site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30206 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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.

3
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

EDIT: accidental post due to race condition.

Teehee I already posted it bud. But I'm glad i got your attention!! and I like what you added

Must have threaded the needle between my loading the page and pressing 'Comment'!

I have removed the re-post and moved my comment to a reply to yours.

Shower thought: conditional on a Harris win in 2024, what are the odds that Trump runs again in 2028? I want a return to the dynamics of pre-Trump elections, where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt, so the fewer times he gets at bat the better.

He'll have the existing huge demand for populist wrecker policies and style that most politicians can't supply, so the crowd will want him back. The crowd wants him back, so it seems like his narcissism would pull him back in, but his age might preclude it, and a loss might drive him away from Presidential elections via sour grapes.

I don't know much of his psychology, and of course there's four years of unknown unknown developments until then. What other factors can you all identify? How do we beat them all against each other to get a spread of probabilities?

Are you suggesting Trump is unique in his shamelessness?

Placeholder reply: I have thoughts on this, but I don't want to divert the evolution of the discussion yet.

Maybe I'm not evolving the discussion much but I think he is unique or at least extraordinarily unusual in his shamelessness.

I think that as an "outsider" candidate (yes he was president, but he's still very much outside normal political machinery), Trump benefited a lot from recent anti-incumbent trends. Covid, inflation, war, and general unhappiness has led to a lot of countries voting against their incumbents, which goes against normal trends where incumbents normally have an advantage. I doubt that will still be true in 2028, and even if it does the Republicans can probably find someone else by then who can harness it better than the guy who's been doing the same political schtick for 10+ years.

According to the SSA Actuarial Life Table, a seventy-eight-year-old American male has a twenty-five percent chance of dying in the next four years. However, the fact that Donald Trump has no chronic health conditions means his actual chance of dying may be lower than that.

Trump is an obese, elderly man - but that is confounded by the best healthcare money can buy. He's a teetotaler: he doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, he doesn't use any hard drugs, as far as it is publicly known. He won't live to be 100 like Carter but he's got good odds of living another four years. He seems like the kind of man to be vigorous and active all his life, but one bad stroke or heart attack and he withers and dies in six months. Being politically active and campaigning is stemming the onslaught of dementia: retirement will kill him.

No Chronic health conditions and access to the best care available.

Jimmy Carter made it to 100 (for some values of 'made it') and I'd not be surprised if Trump is kicking at 90.

I upped by assessment of his health when I saw that recent video of him playing a round of golf.

Wow. He seems more aged/old than he comes across elsewhere but also somehow sharper and in better physical condition than I expected. A 50 minute Trump Biden golf trip video (alluding to their golf banter) would have actually been very cool and hunanzing for everyone I think.

Biden is not capable of playing golf unfortunately.

Whatever you think about their respective congnitive decline, Biden is physically frail in his old age in a way Trump is not.

If Trump doesn't win he will go to jail (80% certainty). I think this might constrain his ability to run.

But I think he might run anyway. Contra the people who say he is senile (a sure sign of TDS by the way) he is still very energetic and funny as hell. Last night's speech at the Al Smith dinner was a banger. The guy had a crowd of New York democrats roaring in laughter.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XI0MUoW28VE

I could write some of the jokes out but they wouldn't do it justice. It requires a feel for the crowd and comedic timing that only a really talented performer can deliver.

He was fine. If you disengage from your partisan inclinations and watch Obama, Bill Clinton, even Bush I and II speeches they’re all often very funny and have good jokes. That’s what happens when you hire professionals to write these things for you. Trump’s delivery is fine. He does the job. He’s not embarrassing or bad. He’s also not great or anything.

I’ll be honest, I found his speech at that dinner very grating. Yes, his speechwriters supplied him with a couple of mildly funny lines. The lead-up to those lines was 15-20 minutes of rambling, political self-promotion (I’m aware that politicians routinely attend these functions as part of campaigning, but the talented ones are able to be far more subtle about it than Trump was) and mean-spirited, unfunny jabs at Kamala Harris, Bill DeBlasio, and Chuck Schumer. Now, look, I hate all three of those people. I’ve said far meaner things about all three of them than what Trump said. However, that’s totally against the spirit of an event like this.

I’m not sure that Trump really grasps the purpose of a “roast”. It’s supposed to be compliments disguised as insults. Celebration disguised as denunciation. Love disguised as hate. And the disguise is supposed to be thin enough that anyone with a modicum of subtlety and tact can easily discern what’s really going on. Whereas Trump genuinely loathes the people he’s talking about (and to) so there is no warmth.

And perhaps that’s inevitable, when you invite powerful and controversial individuals (like Chuck Schumer, or Bill DeBlasio, or Donald Trump) to such an event. Maybe the “roast” style is just fundamentally unsuited to accommodate differences of opinion and interests this divergent. Certainly I’m not gonna weep for Chuck Schumer’s hurt feelings, or Kamala Harris’ tarnished dignity. As someone with a lot of genuine love for roasts as a comedic/social art form (and someone who has participated in a few of them myself) the whole thing came of as very unseemly and inappropriate to me.

Oh man I read this the exact opposite of you.

I thought Trump was extremely, savant level charming. It honestly made me sad that most of our politicians are so terrible.

Him pointing out that he wrote Schumer his first check, or getting in the jabs and stuff against Eric Adams (even if they were all pre written, which I doubt since it sounded very much like trumps “voice”) made it feel like there is hope that we can all actually get along.

Maybe this is just crack to me since I’m an upper-class-adjacent (friends and I are now scheming to buy a table at this event) Catholic, straight, cisgendered white male with a wife and children.

I loved this event last night. I am legitimately in afterglow this morning from it text back and forth with the aforementioned friends.

Yeah, he's a bit of dick.

One interesting thing about this situation is that, supposedly, Trump decided to run for President when he himself was the victim of a mean-spirited roast by Obama at the Press Correspondent's Dinner in 2011. This whole thing could have been avoided if Obama had just resisted the urge. But it was too tempting.

Like Trump, Obama has great comedic timing. I laughed back then at Trump's expense much like I laughed at Schumer's this time. Being actually funny (a rare trait in politicians) excuses a lot in my book.

I totally forget my chain of evidence now, but I remember once seeing compelling proof that this isn't really true and is just a fun myth. Maybe it's because Trump ran for president several times before, maybe it was some leak from some insider who said it didn't make a difference. I guess it basically doesn't matter because the story that Trump ran to get back at Obama is so good that everyone in the future will believe it.

a rare trait in politicians

It's pretty common in Presidents for the obvious reason that you have to be top 1% in several aspects of politics to get the office. The only modern President I can think of (say, post 1980) who doesn't have a reputation for being personally funny and charming was HW (and, maybe, Biden, although he supposedly had his charms before decline set in).

The Zapruer Film of the 21st century. Obama had just given the order to kill Bin Laden. Seal Team Six was making final preparations as he spoke. The newly-released long-form birth certificate listed the time as 7:24PM, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

Contra the people who say he is senile (a sure sign of TDS by the way)

I don't think he's senile. I think he's showing signs of decline. Clearly not as bad as Biden, but come on. It's not TDS to recognize the man is old and shows it.

TSD has always cut both ways. People literally think Trump was sent by god to stop pedophiles and prevent the obvious communist takeover of America or something. Of course he has all the normal age related cognitive decline for a 78 year old. Honestly, I think he's beating the median.

I thought the same as you but today I heard a recording of him talking in 2014. I think his vocal pattern is just like that, regardless of cognitive decline.

All I can see is what I see. When I watch events like the Al Smith dinner I see a person far more present and capable than Harris (who appears absolutely haggard to me in her rare unscripted appearances).

Let’s not forget that age 60 is not exactly a spring chicken either.

I do agree that the odds of Trump falling off a cliff in the next 4 years are non-zero. You can't cheat father time. But, no, it hasn't happened yet.

I've seen Trump look sharp and alert, and I've seen him ramble and spew word salad. Maybe, like Biden, he has good days and bad days.

Harris, after watching her Fox interview, I think really is just dumb as a post. And yes, it's ridiculous that she's the "young" candidate.

But I remain of the opinion that Trump at 82 will not be in any shape to run for president, let alone to perform.

It truly is amazing how relatively dumb the two dem candidates are. I’d peg both of them as having around 100-110 IQ points.

Trump already said that he doesn't see himself running again, and he seemed fairly emphatic. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/23/nx-s1-5123345/trump-wont-run-again-2028-election

Of course he could change his mind, but I haven't felt during this election that he has been as intensively engaged with the process, as he was the last two times. I think he is tired of running for President. And he almost died in Butler.

From what I recall of American history, no major candidate for President has ever gone through the election process more than three times, except for FDR. And FDR's smallest margin of victory was 7.5%, so he had it relatively "easy" compared to Trump. (FDR did also run for Vice President in 1920, and lost in a landslide.)

From what I recall of American history, no major candidate for President has ever gone through the election process more than three times, except for FDR

Henry Clay. He never quite grabbed the brass ring, but he was a major candidate for much of the first half of the 19th century.

Good one, I had forgotten about Clay!

1844 is the one that has to have hurt the most. So close, after so long, but not able to pull it out, once again.

He's 78. He'll be 82 in 2028. He's already showing signs of fatigue and cognitive decline. I wouldn't put it past him to still think he can make a run (I don't think he's capable of admitting he was beaten), but I can't see it being a realistic possibility.

I think they'd be pretty low. 82 is old, he'd be president til 86. After Biden that will be an impossible sell, Trump makes decisions emotionally but I think even he would see the futility in running in 2028. He also does listen to some of his closest advisors, family etc. and they'd certainly advise against it. I'd give it maybe 10% tops.

That said I'd give a return to pre-Trump election dynamics even lower odds than that. You'll have someone like Vivek or Vance running next. The neocons were jettisoned and joined the dems, Republicans are solidly the populist party for now and I don't see any changes in the political trends that caused the political realignment. If anything there will be long term effects of the recent mass migration that will fuel populism and racial spoils politics for decades to come.

Neocons jettisoned... Vance

Using a strict definition of neoconservative, Vance isn't. But he's exactly the kind of person who would have been a neocon during their era. It's why I actually kind of like him on a personal level, even though hypothetically I'd still vote in walz over him for president. Don't confuse paternalism for populism.

Vivek or Vance

That GOP needs somebody who can unite the politically incorrect technocrats, the religious interests, and the populists. Vance gets the first two, Vivek gets only the first. Abbott probably gets all three, Desantis or Cruz could probably position himself there as well. Kari Lake hits the last only; Hawley gets the religious interests and the populists, but he needs to reposition himself to get the technocrats.

Abbott

Abbott is a cripple and will never seriously be considered for a presidential ticket for that reason alone.

He’s also managed to position himself as a serious winner, and weak horse strong horse.

It's been known to happen.

Indeed but there was a massive effort to hide and obscure it that would never happen today.

That GOP needs somebody who can unite the politically incorrect technocrats, the religious interests, and the populists.

Towards the end of Francis Ford Copella's Megalopolis there there is an interesting moment where the lynching of a cross-dressing Milo Yiannopoulos/David Fuentes analog by a bunch of very "Trump-coded" construction workers who are sick of his grift is juxtaposed with an elderly banker shooting his trophy wife when he realizes that she had been unfaithful and was only using him for his money.

I feel like there is discussion to be had about to what degree technocracy of any stripe (politically correct or otherwise) has a place in a populist party/system. And make no mistake, the GOP is a populist party and has been for close to a decade now.

David Fuentes

Who?

Did you mean Nick?

Yes, i had a wire crossed.

I don't understand. You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes (I assume that's who you mean, I can't find any relevant David Fuentes) to be politically incorrect technocrats?

You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes to be politically incorrect technocrats?

Of a sort, yes.

Or more pointedly i don't think they nor the people people they apeal to are looking to vote Republican as much as they are looking to vote against mainstream Democrats.

I disagree with this characterization. Nick Fuentes has always run a vibes based group, his main victory was telling Ben Shapiro he wasn't conservative enough. He's also been calling himself a Christian Nationalist for years. Milo used to be a politically incorrect technocrat back when Allum Bokhari was ghostwriting for him but after getting cancelled by the mainstream conservatives and joining Fuentes (and then leaving Fuentes) he's publicly renounced his gayness and can be seen walking around with a breviary.

Despite their faith being obviously fake and ignorant I would still consider them part of the religious conservatives, although distinct from the main religious conservatives on account of being younger, antisemitic instead of philosemitic and almost completely irrelevant.

