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.
This whole thing, the NYT and your tongue bath of it, bespeaks nothing so much as two people who have never seen terminal ballistics talking ridiculous.
Now why would that be? What percentage of surface area of the body is the head and torso, and how does the movement of the limbs affect their statistical chance of catching stray rounds? What's the effect of people poking their heads out to see what's happening? Is this calculation well established in the military literature? Because I've never heard of it.
And how exactly does one calculate that someone had been shot only once in the head? A rifle round through the skull will tend to pop the whole thing open like a smashed pumpkin. Could have been shot once, could have been shot fifty times. Could have not been a bullet at all, but a rock or chunk of shrapnel from an explosion. Good luck telling the difference.
This is the sort of thing that NYT journalists find impressive, the fact that you do as well speaks more to you than to anything going on in any war anywhere.
The cases in which the child’s head is fully destroyed are not even presented to medical examiners, according to the lead author’s tweet linked in my sub-commented update. This means that the doctors are presented with all gunshot wounds precluding those gunshot wounds which have so destroyed the head that medical intervention is obviously impossible.
Per the same update, the NYT presented the photographs and C-Scan images to a number of medical professionals. “multiple, independent experts in gunshot wounds, radiology and pediatric trauma, who attested to the images’ credibility”. I trust that more than you, or “random Twitter user with Ukrainian flag in username claiming to be ballistics expert”.
We know from shootings in America that stray bullets or inaccurate shots don’t magnetize especially to the head and chest. The lead author previously worked in Flint and Haiti, and he found the proportion of these wounds to be unusual. And, noting the above, the actual proportion of headshots is higher, as the doctors didn’t see the head implosion cases.
Should the IDF be shooting children who peak out their head in a highly dense urban environment?
Let’s assume it is not well-established in the military literature because it has not been researched. Does this mean we turn off all reasoning and thinking until the military studies it? No. We make the best extrapolation from the best available evidence. If the IDF is shooting a terrorist and a bullet inadvertently pierces a child, the likelihood that it lands as a headshot is low, both due to the surface area of the head and the fact that two humans can’t stand in the same spot at the same time.
The Shakespearean language really helps your argument.
With all that said, we can indeed consult some available literature on the site of injury %s in military injuries and stray bullet injuries. 6% and 16.1% of stray bullets wound the head and chest respectively in the context of insurgent military activity (Libyan civil war).
Insert something about availability bias here.
There's a story (possibly approcriphal) about how the british army back in the late 1800s thought that helmets might be somehow dangerous because units where the new steel pot helmets were issued tended to report significantly more head injuries than those that were still wearing berets or the soft cork "pith" helmets.
Subsequent analysis concluded that while reported head injuries had gone up significantly, overall casualties had either remained constant or been reduced, and the reason for the increase in reports was that soldiers who might have otherwise been killed/incapacitated were instead surviving to complain about thier injuries.
Theres a similar story floating around about bombers in WW2 where the Army Air Corps, wanting to increase aircraft survivability, started collecting data on where aircraft had been hit by machine gun fire with the intent of adding additional armor to the most commonly hit areas only for some bright spark to propose the opposite. A hot spot on the heat map indicated that a plane could be hit there and still make it home 9 times out of 10, it was actually the cold spots that needed the extra protection.
People shot in the gut or an extremity these days generally don't die so long as they recieve prompt medical care (bleeding and infection being the chief risk in such cases) so of course the majority of fatal shootings are going to be concentrated in the head or chest area.
Edit: There's also the issue of training and equipment, i would expect an IDF infantry man/woman to be substantially better equipped (Tavor w/ high-end red-dot vs rickety AK) and to be a better shot overall than your average Jihadi even in the absence such material advantages.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link