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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The NYT proposes an interesting metric to gauge Israeli misconduct in Gaza: the amount of one-shotted Palestinian children.
65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza
Quotes from the doctors:
I think this is a brilliant bit of journalism. First, they specify preteen children who are killed, a hugely important qualifier for a conflict which may see 16-year-old boys plant IEDS. Second, they queried a range of doctors, some of whom have no association with Palestinians or even Arabs (or even Muslims for that matter). Third, the data uniquely sheds light on possible Israeli misconduct. Blankly informing us about the number of dead Palestinian children tells us very little: are these combatant-aged? Did they die because of a nearby explosion targeting a combatant? The metric they chose is as beautiful as Abraham Wald’s famous WWII survivorship bias statistical work.
Looking specifically at the number of one-shotted children relative to the number of total shot children is an amazing way to determine intent on behalf of the Israeli soldiers. We should expect that, if these children are shot because they have caught stray bullets aimed elsewhere, that most of the children would be shot in places other than their head and chest. We should similarly expect a higher number of cases of multiple bullet wounds, as in the case of their being shot due to crossfire fighting. In gang-related shootings in America, we don’t see a high number of one-shotted adolescents, but wounds on arms and legs, abdomens, and multiple punctures. (Think 50 cent). Note that any Palestinian child shot or grazed by a bullet is going to be sent to the hospital, so there is no survivorship bias in the presentation of children to the hospital. These doctors have been presented with all bullet-wounded preteen Palestinians, and they are shocked at the high rate of one-shot critical hits — including the author who “volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti and grew up in Flint, Michigan.”
So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza? IMO, the most likely answer is that they want to. Israeli culture is not Western culture, neither is Israeli military culture identical to Israeli culture at large. There is an undercurrent of supremacism and extremism in Israeli military culture. When Israeli soldiers were found to be sexually torturing Hamas prisoners, extremists gathered to protest the soldiers’ arrests. These extremists included an Israeli politician, and the current national security minister publicly condemned the arrest of the soldiers. A Rabbi who specifically teaches orthodox military recruits alongside Talmud studied has specifically advocated for the killing of women and children in Gaza.
There is also a religious component to the Jewish extremism of the Israeli military, which I think is difficult for a naive Westerner to wrap their head around. When a Christian or post-Christian Westerner thinks about Judaism in Israel, they assume they must be worshipping something that is approximately the moral equivalent of Christ. “Sure, they don’t have our Jesus dude, but they recognize the same attributes and moral conduct in other ways”. But this is really not the case. With the same attention that Christians allot to Christ, Judaism allots to the practice of ritual rule-following. When Christians look at their God being tortured by sinners like themselves, Jews look solipstically at their own torturous history by outside threats. The attentional focus of the religion is different, and the moral focus is different. These are qualitative differences. When you combine this phenomenon with the independence of Rabbinical academies, you are going to see some extremist branches rise up in some Jewish academies, especially among the conservative and non-ultra orthodox. These extremist branches are most likely to pour out students onto the Israeli military. In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel. Don’t forget that it’s Israel under attack, not “secular country I happen to be citizen of”. They pray to Israel daily, it is their Christ, so for a Zionist extremism it is as if their deepest value is being terrorized.
I'll be honest about my biases here.
I don't believe the doctors. I think they value the cause higher than their word. And it's been my understanding that some of the viral X-ray images were obviously faked.
Based on your post history, you are obviously a strident opponent of Israel, or maybe Jews in general.
I guess I just wonder what high quality evidence would even look like. What would make me trust you? What would make me trust the doctors? I honestly don't know how to answer that question. But I think the shortest distance to peace is through Israeli victory so that's where I am. War is hell.
And I do believe the damage inflicted on Lebanon and Gaza is nothing compared to what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. When your ideology explicitly calls for genocide (Hamas/Hezbollah), then you've vacated the moral high ground.
I do feel for the people in Lebanon who are caught up in this. It's awful. But the truth still means something.
High quality evidence would look like what the NYT did. They polled an assortment of doctors working in Gaza and asked them how often they saw children killed in such a way that would indicate intent. 80% said yes. Some said that it was a daily occurrence. This is high quality evidence. Perhaps 80% of the doctors are liars and the NYT team is lying. Or perhaps extremists who promote and condone war crimes are doing war crimes. Which is more likely?
Oh. You find this a credible source of information? People who volunteer to be governed by terrorists?
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?
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, they are probably either lying or have no idea what the hell they're talking about. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Probably not
More options
Context Copy link
IMO if even part of the IDF evidence of Hamas operating semi-openly out of hospitals is accurate, it seems likely to me that doctors willing to continue working in that environment might be heavily selected to have an axe to grind against the IDF. For example, I know what I'd expect if I started polling Catholic doctors at Catholic hospitals about the ethics of abortion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link