A feel like you're splitting hairs and the distinctions you are trying to draw are largely irrelevant.

Be that as it may, Elon is clearly a technocrat and clearly in the GOP coalition.

Words cannot overstate how much a significant chunk of the GOP base gets the ick over Ted Cruz. There's a reason he's running behind Trump and in a dogfight for re-election in Texas.

where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt

Hillary? Bill? Pelosi? Cheney? Obama's IRS investigated conservatives and smuggled guns and spied and I'm still hearing about how he was so pristine that he had to suffer attacks about a tan suit.

There is no going back to pre-Trump, any more than there's going back to pre-FDR. The milk is spilled, the eggs are broken, the die is cast. Trump is not the driver of this sentiment, he is just the only one willing to harness the latent desires of the electorate.

If you care about corruption, Nancy Pelosi's career of insider trading is right there. What you want has nothing to do with corruption, or you'd mention the net worth of politicians on a congressional salary. You'd mention book deals that are explicitly excluded from bribery and ethics policies. What you want is something else.

I think what you want is to return to the migration consensus, because that's what I think is the only true difference between politicians and parties these days. You know this is true because of what happened in France, where, when push comes to shove, there's the remigration party and there's everybody else. This explains the Never-Trumpers and the likes of the Cheneys and Mitt Romney. This explains the hysteria over Trump, and the uniparty. Maybe I'm wrong, but I this isn't about corruption, and Trump is not particularly corrupt when compared to other politicians.

Nancy Pelosi's stock market gains are not anything crazy. She just gambled on the tech market going up, and it did. The average congressperson's portfolio doesn't particularly outperform the market.

She gambled on the tech market going up, and also supported a lot of pro-tech-company legislation. I don't think pelosi is special, but that's definitely a conflict of interest. Politicians should be forced to put their assets in a trust like carter did, or better yet liquidate most of wha they own and dump all their money into an index fund.

Trump is not the driver of this sentiment, he is just the only one willing to harness the latent desires of the electorate.

But who else can? J.D. Vance? Seems kinda unlikely. Desantis? Tried once, failed... maybe he could succeed without Trump as opposition, but it seems doubtful. What the Democrats hope is not that the GOP goes back to pre-Trump, but that their base basically dries up and blows away, becoming an unaffiliated and impotently dissatisfied group who can be ignored electorally. The GOP keeps the neocon remnants that haven't gone over to the Democrats, plus a few paleocons and business republicans who aren't neocons, and as a result is so small that it never is able to mount a serious challenge again.

I mean it’s not necessarily going to be a Return To PreTrump. Somebody will take the crown simply because the sentiment precedes Trump and will be around without him. The MAGA crowd has now tasted real power, if you think they’re going to allow this moment to fade without any significant victories, you’re mistaken. And with that power available, someone (probably someone anointed by Trump himself) will take the cause and run with it.

I guess the question is how many MAGA presidents would have to lose in a row before they gave up?

But who else can?

Vance, DeSantis, Abbott, and Scott are the obvious candidates that spring to mind, and I wouldn't rule out Kushner or Don Jr. either. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans also have a reasonably deep bench of young-ish state level officials of which i expect at least a couple to ready for promotion to the national stage within the next 4 years.

Recall that no one outside of Florida had even heard of DeSantis prior to 2016. (Sure he'd been a state rep. since 2012 but how many people know who thier own state rep. is much less who anyone else's is?)

Scott

Which Scott?

Alexander, of course. By 2028, his time in California will have tipped him over the edge.

He would never go into politics, lol. I'd eat my hat!

You can have your own views on the Republican bench, and I'll say as a Democrat, in theory, the GOP has plenty of possible statewide elected officials.

But just in the swing states, the Democrat's will have Rueben Gallego, Roy Cooper, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Stein and that's not getting into somebody like Wes Moore in Maryland. Now, I'm sure you likely don't like anybody I Just listed but those people are all statewide elected officials who have won or in the case of Gallego, will have won solidly in swing states.

Out of your list, I think only Shapiro and Moore are actual national possibilities. The rest are some variation of Blue Scott Walkers or nobodies whose current media attention is pretty much an in-kind campaign contribution.

Shapiro makes sense but makes Michigan perhaps easily red.

Obama was a first term senator but he had unique magic. I’m not sure that Gallego is the same way. Cooper is a red state democrat who for that reason doesn’t have a progressive record to run on; this probably makes him a better national candidate, but seems likely to cause problems in a democrat primary. Shapiro and Whitmer are actual possibilities, although Whitmer is uniquely polarizing and Shapiro is likely to cause some issues with the Muslim vote.

I maintain that the top three Republican candidates by default going into 2028 are Abbott, Desantis, and Hawley. It’s possible Vance makes it onto the list, but it’d require a pretty good four years for him. I’d point to Cruz and Youngkin to round out my top five instead.

If Trump wins and there are a decent four years then it would seem that Vance is likely a shoe in for the nominee. He would be endorsed by a popular two term Republican president. I could see him making RDS the VP.

The problem for the Republicans is what does the post-Trump era look like.

I love J.D. Vance. I think he's the smartest politician we've seen for a long time and he is clued in to the real problems we face in a way that the dinosaurs in both parties are not. He is probably one of the few politicians who has read Scott.

But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.

Now that the Republicans have gone populist, they will need populism to win. It feels overly dramatic, but I am seriously worried that unless Trump wins we will have uniparty rule for a long time.

The GOP’s 2028 nominee won’t be any Republican that people are talking about today. It won’t be a white man. Given the inexorable demographic trends, it will be an Hispanic populist outsider. Think Nick Fuentes but with greater respectability, and who has ties to the military. America will want a military leader to deal with challenges posed by China or Iran. Someone Trumpian and with a bio that could fill out a webpage like this.

Hispanics don’t particularly want a Hispanic candidate, they want a strong white male leader who gets what he wants and has a sufficient number of Hispanics in his inner circle to prove he’s going to bear their interests in mind.

But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.

I feel like this is something the Pumpkin-Spice class tells itself to justify not even bothering to try. Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser degree DeSantis, all being clear counter-examples.

Maybe I'm over updating. I'm a huge DeSantis fan who legit thought that he would win the Republican nomination. He is massively popular in Florida. But he couldn't even get off the starting block.

So here's my updated theory. In the current climate, 95% of the media is enemy territory. You need some sort of guerilla strategy to get airtime. Simply having a great track record and great ideas isn't enough. Look what the media did to Vance. If he gets coverage at all in the media, it's heavily negative. Meanwhile, a midwit like Walz gets tons of positive coverage despite having a terrible record and being a phony to boot. So Republicans need to hack the media to win, which is what Trump did in 2016.

The idea that a conventional candidate like Romney or Bush Sr. could thrive in 2024 just seems anachronistic. The elites wholesale abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats starting around 2010. Without their support, you need something special.

I don't know. I hope I'm wrong.

As i touched upon downthread, I think DeSantis' problem was that he was running as the "Trump-Lite" candidate against Trump himself, and that there was no particular reason for anyone already inclined to vote for Trump (or an otherwise Trump-ish candidate) to pick him over the genuine article.

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

I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total. At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. “I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,” I told him. To my surprise, he responded: “Yeah, me, too. Every single day.”

Using questions based on my own observations and my conversations with fellow doctors and nurses, I worked with Times Opinion to poll 65 health care workers about what they had seen in Gaza. Fifty-seven, including myself, were willing to share their experiences on the record. The other eight participated anonymously, either because they have family in Gaza or the West Bank, or because they fear workplace retaliation.

44 health care workers saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza. 9 did not. 12 did not regularly treat children in an emergency context.

Quotes from the doctors:

“One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”

“I saw several children shot with high velocity bullet wounds, in both the head and chest.”

“Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”

“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”

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.

So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza? IMO, the most likely answer is that they want to

No, the most likely answer is that this time, as many, many times before that, NYT was taken for a wild ride. Nothing like that happened at all, and the pictures they provided is a perfect proof of it - whatever is on them, it's not a person shot in the head by a military weapon.

I think its rather "charitable" of you to assume that they are being taken for a ride rather than taking sides. This is the house of Walter Duranty we are talking about.

It's usually mutual agreement from both sides. NYT would not explicitly produce fakes by themselves, but if they want fakes, they know where to find them, and they know which fakes are to be approached critically and which to be taken at the face value, and the sides play a huge role here of course. This mutually beneficial cooperation gives NYT a plausible deniability - they never deceive by themselves, in worth case they are just a bit too "naive", and the other side of the deal gets to benefit from the seeming reputation that a lot of people, for reasons unclear to me, still attribute to NYT.

Good point.

With the same attention that Christians allot to Christ, Judaism allots to the practice of ritual rule-following.

I have always found certain aspects of Judaism to be rather appealing, including the rule-following. It tickles my autism.

"And when, baffled by the inadequacy of his human standards, your philosopher refers justice to the "categoric imperative," he betrays the triviality of your world . What is that "categoric imperative," that helpless compromise and confession? What man recognizes it, will bow to it? That phrase itself is its own denial, for he that refers mankind to a "categoric imperative" is himself neither categoric nor imperative . But even the deaf will hear and tremble when the Prophet thunders: "Thus saith the Lord." There is the categoric imperative!

(- Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles)

In some ways, Judaism is the Kant to Christianity's Hegel. God and his Law as absolute Other, the thing-in-itself imposed from the outside, an inscrutable and uncognizable limit to pure reason, vs. contradiction introduced into the heart of the logos, the thing-in-itself shattered: a God who can be mortal, a God who can die.

Found more information. Posting it as a reply instead of editing the already-long OP. The NYT issued a reply to critics today:

Times Opinion rigorously edited this guest essay before publication, verifying the accounts and imagery through supporting photographic and video evidence and file metadata. We also vetted the doctors and nurses’ credentials, including that they had traveled to and worked in Gaza as claimed. When questions arose about the veracity of images included in the essay, we did additional work to review our previous findings. We presented the scans to a new round of multiple, independent experts in gunshot wounds, radiology and pediatric trauma, who attested to the images’ credibility. In addition, we again examined the images’ digital metadata and compared the images to video footage of their corresponding CT scans as well as photographs of the wounds of the three young children.

While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos — of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck — were too horrific for publication. We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.

This is related to some of the issues brought up ITT as well. Eg, regarding the quality and legitimacy of the photos (@netstack , @jeroboam , @The_Nybbler, @NelsonRushton).

Regarding the point by @sarker that the doctors were brought to Israel by PAMA, the author of the piece writes on Twitter that

I learned of the existence of PAMA when the Society for Critical Care Medicine sent out a call for volunteers to work with the World Health Organization in Gaza, which went through PAMA. I've literally never spoken to anyone at PAMA about the public advocacy work I do, they're not involved in it in any way whatsoever

This also answers the criticism by @Quantumfreakonomics that anyone who would help Gazans medically must be a Hamas supporter. The Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Health Organization are top authorities who disagree with that.

Point taken. I’m willing to believe that the images are real per Media Rarely Lying.

My arguments about selection bias and lack of statistical evidence stand.

The Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Health Organization are top authorities who disagree with that.

They do? Good to know! Next time I go volunteering to Gaza, I'll make sure to trust those top authorities and not the Hamas militants next to me.

No, I still don't believe them. What was the question asked of the experts? "Is this plausibly a child wounded by a bullet", or "Is this plausibly a child shot at close range with an assault rifle"? I have already said that I thought the photo I linked was a child hit with a nearly-spent bullet; that does not fit the narrative of this opinion piece.

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.

The Israeli military is a universal institution with recruitment based on conscription. My understanding is that secular Jewish Israelis are actually over represented in the high status combat units and they lean a bit more liberal than the country as a whole. This is not the US where the combats are 100% on the right.

Speaking of the US, the combats have done things to ragheads that are a violation of the laws of war during the GWOT, and prosecuting them for it was, uh, at least opposed by some even if it was generally done. More than likely the Israeli command structure just doesn’t care enough to seriously clamp down on this stuff.

The large scale deliberate killing of civilians (including children) during wartime was a feature of practically every major conflict until quite recently. If it’s a question of (western) Christianity versus Judaism, why did countless Christian armies behave in the same way until the second half of the 20th century? Overall, civilian casualties in Gaza remain within reasonable bounds for an intense war against an entrenched guerrilla force that doesn’t wear uniforms in an extremely dense urban environment. If there are Israelis who wish they could genocide the Palestinians (and there surely are), they’re nowhere near starting to do so.

