the available manpower you mention, that longer-lasting land grabs will jeopardize the Abraham Accord normalization that was the longer-term political target for the October 7th attacks, so on), I think it's more likely that the efforts in your 'gap' are going to be followed by a bombing and ground rapid strike campaign.
- Looking at the West Bank from a country-level map gives a pretty misleading understanding of what's going on there. The real map looks more like this -- the clusterfuckery with Area C is one of the more sympathetic issues for Palestinians, but it also means there's a lot of IDF military infrastructure in the West Bank. Controlling the border with Jordan doesn't become perfect in that situation, but it does remain something that can be plausibly attempted.
- I think you're underestimating how hard tunnel work is, and how readily it can be disrupted, and overestimating capacity. The tunnel under the falls at Niagra was excavated with dynamite, to go less than a half-mile.
- A lot of the countries around Israel have the same problem: "better inside pissing out than outside pissing in". This is most overt for Saudis and the Houthis what with the religious stuff, but Egypt, Jordan, and Libya are all extremely aware that the Palestinian movement does not consider them just rulers or serious combatants. If Israel disappeared tomorrow, very few of those armed combatants would pick up a plow. To the extent Iran might reduce support, but Iran doesn't really like a lot of these other countries either, even if Iran hates them less than Israel.
It's not quite as bad in the midwest, though there's a lot of cruft, crappy manufacturers and (not always bad, but high-risk) salvage titles for more reputable builders.
But yeah, prices have absolutely skyrocketed. Most of these would have been advertised at about half of their current prices, and most dealers would be far more willing to negotiate, even as recently at 2015; if you go back to pre-cash4clunkers the difference is even more staggering.
Coastals might be able to hit that at 9k (though prices are before fees!), but if you don't want a used police car (don't do it) or lease car, you're probably more screwed.
At least some settler and IDF bad action is moderately well-supported by the evidence (and shouldn't be very surprising; Price Taggers tend to be assholes). I think Susiya and Masafer Yatta (note: both these pieces are pre-Oct 7th) are more about the broader Area C clusterfuck, but there's a lot of Well-Respected Reporters giving pretty strong claims of Area C places doing variants of a commanded evacuation followed by invasive search, and I could absolutely believe the IDF and/or COGAT is doing it to fuck with them.
Some of this fuckery has escalated to death (contrast, with the caveat that I expect neither of these is giving a good factual analysis, though the jpost one seems like it's damning enough with faint praise that you don't need to by the AJZ version).
It's just an escalation of existing problems, rather than a change in type.
gattsuru
1yr ago
To steelman, the Jerusalem Post columnist is less responding to "pro-Palestine marches", but what he sees as specifically pro-Hamas and often pro-October 7th protests. It's a little less easy to provide examples in the United Kingdom, given the officially-steep punishments for support of Hamas or violence, but to everyone's non-surprise enforcement is a more complex matter and explicit support of Hamas, intifada, or generally "from river to sea" style not-very-deniable stuff were supposedly pretty common. And the head of police decided that the police shouldn't be making charges for hate crimes acts where it's political or anything.
To break that steelman, even that has been a sin to other alliances and allegiances. Reacting to "KillAllMen" or "EndWhiteness" or Solanas fangirling or the like hasn't been acceptable in mainstream discourse for literally a decade, if not longer. For whatever these laws and rules and norms that the Post author wants to bring down might have claimed equal protection and equal restriction to all, in practice they exist to protect 'the powerless', where this is defined in some coincidentally very political directions.
So in many ways, it's 'just' that Freeman is surprised to find that groups he likes are on the other side of that scale for once. And there's certainly people for whom that's a cutting criticism, not just of their current arguments but their entire philosophy -- Chemerinsky is the punching-bag du jour, as he's provided long and significant philosophical support and institutional inaction -- but it's not clear Freeman, specifically, is a particularly central example of that set. He's no universalist hero who complained when other people's ox were getting gored, don't get me wrong, but neither was he waiting until this moment to notice that his group was often pushed to the outside.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's been some combat, mass arrests, and rocket strikes/counterstrikes, but Arabic Wikipedia -- which I will caution I trust not in the slightest (if you think American wikipedia is shameless propaganda...), and only provide as higher-end estimate -- lists an estimated 100 West Bank Palestinian fatalities since October 7th. Al-Jazeera (ditto!) says 110ish and highlights a lot of Palestine Islamic Jihad and a Hamas fighters in a randomly-selected instance.