Most importantly, the Palestinians have an extra option that most of our tribal ancestors (whether Jewish or gentile, Muslim or Christian, European or Arab) did not have: they can surrender and live a comfortable second-world developing country lifestyle and have four kids and enjoy much of what life has to offer. Sure, they’ll be second class citizens in a state they don’t really control and have little say in the politics of, but so have countless people throughout history.

For most of the past thousand years, in most of the Muslim world, Jews had a much worse deal than the worst reasonable outcome of a Total Palestinian Surrender. The life Arabs in Israeli-controlled territory are essentially being offered is, after all, not substantially worse than the life Arabs in most non-petrostate Middle Eastern countries already live. No Jew should feel guilt about this when in truth the Palestinians have already been treated far more generously and with far greater concern for their wellbeing than it would be if (and was when) the situation was reversed.

Edit: Having read the other comments, especially the discussion of military rounds that fail to penetrate a kid's skull and are thus conveniently visible on x-ray, my money is on the NYT falling for fakes created by motivated people. The doctors would not even have to be die-hard Hamas supporters bent on the destruction of Israel. If I had had the misfortune of spending months working in a wartime hospital, I might also consider telling a 'little white lie' about the fraction of dead kids who were shot to the head, if I thought that this is the best way to stop the killing.

Shame on me for believing that the NYT would consult with experts to check the plausibility of their reporting and thereby ruin a great story.

End of edit.

Overall, civilian casualties in Gaza remain within reasonable bounds for an intense war against an entrenched guerrilla force that doesn’t wear uniforms in an extremely dense urban environment.

The claim by the NYT is not that deliberately targeted kids amount to a large fraction of war victims, the claim is that such targeting happens and is tolerated to some degree.

I have previously defended the IDF against people comparing the civilian death tolls of their war against Hamas to the death toll of Oct 7. My argument was that the Hamas attacks were worse not in their death tolls, but in their malicious intent. Everyone fighting a war accepts some civilian casualties. Israel went further than most belligerents regarding the amount of collateral deaths they would stomach, especially when targeting senior commanders, but I would still argue that blowing up 50 Palestinians in a refugee camp to get one bad guy is different from Hamas executing civilians one by one.

People, states and causes are in part not judged by their median action, but by their worst action. As the joke goes, "But just one little sheep!". A doctor who saves the life a thousand patients and murders and eats three others would not be judged by his average or median impact, but by his worst deeds. Likewise, anyone arguing that the Nazis were not as evil as generally depicted because only 0.9% of the German population was Jewish would totally fail to convince any audience. The reason that Abu Ghraib turned into a scandal was because it was the median case.

Headshot six-year-olds are both unmistakably non-combatants and also unmistakably the results of deliberate targeting. I would expect dead six-year-olds, and perhaps headshot 15-yo (unless Hamas happens to abide by the conventions against child soldiers, which seems unlikely). Perhaps a hand full of headshot 6-yo could be attributed to bad luck but any more than that would suggest deliberate targeting of kids.

While I did not much care for the IDF's tactics before, I was willing to cut them some slack as their goal to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth seemed worthy. If further evidence confirms that parts of the IDF were able to conspire to shoot small kids, then I would become indifferent between them and Hamas, as in 'they are both evil and I hope they both succeed in destroying the other, too bad about the decent people caught in their fight'.

At the moment, I am noticing that I am confused. Even if the IDF was full of people who thought that killing Palestinian kids was virtuous, neither the rank and file nor especially the command would be oblivious about the fact that the rest of the world does not share that value judgement. An IDF sniper killing a small child would bring the destruction if Israel closer in a second than a hundred Hamas fighters could do in their lifetime. Nor do I find it plausible that the command would remain unaware of unauthorized past-times of their sniper teams, we are talking about a digital age state known for its intelligence services here. On the other hand, if large parts of the IDF had a collective fetish for child murder, why would they not pick a more deniable way to accomplish that? They could just bomb a school (or wherever kids gather in wars) and claim that it was used as a base to shoot missiles into Israel, the NYT would be very unlikely to prove them wrong.

Another explanation would be that it is some kind of Hamas op. While Hamas path to victory is paved with the murders of Palestinian kids (because Israel can not be defeated while it is backed by the US, and the best way to turn the US from Israel are dead kids for which IDF can be blamed), it very much does not sound like their usual MO. "Climb on some rooftop and shoot some random kids in Gazan streets" does not seem like an order the median Hamas member would follow.

Slightly more plausible would be that they shot kids who had just of whatever 'natural causes' will kill you in a warzone post mortem, and then carried them to the hospital. Still does not seem very likely.

If IDF is targeting small kids, the obvious move on Hamas part would be to smuggle out their corpses and pass them to governments for forensic analysis. If ten different countries go 'yup, they died because of wounds inflicted with calibers used by IDF' that would likely be the beginning of the end of Israel as Harris and Trump race to the microphones to promise and end of all weapon shipments.

Headshots Georg, who lives in Gaza & sees over 10,000 children each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

How many of those doctors saw the same kids? How many heard each others’ stories, or were interviewed based specifically on their involvement?

There are also some credibility issues—the number of kids who made it to the ER with fatal wounds, the quality of the x-rays—but overall, I don’t think this is a statistical argument. It’s a vibes-based argument dressed up with a survey. That’s fertile ground for all the usual confirmation biases, group consensus, etc. I’m not buying it.

And look. I know that you’ve got this weird conviction that Jews are rule-obeying golems, but it’s not realistic. It doesn’t make useful predictions, and it’s less defensible than just accusing them of religious fanaticism. Making your criticism strangely specific doesn’t always make it stronger.

Also, I was under the impression the most fanatically religious Jews were exempt from conscription, or at least try very hard to avoid military service.

These are two different groups of fanatically religious Jews. The Haredim rely on divine providence and prefer to pray the problems away, while the Srugim don't expect G-d to do all the work. They are the ones that would start building the Third Temple as soon as they knew they had enough nukes to glass all resistance in the Muslim word. For now, they want everything from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River.

preteen children

Every adult I know consistently underestimates age by 2-3 years when asked to guess, even those that deal with children on a daily basis. With a little effort, that can easily become 4-5, and you don’t even need journalist math to get there if you’re starving because your parents fed you to gave all your food to the soldiers.

And you really don’t need to be that big to hold a gun. This also tends to shock people who intentionally ignore what someone of age X can or cannot do (typically because their culture encourages that) but I’m not at all shocked if a population that radicalized its citizens from birth has a non-zero number of unacceptably cute (by Western standards) enemy combatants, which even so much as “be a distraction, go set off some firecrackers” qualifies as, realistically.

So while the number of blatant-war-crime deaths (even if these kids are actually receiving fire directly) is almost certainly not 0, I question the default assumption of “they weren’t combatants”, just like and for the same reasons I question their practice of putting their HQ in a school.

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.

Why? Being hit by one stray bullet is pretty rotten luck. Two or more seems much less likely.

Note that any Palestinian child shot or grazed by a bullet is going to be sent to the hospital

With Gaza's limited resources, during a war? Maybe, but I don't think this is a safe assumption.

You also have to account for the possiblity that a) at least some of the doctors are lying, and b) the worst cases may have been sent to American doctors either for propaganda purposes or because of their better skills.

Note that one of the X-rays shows a bullet that seems to have entered at a path nearly perpendicular to the top of the skull, implying either that the child was shot while lying down, likely by a stray bullet while lying in bed, or perhaps even by a bullet fired up into the air and coming back down, a phenomenon associated with the Arabic tradition of celebratory gunfire. Another shows a bullet that seems to have entered through a downward path about 45 degrees below parallel, which is hard to explain with a sniper shooting at a distance, and again more consistent with a bullet shot into the air and coming back down.

I think a lot of this is down to history. Jewish history is full of “we thought we were safe, then the gentiles started forming mobs — again,” and recent Israeli history has been one filled with terror attacks, suicide bombings, shootings, etc. with a history like that, paranoia, and thus extreme reaction to threats is just part of the deal. From the point of view of Israel, if the country fails, it’s only a matter of time before they’re back in Nazi camps. And the only thing standing between Jews and Nazi camps is the Israeli security apparatus. So, unlike the USA where military forces are generally only used abroad and we haven’t had a mainland invasion since 1812, Israel has a history of exile and being victimized all the time, finally getting a state, having the surrounding countries try to kill them, nearly daily terror strikes. There’s no sense that letting up will do any good here. The US military can follow international law because it’s not at risk nor are its civilians. If we decided to fight a war with silly string instead of guns, the state still isn’t at risk. If Israel doesn’t go full bore, they risk being destroyed. So while the US military wouldn’t shoot preteens, it’s never been in the same position. They never had to think about whether the kid will grow up to try to kill them.

You are proposing an interesting metric, and I would like to see comparisons to other conflict zones before spinning explanations about how Israelis are uniquely predisposed to targeting children.

This opinion poll is a reasonable source of anecdotes based on a snowball sample:

Through personal contacts in the medical community and a good deal of searching online, I was able to get in touch with American health care workers who have served in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023. Many have familial or religious ties to the Middle East. Others, like me, do not, but felt compelled to volunteer in Gaza for a variety of reasons.

This is not a representative sample--even of "American health care workers who have served in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023"--nor does the author pretend it to be such. As for the rest of the methodology, I have found none in the article, except:

Using questions based on my own observations and my conversations with fellow doctors and nurses, I worked with Times Opinion to poll 65 health care workers about what they had seen in Gaza.

What were these questions? What was the structure of the interview? Times Opinion isn't exactly known for conducting unbiased research, qualitative or quantitative. In particular, this gives me pause:

Fifty-seven, including myself, were willing to share their experiences on the record. The other eight participated anonymously, either because they have family in Gaza or the West Bank, or because they fear workplace retaliation.

Confidentiality is a keystone feature in social science research; without it, a participant must consider how their response will reflect on them from the broader audience. Here, however, the vast majority agreed to have their full name, age, and city of residence displayed next to their responses in the New York Times, in an Opinion piece decrying the Israeli violence in Gaza. So not only are these responders not representative, they are advocates.

Now, it's still possible that a healthcare professional who is passionate for the cause still report the truth. I am not discounting out of hand their specific anecdotes, though I do question their veracity or interpretation more than I would a more neutral observer. Because these anecdotes are coming from advocates for a cause, I give more weight to objections like the kind raised by @The_Nybbler when analyzing the X-ray photographs.

So to summarize my point: This particular Opinion piece's evidence does not extend beyond the anecdotes the specific medical professionals who chose to go to Gaza during wartime and have demonstrated willingness for advocacy on behalf of Gazans. However, I agree that the metric (# pre-teens shot in the head with single bullet) / (# pre-teens shot overall) could be a valuable indicator, so long as there is a reasonable attempt at meaningful comparison.

P.S. As an intuition pump, if we take one year in US and looked at, say, teenage boys, I would expect that metric to be high (more than 50%) due to suicides.

P.P.S. The metric (# healthcare professionals who saw preteens with a bullet wound to the head) / (# healthcare professionals), on the other hand, is not as useful, except maybe for those who consider healthcare profession in that region as an occupation.

Is this the same nytimes that blew out of proportion the story about the kids buried in Canada schoolyards?

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?

Perhaps 80% of the doctors are liars

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.

and the NYT team is lying

Probably not

They polled an assortment of doctors working in Gaza

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.

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.

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

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 comments

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Wasn't one of these types of doctors killed recently because he was holding one of the hostages and was killed in the retrieval? Could be misremembering, but I suspect that's what we are working with. And I say that as an ardent doctor defender.

That was a Palestinian doctor, not a foreign volunteer doctor like most interviewed here.

I don't know about doctors, but I believe there was an Al Jazeera journalist that met that fate.

It sounds familiar but even apart from that the level of supposed sanctity that we're supposed to treat doctors' testimonies with is kind of dumb. The idea that being a doctor automatically confers on someone the kind of supreme ethical status that means they would never lie, be biased, or really hate Jews, has the sort of intuitive logic that I probably accepted as a child but shouldn't be convincing to any adult who tries to think critically.

The chorus of skeptics here should look at past events. The Israelis shoot children all the time. They even manage to get off in court after shooting a child in the back.

Can you even imagine what would happen if a white US police officer mag-dumps a 13-year old black girl for walking into a 'security area'? She was 70 m away when she was first shot. Heading away from the army camp and 'security area'. The soldier runs out to follow her and confirm the kill, as per procedure.

On the tape, the company commander then "clarifies" why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

The officer who shot the girl is then acquitted of any malpractice in court.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/24/israel

I think leftists would undergo some kind of super-saiyan transformation upon hearing such a case, especially when the transcript has these extremely villainous lines. This is what actual systemic racism looks like, when you blow people away with impunity and get off in court.

That was 2004. In 2018 they shot and killed another 35 children peacefully protesting in Gaza, amongst others. There are probably many more cases that I haven't heard of, these are the two that immediately come to mind.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition

The base assumption should be that of course the Israeli army is shooting children. They did that before October 7th. They did that 20 years ago. Of course they're doing it today. There is a great deal of hatred in this part of the world. There is a reason people join Hamas, taking on roles with a pretty poor life expectancy and few perks.

I don't believe in a global crusade against every bit of unfairness in the world but the whole 'Israel is so noble and innocent' angle needs to be shut down.

Usually kill-on-sight zones are in military bases behind fences and extensive signage. They're not on the edge of refugee camps, places you'd expect civilians to be walking around.

Yeah, the posts on Philadelphi were pretty crazy. Rafah is split by the Egypt-Gaza border, so any kind of physical barrier there has to be right against the city - a pain for both the residents and the soldiers in the posts. It’s also a damned-if-you-do, dead-if-you-don’t situation, as we can see today, since leaving the area unmonitored just makes weapons smuggling into Gaza very very easy (but having settlers there was pure insanity).

IDF is back in the same spot now, and I hope we’ve learned our lessons from last time. Everything 1 km from Philadelphi needs to be razed.

BTW, you can see a bit of what Girit (badger) was like at the time here.

I don't think the skeptics (hi) doubt that Israelis sometimes do awful things, including shooting children. Or that we believe Israel is noble and innocent.

I do tend to believe that their enemies are among the worst in a generally shitty part of the world. And that people who bring up cherry-picked and carefully described incidents taking anything critical of Israel at face value, and then extrapolate to generalizations about how this is just typical Jewish behavior, do not, in fact, actually care in the slightest about alleged dead Palestinian children, but are happy to invoke dead children if it presents another opportunity to talk about how Jews are lizard-people.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Israel, but it's hard to take them seriously from someone known to hate Jews. I mean, if suddenly you're willing to call interviews by the NYT asking people in Gaza if the Israelis are committing war crimes "high quality evidence" you can surely see why this prompts some see skepticism.

That is only meaningful if (a) (as jeroboam said) they are telling the truth, and (b) you compare to a control group consisting of the number of children shot in the head or chest in other war zones.

A priori, it is = easier to believe that you could find several doctors to make up this story, than it is to believe that Israeli soldiers are doing it intentionally on a regular basis. So the evidence needs to be pretty solid in my book.

Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process. Are Nina Ng and Dr. Mark Perlmutter die-hard anti-Israel extremists? Even if we ignore the bias that would lead one to conclude that every Arab and Muslim working as a doctor is a sympathizer to Hamas (of course, we would never say this about Jews who have associations to Israel), this conclusion doesn’t make sense in light of the testimony from the Vietnamese American and the white midwesterner. Due to language barriers, most doctors working or volunteering in Gaza are going to Arabic speakers.

Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process. Are Nina Ng and Dr. Mark Perlmutter die-hard anti-Israel extremists? Even if we ignore the bias that would lead one to conclude that every Arab and Muslim working as a doctor is a sympathizer to Hamas (of course, we would never say this about Jews who have associations to Israel), this conclusion doesn’t make sense in light of the testimony from the

I don't know how to explain the Times opinion, so that remains a mystery. But it is way more plausible that the Times got it wrong somehow, than that a military rifle round hit a person in the head and failed to exit. I once shot a 180-pound boar in the throat with a round similar to the one the Israeli military uses, and I found the bullet in the pig's rump; it went all the way through a wild boar from stem to stern.

According to this random article, the interviewed doctors were sent there by the Palestinian American Medical Association. I haven't done the legwork to fact check this myself.

However I do find the arguments against the x-rays to be convincing. Are there any counterarguments for those?

Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process.

It's very easy for me to believe that some Americans are to some extent pro-Hamas. It's even easier for me to believe that the Americans who ended up volunteering in Gaza are pro-Hamas.

Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors?

If they interviewed doctors in Gaza, they interviewed pro-Hamas doctors. No one would voluntarily put themselves under the jurisdiction of Hamas unless they were okay with what that implied. If someone from a foreign country volunteered to work in German hospitals during WWII, one would assume that they were a Nazi sympathizer.

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.

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.

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”.

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

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.

as the effect of people poking their heads out to see what's happening

Should the IDF be shooting children who peak out their head in a highly dense urban environment?

Is this calculation well established in the military literature?

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.

tongue bath of it, bespeaks nothing

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.

I guarantee this has been well-studied somewhere, if only by the police. There’s a lot of papers on determining homicide vs. suicide via location and angle. That implies some sort of literature on homicide pathology. My searches weren’t very fruitful, though.

I don't think they'd help much for children in a war zone. Even most areas of Chicago aren't located near active war zones where stray rifle bullets might come from.

One of my bullshit detector modes is applying the "Cui bono?" rule: If true, who benefits from it?

I don't see a tactical or political advantage for Israel to be doing this as a matter of policy: Committing high-value troops to take out low-value targets? And certain carry a highly negative publicity penalty? What's Israel's ROI on assassinating pre-teens?

On the other hand, we know that Israel's enemies love to play the Victim PR game, exaggerating and even inventing tragedies that cast a shadow on Israel's claim of moral legitimacy. What's the Hamas ROI on shooting a few of their kids in the head if it means widespread outrage aimed at Israel? While it's hard for me to imagine such a craven tactic*, Hamas has more to gain from this than Israel does. If they're faking the shootings, the ROI for them goes up even more.

  • I also can't imagine the craven tactic of positioning military assets in schools and hospitals, but we know Hamas does this and that Israel appears to take greater care to avoid civilian casualties. So these priors also lean me further toward: "If it's happening, Hamas is doing it." Alternatively, it could be a rogue Israeli soldier who has snapped, but seems unlikely to be a sanctioned military effort.

There's evidence suggesting some Russians are shooting Ukrainian soldiers after they've surrendered, which is a very stupid thing to do from a tactical perspective. Drawing a parallel, if this claim is true it needn't be for tactical benefit, it could be purely emotional and because they believe they are immune from consequences.

It is very unlikely to be a sanctioned tactic. I hope no one read my post as implying such. What’s more likely, IMO, is that an extremist element of Israeli society has entered the military and is committing atrocities unpunished. This already occurred with the craven sexual torture of Hamas prisoners of war, tacitly approved by leading “far right” Israeli politicians who lobbied for the perpetrators to go unpunished. And the calls for these extremist actions have been made by a Rabbi who specifically trains up orthodox Jewish soldiers.

I have a hard time buying that IDF leadership is directly instructing its soldiers to shoot young children on sight, but, per your clarification, I absolutely believe that if a minority of IDF soldiers were doing this in a fit of rage and frustration, IDF leadership would probably look the other way unless it became really egregious.

There is not much PR value in publicly declaring your support for inserting sticks into prisoner's rectums, but Israeli politicians do it anyway. One can only imagine what this fellow says in private.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/

Why is it so hard to believe that many Israelis really hate Palestinians, that your natural thought is not 'Oh the Israeli soldier shot the enemy civilian' but 'Hamas is shooting their own children in the head to make Israel look bad'?

Hatred is a thing. In Israel, hatred clearly has a constituency, votes and gets elected. It follows that they are also in the military.

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.

...because the spiritual purity of 15-and-younger boys disarms explosives?

You may feel this is brilliant journalism, but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies. Child soldiers aren't merely 'are they big enough to carry a gun', which can be well below 10, but 'are they old enough to throw stone-heavy grenades,' which is even less. A preteen can easily be a child soldier, and even a cutoff of 6 is being arbitrary in terms of 'can they provide militarily-useful tasks.'

Nor does anything in the article address the nature of Hamas's influence in the information space, which is not only in the form of influence on intermediaries (by controlling access to Gaza) but also on the locals reporting to those intermediaries (by threats of retaliation).

Nor does the article- or you- make any effort to clear for selection bias on head/body shot children. For the article, there's only 8 cited speakers and the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need.

You say this...

Third, the data uniquely sheds light on possible Israeli misconduct.

...but the data doesn't uniquely shed light on possible Israeli misconduct. The data doesn't uniquely shed light on any misconduct. The data doesn't even demonstrate a pattern, because the data is depicted without time, context, or even attribution.

Heck, the data doesn't even provide an actual number of children shot.

Most of the article- the vast majority of the article- isn't even about gunshots. It's about malnutrition, psychological harm, baby mortality, and other things.

There are only 8 speakers cited with stories of children being shot. Given the relative range differentials between the Israeli small arms users and Palestinians, it would seem reasonable that a 'the Israelis are deliberately targeting children' to rely on snipers (shooting individual targets from range with precision), rather than closer-range options (pistol-executions) or mid-range-but-less-accurate fires.

On a very basic breakdown of -Attribution of who done it -Attribution of child-soldier era child -Characterized as single shot -Characterized as a sniper (single shot, single targets)

We have

Claim 1: 6 children, ages 6-12, single shots to skull

Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Yes Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (no claim of a sniper context, or how a sniper would be responsible for a singular group)

Claim 2: Pediatric gunshot-wound patients

Attribution: None Child-solder Age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No (gunshot-wound patients is plural patients, not claiming all patients had a single gunshot wound) Sniper characterized: No

Claim 3: Several children with high-velocity bullet wounds in head and chest

Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No Sniper characterized: No ('high-velocity bullet' does not imply sniper, and no basis of what this means is provided)

Claim 4: 4-5 year old children, all shot in head with single shot, all delivered at once

Attribution: None Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Additionally, group delivery implies no risk in taking the time to load all individuals, supporting a close-killing, not snipers)

Claim 5: Child shot in the jaw

Attribution: None Child-solder age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)

Claim 6 Father + Brother claiming children (3 and 5) were shot by snipers in house after rumored Israeli pullout

Attribution: None (Israeli attribution is of the rumor of an Israeli pullout from a neighborhood; the sniper is not attributed) Child-soldier Age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: Yes

Claim 7 18-month little girl with gunshot wound to the head

Attribution: none Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No

Claim 8 (Dr. 'Many' children, on almost daily occurrence, with nonfatal gunshot wounds to head

Attribution: none Child-solder age: Unclear Characterization as single-shot: No Snipe characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)

So of our 8 claims- claims that are clearly selected for shock impact to print and thus are probably at the bounds of what even the NYT would consider worth reporting- we have...

8 Claims

Attributions to Israeli Shooters: 0

Characterization of Non-Child Soldier Age Victims: 3

Characterization of single shots: 5

Sniper characterized: 1

So when you say this...

So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza?

This is assuming a conclusion not supported by the data.

No evidence, or even claim, is made that it was Israelis in particular shooting the children. That may be the insinuation, but nothing in the article elevates the Israelis over other factors or actors, including...

-Revenge killings / crimes of passion targeting a family

-Armed criminals attempting to silence witnesses of a crime

-Suicide by traumatized children (see lower article on psychological trauma)

-Resource-shortage/'mercy' murders by caretakers unable to afford the children (see lower article on inability to care for children)

-Cross fire from other combatants

-Deliberate fire by other combatants*

*This is the due reminder that Hamas deliberately works to get Palestinians killed, uses human shields for military positions, and done the shooting themselves on occasion... and that the current conflict wouldn't be occuring if they weren't willingness to plan and execute theatrical murder of children for propaganda effects

And this is if the claims made are to be taken at face value, and not reflective of other data compromise issues such as selection bias (if Dr. Farah is the sort of doctor who can help children shot in the head, he's not going to be given the children who were shot less severely who other, less specialized, people can care for) or other issues of unintentional or intentional bias, or examples of outright deception.

(This is the due reminder that any Gazan medical center data that relies on the Gazan ministries is using Hamas-approved and provided data. This includes conflating gazan civilian and gazan combatant casualties, and exagerating claimed losses.)

And this doesn't even approach whether incidents which would be Israel were results of laws-of-war-acceptable action, which the article doesn't even try to address from any perspective. Naturally the Hamas-institutional data would not exactly be publicizing how many children who have been shot were shot in the context of being belligerents in the current conflict.