Fatah's claimed official support for a general uprising and specifically to provide Gaza Palestinians medical aid, but the text is weirdly less bloodthirsty (repeat above disclaimer, but going the other valiance) than a lot of college campuses, damning with faint praise as that might be; whether this reflects translators rephrasing matters for public consumption, the organization not wanting to tall poppy themselves, or a result Fatah's long-lasting tension with Hamas (Hamas has gone out of its way to kill Fatah officials, Abbas keeps fucking with Presidential election dates), or some other thing, I dunno. On the other direction, Abbas has a pretty explicit disavowal of attacks focusing on civilians on Twitter... in English... for a couple days... which limits how much that could be read as intended for internal read.
gattsuru
1yr ago
For comments, after you've submitted a comment, click the "..." button to the right of "Delete", and then click "Mark 18+".
For posts, there's a selectable box under the main text box, between "Notify Followers" and "Draft". I believe Posts can similarly be marked 18+ after-publication from the "..." menu.
Shalit was an extreme case, but unprecedented in degree rather than kind: the history of past prisoner exchanges and hostage negotiations was filled with lopsided counts, and there are a few like the 1983 Fatah exchange (794:1) that got pretty close. Ostensibly, these exchanges were meant to show how much the IDF valued its own people over hurting Arabic peoples, though in practice the disparity in number of captured prisoners to exchange almost certainly played a role.
He'd also become a minor cause celebre among Israelis, and not along the typical breakdown you'd expect. Anti-Hamas Israelis made up a significant part of the group wanting him freed at nearly any cost, up to and including several protests intended to disrupt shipments in and out of Palestinian areas. I don't know if that's just a ramification of Israel's draft, or some broader philosophical or cultural difference.
More controversially, I think the post-2008-era Likud philosophy for Palestine was one of disengagement, and large prisoner exchanges might have been a part of that. Not that they believed that these groups were harmless, but that they'd been mitigated to such extent that a lot of the past threats were no longer available; if these released prisoners were any more radicalized, they'd be limited to bomb threats at the checkpoints, firing rockets that didn't work well, and the occasional kidnapping (which was now, if more in theory than in practice, motivated to keep their ransoms live). At the same time, Palestinian prisoners were politically expensive (especially under international scrutiny) to hold, and require complicated hoops to hold within bounds of international law, and the Israeli government could not release without a good excuse otherwise, both to save face and because many had blood on their hands. If that was truly a motivation for the prisoner exchange, that was a wrong belief, but it wasn't as unreasonable in 2018 as today.
Most meaningful studies I can find give a median closer to 10-25, which is significantly higher than heterosexual couples but not by an order of magnitude or more. You can find some higher estimates, but the highest numbers (100+) are generally selecting from prostitutes, brothel workers, and bathhouse addicts in San Francisco (see Bell and Weinberg, often referenced by anti-gay groups, which was almost 1/4th prostitutes), and those in the 50+ range usually reflect heavily urbanized areas and less severe but-still-significant selection pressures.
((There are some issues with the lower-end of the scales; these end up distorted by younger people who haven't had sex with any men yet and may not ever, which gets into some complicated philosophical questions. Some studies, especially earlier studies lump in bisexuals with gay men, and more recently there's the complex question of non-practicing or at least not-practicing-with-partners gay men. And obviously the lifetime sexual partner count of a specific person at a specific time can be different than the total number they'll have over their lifetime, though overlooking that difference is present in AFAIK all data sources.))
Some people suspect that this number has skyrocketed very recently, in the current day usually pointing to grindr. You can get 70ish by selecting solely from people using grindr, but I'm... skeptical that this is closer to Average Gay than to the San Francisco Bathhouse Fanatic.
The high ends are pretty extreme and bad in a lot of ways and it's definitely a chart with a long tail, but even most people who style themselves as mansluts don't get or even aim anywhere near there. Beyond the sheer logistical problems (insert Clerks joke here), it's literally a full-time job, and once you've found a good top there's a lot of good arguments against going back to the the sea.
The very high ends do exist and there are people who make it a major life's goal to get their body count as high as possible. For pragmatic reasons that's a lot more oral (and I suspect that they aren't the most precise about avoiding repeat customers or 'donations'), but as weird as the 2k+ numbers when examined closely are, they're not obviously lizardman numbers, and not just because most furry scalies are tops that don't really kink onto this stuff.
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