And this doesn't go into data collection issues, such as how the relevant medical authorities were picked, the lack of cross-reference to any sort of objective data sets (or even unobjective data sets), and the rather blunt use of emotive language and framings for what ends with a rather direct policy advocacy stance which itself would imply the selection of data was driven to justify the policy rather than the other way around.

So, as far as brilliant research goes, nah. Not really.

A preteen can easily be a child soldier

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. 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.

the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need

This is not true. Emergency nurses will deal with children shot in all places. 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. Who do you believe is the lower specialty on whom they drop off the children only merely shot in the abdomen or thigh?

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 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...

Ah, yes, the children shot in the head point-blank range with assault rifles, where the bullet remained IN the skull, yet whose head was pretty much intact. Obvious Hamas propaganda. These children (if indeed they are children) were either hit by nearly-spent bullets (e.g. at long range, or fired in the air) or the bullet was simply placed under them when the X-ray was taken.

If you shoot someone in the head at close range with an assault rifle, the bullet goes through and leaves an enormous exit wound, plus a wide path of damage through the brain due to hydrostatic shock.

If you shoot someone in the head at close r

Amen. No damn way a 7.62x51 rifle round (what the Israeli's use, comparable to a .308 Winchester) fails to exit a human skull.

You're assuming that's a 7.62x51 projectile. It looks like a .50 BMG to me, given the relative scale to the head, unless that's a newborn.

The Israelis use 5.56 NATO, mostly. Hamas uses 7.62. There's not enough information in the X-rays to distinguish (because they don't tell you the size of the head), though I think some (including the one I linked) probably are bigger than 5.56 -- I suspect that one was a round from an AK-47 or similar either at long range or (more likely) fired not quite straight up.

they use 7.62 NATO for snipers and machine guns, IIRC, and .50 for HMGs. that bullet looks like a .50.

A 7.62x51 or .50 BMG at close range doing that little damage is even LESS likely than a 7.62x39 or 5.56 NATO doing it, of course. But if I'm doing my measuring correctly, if that bullet is a .50BMG with 13mm diameter, the head has a front-to-back size of 266mm, which is too big (99th percentile for men is is 217mm) If it's 7.8mm (7.62mm nominal), it's 159mm; too small for an adult, and we don't know the age of the victim. But of course this is an X-ray and sizes can be distorted.

your measurement definitely beats my eyeballing. and yeah, I'd be mystified at how either one could end up in that position in a kid's head, on purpose. Like, you need the bullet to have lost 80-90% of its velocity before it's going to stop like that, so we're probably talking high-angle fire at long ranges.

Could be an old CT scan from a casualty of one of those Arab weddings where they fire guns in the air indiscriminately.

The 7.62x39 round used in an AK is different than the 7.62x51 NATO. Or the Mosin’s 7.62x54R, for that matter. They’ve all got the same bullet diameter, but different bullet lengths/weights and cases.

Maybe @NelsonRushton was thinking of the IMI Galil, which had a 7.62x51 version. But as you noted, Israel used and uses 5.56x45 for its infantrymen.

He also could have been referring to rifles like the SR-25 or M24. Those would fit the “sniper” narrative. But news outlets can’t decide if the Israelis are shooting children crossing the street, or executing them point blank, so who knows?

I did a hasty google search and I was just mistaken. It appears that the IDF uses a 5.56x45mm NATO. Still, that round will go in one shoulder of a 200-pound wild boar and out the left shoulder, leaving a golf ball sized exit wound. In Marshall & Sanow's study of terminal ballistics, they give penetration averages for pistol rounds in real world shootings (of humans), but for the 5.56 NATO they simply say "routinely exits the human body".

So while I was mistaken about the caliber of the round, I stand by the claim that it is not plausible for an IDF rifle round to stop inside a human skull.

Doesn't really matter, though. Any of those rounds fired from point blank range or really any range at which you can see the target without optics, or indeed any reasonable sniper range even with optics, is going to do a lot more damage to the head than shown in those X-rays. Nobody's sniping children from a mile away.

I concur. I think that photo, at least, is obviously fake.

Ed: or the bullet only killed a child after expending its energy in four or five Hamas bodies. That could also explain how they were so close to a hospital!

If they use some underpowered subsonic assassin setup, then it's possible it could be slow enough to just make a hole an embed in the skull at close range. Most of the bullets in the images look like 5.56 (?), and it's really not the tool for the job. It'd likely not work reliably in the IDF issued rifles (are they mostly using Tavor's still?) as this kind of ammo usually requires a special setup or tinkering beyond what infantryman has in the field.

If there's death squads going around giving Moscow neckties to Palestinian children, then they would probably choose something else. Mossad used to like those nifty .22's. They also probably wouldn't let the kids they just shot in the head get carted off to the hospital. On the other hand, if a child catches a strays, ricochet, or misidentification there's less reason to prevent them from going to the hospital.

Soldiers blasting kid's skulls for fun with their issued rifles on a regular basis seems unlikely given the details in the article if only for the fact there are so many kids going to the hospital after getting blasted in the skull with a rifle cartridge. "44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza" with a couple X-ray's doesn't sell me on death squad or even misconduct. It shows me kids have been shot in the head according to some doctors.

The lethal combination of what Human Rights Watch describes as indiscriminate military violence, what Oxfam calls the deliberate restriction of food and humanitarian aid, near-universal displacement of the population, and destruction of the health care system is having the calamitous effect that many Holocaust and genocide scholars warned of nearly a year ago.

I think this paragraph tells me enough about the journalist's sympathies and where her biases lay. Doesn't mean the IDF hasn't had misconduct or committed war crimes. I suspect they have just based on what I've seen make it online. Especially in the early months of the war. But, probably not to the degree, frequency, or relevancy (genocide) that this writer believes.

are they mostly using Tavor's still?

No, most units moved back to M4’s, or an m-16 variant for rear units. You may see an Arad at places, and IIRC the border guard is trying out M7s. I haven’t seen a full-size Tavor in a while. Some reserve units still used micro-Tavors (X95) which is my personal favorite.

I have actually been following news from Gaza, not just the bits you might catch now and then on CNN, but by watching Western, Israeli, and Arab news channels ( including in Arabic). So I have a pretty good sense for how it's covered, including the biases most frequently exhibited by each side.

Bluntly, I do not trust anything reported directly from Gaza, especially from the people on the ground there. This is not to say I think Israelis or the IDF are always trustworthy (they are not), but no journalist is in Gaza without explicit permission from Hamas. That is just how things work there. There are literally Hamas soldiers in Gaza hospitals, but you will never see them shown by the journalists walking the halls to show you how terrible conditions are there. You will never see them criticizing Hamas, interviewing someone who criticizes Hamas, or presenting anything other than a Palestinian-sympathetic point of view. There are two reasons for this: (1) Most of them are sympathetic to Hamas, if not actually affiliated with them. (2) Even the ones who aren't know they will be expelled (at best) or disappeared (at worst) if they don't observe the ground rules. The ground rules are "Hamas is in charge here and Hamas controls the narrative."

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?

This is a level of credulousness, and confidence, that I know for a certainty you would not display - especially from the NYT - on any other subject. This is not "high quality evidence." This is evidence that pleasures your priors. You took a sketchy story and from it wrote a carefully written polemic that argues, essentially, that Jews are taught by their religion that shooting children for fun is fine. You have already ignored a pile of contradictions to even your most specious claims (e.g., that the Israeli military is mostly made up of religious extremists), and ignored any sort of logical analysis. So let's take a few points in order:

Why would the doctors lie? Most aid workers in Gaza, unsurprisingly, are sympathetic to Palestinians and believe the "genocide" narrative. Some, like the journalists, are actually Hamas supporters. That doesn't mean they would all be willing to make up stories about children regularly being shot by Israeli snipers, but many of them would. Many others, if told this was happening, would be willing to believe it and/or at least not publicly display any skepticism. And if Hamas says "The narrative is now that the IDF is sniping children," doctors still working in Gaza are certainly not going to say "No, that isn't happening." Especially since they probably have seen a lot of children killed, a few might have actually been targeted, and so they're going to be willing to go along with "The IDF is now doing this regularly" – even if they know it's not really true, maybe the outrage will result in fewer children dying.

You have made it clear often enough in the past that you despise Jews and consider them a kind of invidious predatory species, so a story that portrays them as moral mutants clearly appeals to you and is easy for you to believe, but let's try starting from an assumption that Jews aren't monsters. Contrary to your careful argument above that Judaism is an alien and inhumane ethical system completely divorced from Western thought, Israeli cultural norms are mostly Western ones, especially considering how many of them came from the West. The IDF mostly behaves like Western armies, which is to say: they have rules and they follow the Geneva Convention. There are definitely breaches, as happens in all wars, but they aren't monsters who are given a doctrine of "preteen children are legitimate targets." Most people would not do that. It's only plausible that Israelis think sniping children is fine if one accepts your premise that Jews (all Jews!) literally Other gentiles into a "not human" category. You might believe this, but it's not actually accurate.

Do I believe that here and there, some fucked up soldiers have done fucked up things, like sniping children? Yes. Shit happens in war. Do I believe this is either explicitly or implicitly endorsed by the IDF? No. They might not spend a lot of time investigating claims by Al-Jazeera or looking too deeply into an accusation that Sergeant Steiner shot a kid, but they haven't been given the go-ahead to individually target civilians.

People have already talked a lot about the unlikelihood of military rounds (whether 7.62 or 5.56) entering a child's head and staying there, rather than turning it into an exploding pumpkin as it exits. Ballistics can be weird and unlikely things can happen, so one or two X-rays of kids with 7.62 shells in them? Maybe. Happening on a daily basis? A rash of children with 7.62 rounds in their skulls who are still alive? Come on now.

Basically, this story does not pass the sniff test on any level, and the NYT writing outrage porn with heavily biased sources is something you would normally readily pick apart.

There’s a reason why I trust the NYT on this specific topic. If the NYT tells me that Assad used poison gas against civilians, I doubt it pending further evidence because it is aligned with American geopolitical interests and the interests of the NYT’s Democrat + wealthy bent. Same with the hilariously biased title reporting on Kamala’s plagiarism today. This is par for the course of NYT. But NYT has no compelling reason to post anti-Israel falsehoods. It doesn’t help Democrats, it doesn’t help their financial status, and it goes against the values of some of the execs who have ties to the Jewish community (CEO and chief editor). Why would the NYT be particularly critical of Israel? I think because the truth actually compels them here. There’s no financial, status, or political reason for them to criticize Israel. Now in this particular article, there is also an element of objective reporting, not pure subjective storymaking. No, it’s not perfectly objective, but polling a good sample of doctors is better than your usual Israel-Gaza coverage.

Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.

already ignored a pile of contradictions to even your most specious claims (e.g., that the Israeli military is mostly made up of religious extremists)

See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement. Critics charge that its growing influence – including from the more orthodox portion known as Hardalim – is pursuing its own agenda within the army. Two-fifths of infantry graduate officer cadets now come from section of Israeli society aligned with far-right parties and settler movement” […] “In 1990, 2.5% of the graduate officer cadets of the infantry came form the national religious,” Shaul said. “By 2014 it is 40%. That is three times the representation of the national religious in Jewish Israeli society.” […] “Already we have seen discipline issues [related to national religious ideology] become almost unenforceable, and that has consequences elsewhere, including on issues like the rules of engagement.”

It's only plausible that Israelis think sniping children is fine if one accepts your premise that Jews (all Jews!) literally Other gentiles into a "not human" category

No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children. And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this. I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.

I know you have not missed the last year of media coverage, therefore I do not believe your conviction that the NYT would not criticize Israel unless they really had the goods and were compelled by a sense of commitment to accuracy to report it.

The NYT does have a wealthy Jewish constituency. It also has a very large and very woke constituency that has been criticizing Israel and signal-boosting the Palestinian narrative since October 8. (Well before that, actually.)

You know this. The NYT is not some bastion of Jewiness that was suddenly forced to admit to Israeli atrocities because they had no choice. Now to be clear, I doubt any NYT reporters are deliberately reporting falsehoods. They might or might not really believe that Israeli soldiers are now routinely and intentionally shooting 5-year-olds. Maybe they think the doctors in Gaza who are claiming this believe it and deserve to be reported, because it's "close enough" to the truth. But they are certainly being as willingly credulous as you in accepting a narrative at face value that tells a story they want to tell.

Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.

This isn't what I said, and you know this isn't what I said.

I don't suggest Hamas is holding guns to doctors' heads to force them to make up stories. The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza. Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."

I do expect at some point we'll hear stories from people who were in Gaza who will be more honest about the Hamas militants in hospitals (I mean, these stories have already gotten out), but (a) they will have to have left Gaza, as will their families; (b) they will have to be people who don't want to cover for Hamas. Which is not a lot of people.

Most medical workers in Gaza, asked "Have you heard of the IDF shooting children?" will probably say "Yes, I've heard that's happening." Some will also have seen children brought to the hospital who've been shot.Were they shot deliberately? The family might say so. Is the medical worker going to disbelieve them?

Take a handful of actual incidents, a large proportion of sympathetic and biased medical workers, and a heavily censored reporting environment, and unsurprisingly it's easy to get a story like "Yes, everyone agrees the IDF is sniping children." Every war produces these kinds of atrocity stories; many turn out to be untrue. We already have a lot of conflicting narratives about October 7, and about what has happened in Gaza so far.

I cannot resist pointing out the obvious: the evidence for the Holocaust is far more voluminous and convincing, and yet strangely your skepticism comes out in full force on that subject. Why, one wonders, are stories of atrocities committed by Jews so believable, and stories of atrocities committed against Jews so hard to believe? Could you possibly suffer from bias?

See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement.

That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset. So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities." While this might be cause for concern within Israel, it still does not follow that even these 40% believe the things you claim, that murdering children is totally moral.

No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children.

This is not sufficient when your claim is that the IDF is now routinely sniping children and Israelis are okay with it. There is an extremist section of every society radical enough to say "Kill the enemy, including their children." We have no shortage of them here in the US, and they come in right, left, secular and religious, woke and Dissident Right.

And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this.

The number of people in the Israeli military who believe it's fine to shoot children is greater than the number of people in the general Israeli population? Yes, I am confident you could say the same thing about the US military (or nearly any military) as well.

I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.

Yes, and your point was weak and poorly argued; it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe." There are plenty of Christian extremists with awful views and some of them join the military. A while ago there was a spate of stories about white nationalists infiltrating the Special Forces. I suspect you would be both more skeptical about the threat and protest about the unfair characterization of so-called white nationalists.

The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza

Why do you believe that their sample of doctors is flawed? There’s not an enormous amount of Western doctors in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that the NYT Time only picked doctors willing to lie. This is just what you want to believe. A team of NYT employees oversaw the polling.

Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."

The doctors had the option to answer anonymously. There is no evidence of Hamas threatening doctors. Many of these doctors have already returned home permanently. So your theory here is wrong.

That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset.

Infantry officer is an influential role. It is a relevant role if we are looking at shot children. You mistakenly thought that there was not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military. I showed you an article that 40% of infantry officers come from a group with extremist views. The article goes on to say that these extremists have already violated rules of engagement and caused problems. Your screed called this “specious” — are you willing to concede you were empirically wrong? There are, factually, a lot of extremists in the Israeli military.

So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities."

Read what I wrote again. You made up that quote wholecloth. I said that there are extremists in the Israeli military, that the military selects for that more. You do not need most of the military to be extremists to have major problems with shooting innocent kids in the head. You need a sufficient amount of extremists, like… 40% of the infantry officers coming from a group that has problems with extremism. Read the article — it’s literally about how the group is extremist and has caused problems for the military and is causing secular soldiers worry. Even the secular Israeli soldiers see problems with extremism.

it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe."

We both know that is not my argument. Let’s ask these questions: in what capacity is the religious practice different? Which type of cognition is increased by the different practices? Where is the moral concern located?

Why do you believe that their sample of doctors is flawed? There’s not an enormous amount of Western doctors in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that the NYT Time only picked doctors willing to lie.

Reread what I posted. I did not say the NYT only picked doctors willing to lie, and I specifically addressed the "lying doctors" theory. Stop trying to use these slippery tactics and moving goalposts.

The doctors had the option to answer anonymously. There is no evidence of Hamas threatening doctors. Many of these doctors have already returned home permanently. So your theory here is wrong.

My theory is that the doctors are some combination of lying, credulous, and sympathetic enough not to question too much. "Your theory is wrong" is based on nothing but your belief that if you state something confidently enough it should be taken seriously.

Infantry officer is an influential role. It is a relevant role if we are looking at shot children.

Again, slippery goalpost-moving.

You mistakenly thought that there was not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military.

Again, stop being slippery. The specific claim (by you) was that "most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists." Do we need to go through this word by word? I never claimed that "there is not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military," because we didn't even discuss what "a high level" would be. I would consider 40% of infantry military officers to be a high level by some measures, but not by the measures you were claiming, when you used the word "most" and asserted that it was a sufficiently large majority of all soldiers to make it likely that head-shotting children has become SOP.

Your screed called this “specious”

Debunking you point by point and line by line, while tedious, does not make a screed. What I called "specious" was, again, your claim that most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists. You've retreated to "a lot of their infantry officers are from right-wing religious communities" but are now pretending that that's what was in dispute.

— are you willing to concede you were empirically wrong?

No, because I am not. You are provably and demonstrably so, right here, and I won't bother asking if you are willing to admit it.

There are, factually, a lot of extremists in the Israeli military.

"A lot" is a much slippier and unquantifiable number than "most." Again, moving goal posts.

We both know that is not my argument.

No, we do not both know that. I genuinely believe that you hate Jews and your, ah, "screed" of an OP is motivated by hatred of Jews. Are you willing to clearly state this is false and you do not hate Jews?

Let’s ask these questions: in what capacity is the religious practice different?

Why should I care? Every religion has different religious practices. This is only relevant if you're trying to argue there is something uniquely pernicious about Judaism.

Which type of cognition is increased by the different practices? Where is the moral concern located?

Those might be interesting philosophical questions, but nothing you've posted so far (in your many posts under this topic, under your many alts) has ever supported the conclusion you keep reaching for that "Jews are hostile aliens."

ETA: My apologies, I will retract one thing: I reread your post and you didn't say "Most soldiers." However, I will stand by my claim that this is the central thesis of your claim, that Israelis are now adopting tactics of shooting children because (some number of them which we can argue about whether it literally constitutes "most" or not) are sufficiently extremist that this is now commonplace in the IDF and widely accepted among Israelis because of their Jewishness.

"In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel" would be the primary quote here. I was mistaken, in that you used more weasel-wording than I remembered, but let's say it's 20% or 40% or 80%. It's still quite an extraordinary claim that the IDF is deliberately targeting children in Gaza, and they're doing this because.... Jews are monstrous and believe they are fighting a holy war against an evil enemy. You think if there were really Hamas militants in Gaza hospitals, or that doctors were advancing false Hamas narratives and faking bullets embedded in kids' skulls, "someone would tell." Yet you don't think if the IDF was being told "Shoot children," no one would tell?

I don’t know why you would include the line “the NYT didn’t interview every doctor” if you weren’t insinuating that the sample was biased by the NYT. But okay, if you’re not alleging that, then you’re alleging that the doctors were under some pressure by Hamas to testify in a certain way? This hypothesis is unevidenced, would be evidenced if it happened (given how important it would be for the Israeli propaganda machine), contrary to the nature of the interview (anonymous), and counter-evidenced (20% of doctors said it didn’t happen). So I have to simply ask why you retain this belief. If you’re merely insinuating that the doctors, by virtue of their willingness to volunteer in Gaza, are predisposed to lie (?), or predisposed to like Hamas (?), or by virtue of caring about dying children are willing to exaggerate how many they saw (?)… maybe it would just be helpful if you tell me clearly what you believe.

To copy-paste my original assertion,

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

Please notice the italics. My assertion would wholly explain why the children are shot in the head. There are 20k-30k Israeli soldiers in Gaza. How many deprave, genuinely evil Jewish extremist soldiers do you need in order to see too many killed children? Not most. Not half. Mere percents in combat roles. Yet this is not excusable; the failure of Israel to check or punish its extremists is inexcusable.

For some reason you are naive about the extremism in Israel. So I will provide more sources. It’s almost Jihadi, indeed we may call it Jewhadi. Apparently the support for sexually torturing POWs by some Israeli leaders, and the call for killing children by what amounts to a military recruiter, were not sufficient. From Haaretz:

https://archive.is/TndVC

In late January, Rabbi Dov Lior, a leading Orthodox rabbinic figure on the religious far-right, was asked if it was permissible to desecrate the Sabbath to block humanitarian aid to Gaza […] For Lior, blocking aid to a starving population, even against the wishes of the Israeli military and an extreme right-wing government, is a more crucial religious commandment than keeping the Sabbath.

To be a good Jew is to put the collective punishment of Palestinians ahead of basic observance. Recently, Rabbi Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of Zfat, even wrote a special prayer for those blocking humanitarian aid.

This mode of religious thinking, which sees God as a God of holy wars and vengeance and demands that Jews act violently in His name, has been gaining ground for more than half a century in some extremist corners of Israel and the Diaspora. But since October 7, it has developed into a more coherent and grotesque worldview, a political theology that licenses and even commends collective punishment and the proliferation of gun licenses while undermining or even dismissing efforts to return the hostages. It demands the expulsion or total submission or death of Palestinians

From the New Yorker, interviewing Yehuda Shaul, who founded “an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing what they see as the realities of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories”:

Over the years, every once in a while you would see a video of settlers attacking Palestinians with soldiers not intervening. In the past four or five years, there was a transition. We moved from soldiers standing idly by while Palestinians were being attacked to soldiers sometimes even joining the attacks. Sometimes it was soldiers who were settlers, who were back at home in the settlement or the outpost where they live, or where their friends live, and the guys are organizing to go down and attack Palestinians, so they take their gun or come half in uniform and join the attack. Sometimes it’s because specific military units were made up largely of extremist, nationalist, religious guys that the U.S. was even contemplating restricting military assistance to. But after October 7th things got even worse. Now the settlers are the soldiers and the soldiers are the settlers

two more things are happening. One is the sociological change in the Army. What we see is a significant shift within the Army—a change from the old-school, secular, Labor Party-oriented people to nationalist religious people, and especially to the ultra-Orthodox nationalists. People like Smotrich.

In 1990, only two and a half per cent of graduate officer cadets in the infantry were nationalist religious. In 2015, it was nearly forty per cent. That’s about three times their size in society. So you have this change, this sociological change, of middle-, high-class, secular, better educated military people going into cybersecurity and signal intelligence, more into positions that can advance their status in the economy post-military service, while the combat rank and file is being filled more with the ideologues, the nationalist-religious guys, as well as blue-collar people. In the past decade, there has been a big fight in the I.D.F. about who the real authority is. Is it the rabbi or the commander?

In 2016, two Palestinian attackers stabbed a soldier, wounding him. The Palestinians were shot. One of them was killed—the other one was neutralized, laying on the ground. Minutes later, a military medic called Elor Azaria arrived and he shot one bullet into the head of the Palestinian—basically executed him. And it was all filmed by a Palestinian activist who was living nearby. Once this came out, there was outrage. Ultimately, Azaria was indicted, but there was outrage about the fact that he was indicted. And it got to a place where even Netanyahu, who was the Prime Minister, called the shooter’s parents to show support. Ultimately, Moshe Ya’alon, who was the minister of defense at the time—a right-winger and a former chief of staff of the I.D.F.—had to resign, among other reasons, because he supported the indictment. Azaria was sentenced to eighteen months for basically an execution that was filmed.

That was the moment where the rank and file within the Army, plus the political base of the Likud Party and the Israeli right, essentially rebelled against the old guard who want to say that the I.D.F. is a professional army with discipline, who want to tell a story to the world of adherence to international law, checking ourselves, investigation, accountability. Now it became, “In our Army, we have different ethics than you, and we have a different idea of rule of law than you have. And it’s unacceptable that a soldier will be indicted for this.” For me, that’s the threshold where you understand that, at least at the level of the rank and file, the ideas had changed.

For me, the idea that bad things are happening in Gaza, that bad things will happen in detention centers, is not surprising. But how bad they are, to be honest, is surprising. I fear that we’re just scratching the surface here. And I fear the fact that the media is largely not yet in Gaza. I fear that we’re going to discover that we’ve reached serious new lows in our behavior—in terms of rules of engagement that were extremely permissive in the amount of collateral damage allowed, and in terms of treatment of detainees

I think there is a big chunk of Israeli society that, for them, the kind of assault that is alleged against detainees actually sounds reasonable. It sounds reasonable to people in the Knesset today and for ministers in the government. You saw thousands of Israelis standing and defending these soldiers, even with what is alleged that they’ve done. That’s how low we’ve reached. An entire section of Israeli society and the political class and government have actually stood up to defend these actions.

—

Now responding to other points:

Are you willing to clearly state this is false and you do not hate Jews?

Jews are not a monolithic group. I hate the extremists, and I do not hate the others. I probably have positive valence toward secular Jews. While I hate aspects of progressivism, I do not see it as Jewish-driven like some commenters here.

I can’t help but ask: have you invested your identity into Israel in some way? Are you yourself a religious zionist? Your posts come off as biased, to say the least. You misread my original post, which isn’t a big deal, but maybe it hints to deeper biases in this discussion. I am a random American guy from the east coast, have made friends of all faiths. There is no reason for me to be biased against Israel. But, you know, if I grew up singing songs about how Israel is the pure God-given land of my forefathers, and that everyone else has it out to get me, and that I have to love other Jews as tribesmen, that is going to bias me, right? So I think I am naturally less biased than anyone who grew up in a religiously Jewish household. If you think about how Hitler was able to make young Germans prejudicial and extremist, it was through singing songs about their homeland, hyping up their history, believing they were the chief victims of the last world war, increasing love for pan-Germans and sending them to German summer camps to instill values and camaraderie. So should we really be surprised if Israel has a lot of extremists — more than a Western nation? They are maxxing for extremism, except unlike the Hitler Youth, some of the orthodox get little secular education and are trained in the violent Old Testament.

I don’t know why you would include the line “the NYT didn’t interview every doctor” if you weren’t insinuating that the sample was biased by the NYT. But okay, if you’re not alleging that, then you’re alleging that the doctors were under some pressure by Hamas to testify in a certain way?

I've already explained this several times. What I believe is that every doctor in Gaza is obviously someone who sympathizes with Palestinians and has seen a lot of dead children. They aren't out in the field, so they see kids coming in with bullet wounds, and they probably aren't doing forensics to determine if it looks like a direct shot or a ricochet. If people tell them "IDF soldiers are shooting children," how skeptical will they be? Are they really seeing a lot of direct "kill shots" (e.g. to the head and chest, as opposed to various other random wounds like you'd expect of civilians caught in crossfire?) If they see one or two, how much convincing do they need? If you have one or two doctors willing to go along with a fabrication or an embellishment (such as doctoring an X-ray scan), and then disseminates them, who is going to call bullshit on them? How much evidence would the NYT need?

What I believe, and have explained, is that the truth is probably much messier than either "Yes, the IDF is now sniping children as SOP" or "Every doctor in Gaza is now making up stories of children being sniped." It's going to be a combination - a soldier here or there who said "Fuck 'em all" and is willing to shoot children, a few credulous doctors, a very active Hamas PR campaign (with no small amount of help from people like you). The fact that the NYT is willing to signal-boost any hint of Israelis misdeeds and spin a narrative of Jews being child-killing monsters, on the thinnest of evidence, helps make the extreme version of the story more plausible to people like you, who hate Israel and/or Jews.

Please notice the italics. My assertion would wholly explain why the children are shot in the head. There are 20k-30k Israeli soldiers in Gaza. How many deprave, genuinely evil Jewish extremist soldiers do you need in order to see too many killed children? Not most. Not half. Mere percents in combat roles. Yet this is not excusable; the failure of Israel to check or punish its extremists is inexcusable.

If you just want me to agree that shooting children is bad and anyone who does so intentionally should be prosecuted, I agree. That Israel is allowing it is your claim; I suspect Israel is "allowing" it in the same sense that the US "allowed" atrocities in Viet Nam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan. Some people got away with shit, sometimes the brass were willing to look the other way, but sometimes people got caught and were prosecuted, and the American public was definitely not "okay" with it. Only people with a deep ideological hatred of America would say we committed war crimes out of sheer American evilness.

Jews are not a monolithic group. I hate the extremists, and I do not hate the others. I probably have positive valence toward secular Jews. While I hate aspects of progressivism, I do not see it as Jewish-driven like some commenters here.

Okay. That is genuinely surprising to me, though I am not sure I believe you. But I'll take your word for it--

I can’t help but ask: have you invested your identity into Israel in some way? Are you yourself a religious zionist? Your posts come off as biased, to say the least.

Oops. There's the tell. Gotta admit, I was waiting for that.

As I have told the other Joo-posters who eventually pulled that on me (and not that it is your business or should matter): nope. No Jewish or Israeli affiliations whatsoever. Well, I do have Jews in my family tree. Which according to some Joo-posters would make me a Jew genetically, so maybe my Jew-genes "bias" me. But given that my entire family is Protestant and I have literally never set foot in a synagogue in my life, that would have to be some deep DNA-programming.

I don’t think it’s a given that these humanitarian doctors sympathize with Palestinians especially rather than humankind generally. I also don’t think that sympathy to Palestinian kids in their practice would lead to biasing their answers to a survey. There’s a subset of doctors who seek out wild ways to help people, and there is no wilder or more attention-grabbing way to help people than volunteering in Gaza. I would wager (total conjecture here) that volunteering in Gaza is actually a coveted position for young medical school graduates. Maybe 1% are accepted. It will probably shift to Arabic-speakers for practical reasons, so maybe that’s a small selection bias. It beats potentially getting malaria in Africa or helping alcoholic Appalachians in West Virginia.

that’s a tell

There’s no tell. I remember almost zero biographical details of any posters. Google tells me that your name is Gaelic for fool. Why do you think the Irish are so critical of Israel — are they all secret anti-semites too? You are clearly impassioned in this particular topic. Slippery this, that’s a tell that, Jew-hater there, alt accusations yonder… it’s all so tiresome .jpg

More comments

But NYT has no compelling reason to post anti-Israel falsehoods.

Strong disagree. The NYT is emblematic of where the Democrats will be in the future, and the future of the Democrats is a consistently expanding Hamas caucus.

This is why Hamas and Hezbollah felt emboldened to do 10/7 and the expanded rocket attacks, and also why Israel feels pressure to deal with both problems NOW in a significant matter. The Democrats are signaling that within a few cycles sanctions on Israel akin to South Africa or Rhodesia are on the table.

The pro-Israel lobby is one of the strongest in America. Pro-Israel donors are some of the largest in America. Why would they give this up for young anti-Israel liberals? The NYT also has the ability to influence its readers’ opinion, so why would it abstain from influencing it to be pro-Israel?

Because its been/being colonized by anti-Israel youths who have bought into the neo-Marxist anti-colonial talking points. Also with immigration, and your longstanding black base, the average Democrat him/herself will be an antisemite fairly soon.

There has been yet another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump. A man was apprehended at Trump’s rally in Coachella California. The man was carrying multiple firearms, and a fake VIP pass to allow him to pass through into the central rally area where President Trump was speaking. The man was also carrying multiple passports showing various different names and identities. The man connected to the Ukrainian foreign legion who attempted to assassinate President Trump in Florida also had a similar collection of fake passports.

This is like…the third time you’ve announced some Trump situation via a one-paragraph press release. Where are you getting this stuff?

https://nypost.com/2024/10/13/us-news/third-trump-assassination-attempt-thwarted-when-armed-man-arrested-outside-coachella-rally-sheriff-says/

Where are you getting this stuff?

It's been doing the rounds on Twitter for like a day. I actually wanted to correct this post earlier today, but I couldn't be arsed to dig out the source.

There’s dozens of news articles about it on multiple mainstream media outlets including the New York Post, Time Magazine, and the LA Times.

This is horrifying. Can anyone compare this to previous elections? I hadn't seen any news coverage but I imagine it would be a bigger deal.

When is the last time there was even an assassination attempt against someone? Obama?

The fact that we've had four in a handful of months should be deeply concerning to anyone wanting to keep America free from bloodshed. Look at how the Roman empire fell if you want an example. Trump needs massively beefed security, immediately, whether you like him or not.

Four? By my count, this would be number three. The bomb and/or dog thing didn’t pan out.

Though apparently there were two attempts years ago! One by an autistic UK tourist who didn’t know about retention holsters. Another by a forklift thief.

A Canadian lady apparently tried Ricin.

For this incident, my current understanding is that the only evidence that he intended an assassination attempt is a loaded weapon in his trunk, while he denies any such intention, and appears to be an enthusiastic Trump supporter. My bet is that he was not actually an assassin.

Against: his political advocacy, the official statement from Trump’s campaign.

For: fake ID, fake plates, multiple weapons, bringing all these things into a security checkpoint??

I dunno, it’s hard to apply normal logic to a guy who thinks this was a good idea. Only time will tell.

Don't forget he's also a Sovereign Citizen -- he probably just told the FBI that they can't touch him because he's a Free Man on the Land, and they knew that they had to cover the whole thing up if they didn't want to face an Admiralty Tribunal!

concur that time will tell, and if there's any solid evidence of intent, I'm open to hearing it.

My understanding is that the fake ID and fake plates is standard sovereign citizen behavior. they make their own license plates and IDs routinely (or use novelty reproductions) because it's part of the sovereign citizen memplex; they believe they're the "real" united states government, so they issue themselves "official" ID. I've heard he claims not to be a sovereign citizen, but I'm not sure if that's just a permutation of the meme, where he'd claim to actually be a "free citizen traveling" or whatever not-actually-a-distinction.

Multiple weapons isn't that weird. When I travel with guns, I usually travel with more than one.

Trump needs massively beefed security, immediately, whether you like him or not.

The good news is that after the first attempt, they seem to be catching the would-be assassins before they get a chance to do anything.

True but every attempt needs another OOM of security imo.

Trump getting assassinated is the only real doomsday event for the republic I see at the moment. At least the largest probability one. Once the spiral of political violence starts it's nigh impossible to stop.

…but it is 100% worth discussing.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-14/la-me-no-assassination-trump-coachella

On one hand, the perpetrator is an outspoken Trump supporter, running an advocacy org to expose the Deep State.

On the other, he runs an advocacy org to expose the Deep State. I don’t think that selects for the most stable individuals.

On the gripping hand, the guy is taking fake IDs and fake weapons into a restricted area with his fake license plate. He’s lucky to be alive.

“You can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.” ― Hillary Dawg Clinton to Pakistan

Trump and his lackeys have fed conspiracy theories for a full decade, which are now coming back to bite them in the ass.

It's a familiar story. The radicalization of Bangladesh and the Maldives are examples from the last two years. You can't give ammunition to the crazies and then be surprised when the crazies start shooting (figuratively and literally).

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.

Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.

It's a uniquely American problem. High trust is usually synonymous with the first world. High trust and civic sense drive efficiencies that help the first world stay ahead. First-world Europeans and East Asians do not have this deep-rooted suspicion towards authority. Even functioning third-world nations have sweeping rations and welfare (low quality as it may be) to help with survival. So, the citizenry retains a base level of goodwill towards institutions.

America, since its inception, may be the only first-world country that's remained low-trust. The Second Amendment and the union-of-states structure start things off with suspicion between smaller organizations and national organizations. As time went on, you got the Wild West, stranger danger, dilapidated inner cities, and more recently, drug addiction-driven homelessness. Can't trust anyone. Usually, this would be unstable. But America has so much money that it brute forces its inefficiencies away. The entire American debt and insurance industry is propped up as a band-aid solution for all the missing trust.

In such a zeitgeist, violent conspiracy nuts become a unique failure mode for American society. Somewhere along the way, these kinds of conspiracy nuts are beaten down into compliant citizens. But not here. The country feeds this distrust, through its scriptures and decentralization. Now the nuts are crazier than ever, they have guns, and they're pointing to the source of their distrust: national leaders. With the disempowerment of pacifying institutions such as mainstream media and traditional churches, the nuts continue spiraling. America is dry tinder, and Trump is a whole-ass blowtorch. For the sake of this nation, I hope he loses and quietly fucks off to Mar-a-Lago for good.

The Maldives have been trending more Islamist for 30 years, but I wouldn’t call the events of the last couple of years further or more rapid radicalization. In fact the middle class youth seem less radical, fewer hijabs, less modesty in general than they did ten years ago, tempted more by new money consumerist Dubai culture than anything else. They’re watching Dubai Bling on Netflix (though who isn’t?).

What’s changed is that anti-India animus has grown, but that was always inevitable under a Hindu nationalist government. Most of the anti-Indian insults on Maldivian Twitter also weren’t / aren’t Islamist in character, they’re more the same stuff you find on /pol/.

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring.

I feel like "Yes, Minister" should be required watching in Civics classes.

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it.

The concept of "Deep State" is one of the only exports of Turkish political discourse to the wider Western world (you are welcome).

While some Americans such as you came up with explanations as to how it "actually" denotes something else more inline with your own worldview, no the actual concept of Deep State very much describes an inner polity that actually runs the country while staying embedded deep inside the visible state.

This makes a lot of sense in the local context of Turkey and similar shakier Western-aligned countries (Greece, Egypt etc but even for example Italy). These countries often had a core of NATO aligned bureaucrats and military/intelligence officers who coordinated with each other to manipulate or bypass the wider political process for important decisions. These structures were on hyperdrive during the Cold War but they did not disappear overnight afterwards and usually morphed into different shapes.

As the world nears a new era where there is genuine competition and danger for the US Empire, and the politicians and regular bureaucrats cannot be trusted with certain decisions, it is not a coincidence that some of these groups are reactivating and flexing their muscles.

America has not been high trust in the modern era. We’re a Latin American country which is so wealthy it can brute force its way past most of the usual Latin American social ills, or at least mitigate them. We’re not a bigger wealthier first world country. This isn’t England or Japan in the new world. It’s Brazil with seven times the GDP per capita.

I think that's a direct restatement of what DirtyWaterHotDog said. Was that your intention, or were you trying to argue with him?

This doesn't make any sense... if this were true you'd expect to see the opposite. You're going to blame Trump for stirring up the crazies with wild conspiracy theories, then say that HE is the one to blame for it when he gets attempted assassinations?

If this were attempts against Joe or Kamala, I could maybe see this. In fact I'd probably agree to some extent. But the idea that Trump is the one who is going to get assassination attempts when he has been 'stirring up the crazies' against the other party, yet the other party has 0, is farcical.

Most violence happens within the ingroup. 54.3 percent or people murdered were killed by someone they knew. The same doesn't exactly hold for assassinations, but there's a trend of assassins having more in common with their targets than their targets' political enemies. Charles J. Guiteau was definitely on Garfield's "side." Lee Harvey Oswald was closer politically to Kennedy than Nixon. John Hinckley Jr was nonpolitical, but at the same time had been attempting to become an entertainer.

And given how the US presidency works-- with the designated survivor being the vice president-- this really makes perfect sense. If you hate the president, replacing him with a vice president you also hate that meanwhile becomes much more radically against you is a terrible idea. But showing "your side" that they shouldn't risk betraying your cause/better go even further in your direction makes more sense.

With all that being said, I wouldn't blame specifically trump for the assassination attempts since it's not like his rhetoric exists in a vacuum. But it's not like we're not seeing equivalent forms of radicalism in the democratic base. See: BLM, pro-palestine protestors sabotaging their own side. Trump's base just happens to be more male, more armed, and therefore more violent.

America has remained low trust? There are a multitude of economic counter arguments one can make. The simplest is that few people would invest in a low-trust society, and yet the American economy remains the envy of the world. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. The US routinely runs current account deficits, as foreigners just seem to love holding US-denominated assets. The legal system has its foundations in common law, which requires a great deal more trust than civil law. American industries operate quite profitably based on trust such as banking, and anything that relies on brands.

What I think you’ve identified, quite appropriately, is the mistrust that reasonable Americans now have toward the people and institutions who have betrayed them. Technology has made it harder for politicians and journalists to lie. Television showed Americans what was going on during e.g. the Vietnam War. The Internet gave Americans more perspectives that were censored or ignored by the mainstream press. Social media allowed Americans to communicate with each other without needing a propagandist to soft chew their ideas for them. And it turns out that many conspiracy theories turned out to be conspiracy facts, and Americans realized that the faceless bureaucracy supposed to represent the better angels of our nature actually had its own self-serving motives. So maybe the ‘conspiracy nuts’ were previously the ‘compliant citizens’ who woke up to a nation that—somewhere along the line—stopped being theirs. Is it any wonder, then, why some of those people might resort to taking their nation back by force?

The American people and American institutions are distinct. I agree that the world's institutions trust American institutions. The modern world order has been sculpted by post-WW2 America. It is less so trust, than the world being a vassal state to America.

To be clear, I don't say this with resentment. I consider US to be history's most benevolent global superpower. I'll take Pax Americana 100 times over the superpowers it replaced.

For my previous comment, I meant interpersonal trust and citizen-domestic institution trust.

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.

It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.

OSHA is supposed to protect workers, but quite often the opposite happens as rules that do little to prevent serious injury often make it difficult to impossible to run a business. Which makes it a much cheaper and often better idea to have things made in China or India so they aren’t fined because of some cosmetic problems that have nothing to do with safety.

FEMA is so regulation heavy that it’s more a hinderance than a help in a disaster. Much of the aid in Helene is getting through despite FEMA, not because of it. And because of this the people no longer want FEMA around. I can’t blame them when a bunch of construction workers with heavy equipment can rescue more people in a couple of hours than FEMA and those they contract with can manage in a week.

It’s poor customer service. The people are not getting better transportation from the department of transportation, better education from the department of education, and so on.

Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.

They’re not necessarily “crazy”. I think they’re wrong in the sense that these groups don’t wish them to suffer. But at the same time the deep state serves the deep state and is mostly a jobs program for elites who are otherwise unemployable who have no idea how to get things done. They follow procedures off cliffs because they are not skilled enough to know how things actually work so they can’t or won’t bend the rules to get things moving in the right direction.

It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.

Whether you admit that, people do believe it is nefarious, or at least speak as if they genuinely believe it. And that it is organized.

Agencies are built to be standardized, both due to logistics of coordinating between agencies and at scale, and to try to prevent both actual and perceived bribery or kickbacks.

They’re not necessarily “crazy”.

I would apply that term to a Trump supporter that tries to assassinate Trump. Unless it was some 4D chess move to pretend to try to assassinate Trump to give Trump a polling boost.

I've found myself in a lower managerial position of a large corporation. I've had my share of processes that are meant to add traceability to both the tasks themselves and my workload, and the incremental increase in the number of steps added. I hate it, but I'm not throwing away my job over it.

I’m not going to deny that at least some people think it’s nefarious. It’s just that it’s much more likely that FEMA is bean counting supplies gathered by other charities before letting them through to satisfy a process that’s in their handbook. Standardizing is generally okay. But then again this is a situation where time loss means dead bodies and everybody knows it. It’s not exactly the same as managing accounts in an office. The time spent adding traceability to a process in an office job and even using that to trace that information isn’t going to cause much of a problem because you have the luxury of as much time as you need to do that. If the cost of traceability is death, then I think honestly it’s a bit more critical to push back and say “why is it important to have a complete inventory of what First Baptist Church of Asheville is distributing when that will delay aid by a whole day and people will die without food?” Sure, there are some bits that you need to hold the line on, but trying to follow a checklist to the letter in a disaster zone just adds delay where none was needed.

Do you remember when in December 2023, Poland finally voted out the the far-right PiS party and moderate Europeans rejoiced to see Tusk become the prime minister?

Well, it seems that this joy might have been a bit premature. You see, Poland is currently being flooded by migrants from Belarus. Per the BBC:

Dozens continue to attempt to cross the border daily.

Dozens a day might add up to ten or twenty thousand over a year. Of course, most of them don't want to stay in Poland in the first place:

Many of the migrants who cross into the country from Belarus do not stay, instead entering Germany.

The population of Poland is around 38M, and there a about 1M refugees from Ukraine in Poland without civilization ending, but the migrants via Belarus seem to tax the Polish state beyond the breaking limit.

Thus, the ultima ratio of a state fighting for its survival:

“One of the elements of the migration strategy will be the temporary territorial suspension of the right to asylum,” the prime minister said. “I will demand this, I will demand recognition in Europe for this decision,” he added.

There are some things a government or legislature can suspend at will. If Tusk decides to suspend a civil servant or a subsidiary for farmers, that is his prerogative.

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.

Obviously, I am not suggesting that all the refugees entering via Belarus should get asylum. Likely, almost none of them qualify. But they should have a right to make their request and get a speedy rejection, followed by an appeal speedily denied by a judge and a plane ticket back to their country of origin.

Yes, this will mean that for every plane ticket that Belarus buys (or makes some migrant pay for), the EU will also need to pay for a plane ticket, but realistically that is the only way out of the situation. We do not want to compete with Belarus in "who is better at terrorizing delusional migrants", because that game can only be won by shooting more unarmed civilians than Belarus is willing to shoot.

This is feasible because the GDP of the EU is much higher than that of Russia (which also likes to spent its income on other stuff, such as killing Ukrainians). We can match them plane ticket for plane ticket. There are places where the number of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers reaches numbers where one might discuss how one can handle all the people. The border between Poland and Belarus is not such a place.

Barely a year ago Agnieszka Holland, in her movie, was chastizing Poles for their backward preference for a secure border. The elite camp currently in power enthusiastically nodded along, plebs chafed. Somehow I don't buy this change of tune.

In any case, it comes down to our inept attempts at destabilizing Belarus regime. Maybe we're getting enough results to justify the costs of this border issue, I doubt it, I think the window of opportunity is gone.

aren't the pushbacks justified, as they're not trying to enter legally via the border crossing, but run through the woods to cross illegally, without getting involved in the asylum process? they don't want to make any requests, they want to pass over to germany or wherever. why should any country let them in? I agree with ppl emphasizing, that securing the borders is one of the basic reasons for the state to even exist. migrants are used as a weapon by belarus and exploited by smugglers. by accepting them we just encourage more to come.

as they're not trying to enter legally via the border crossing, but run through the woods to cross illegally, without getting involved in the asylum process?

Ideally, people could just apply for asylum in EU embassies worldwide, and would be sheltered in there until their claim is processed, with a plane ticket to EU for anyone whose application has been granted. In that case, entering illegally would be frowned upon.

Realistically, we don't do that because it would make it too easy to apply for asylum. Most asylum seekers can not simply board a plane to EU and make their request at the passport control, because we explicitly penalize airlines who transport such passengers. I am quite sure that if the migrants under discussion were walking to a border station on the Polish/Belarusian border and made their request for asylum there, they would not be let on EU soil.

If we close all legal pathways to the EU, and also say that people who have entered the EU illegally do not have a right to claim asylum, then we have de facto abolished asylum in the EU.

@MadMonzer referred to article 31 of the 1951 refugee convention:

  1. The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article i, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. [...]

Granted, making the case that your life was in danger due to your protected status in Belarus will be a hard case to make, but it is not impossible.

There is, of course, a third solution- deport them to some third country which is such a shithole that it can’t stop it, and publicize this fact widely. South Sudan is a much much worse place to live than Iraq which is a worse place to live than Belarus which is a worse place to live than the EU. Even if the south Sudanese government has to be bought off, they’re so poor it’s cheap.

Australia does this with Nauru and Papua New Guinea. There's a policy where no asylum seeker who arrives by boat will be resettled in Australia. Europe however is short on unpleasant pseudo-colonies these days, there's no politically reliable, nearby, unpleasant place they could be sent. Maybe France could set up a facility in French Guyana?

There's a lot of poor, cheap to buy off countries in sub saharan Africa, and Europe can afford a lot more plane tickets than Belarus.

Just look at the Rwanda solution, Britain's laughable attempt to emulate Australian policies. Subsaharan African countries are quite proficient at exploiting European aid providers and the British ran the project in a clownish and unserious way, the whole thing collapsed in a heap of scandal and delays.

This isn't a matter of cash, it's a political issue. The reason Belarus is using these tactics is because they have structural political advantages and know it. Belarusian human rights lawyers either operate outside the country or sleep with both eyes open.

In Europe, human rights lawyers and NGOs run wild. The EU coats everything in a suffocating layer of law. It is possible to break through like Denmark has. But the question is fundamentally about willpower and organization, about the internal conflicts within the Union and within individual countries. Belarus isn't outspending Europe, they're inducing division.

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.

I thought that we are beyond this point already. At least since COVID, everybody knows that rights, including human rights can be suspended at will, sometimes based on unilateral decision of governing bodies for what constitutes a crisis. We now hype everything ranging from climate change through mental health or obesity or anything else as crisis, this is the feature and not a bug. It was actually one of my direct examples to many people during COVID - what prevents government to declare some arbitrary crisis and act with heavy hand?

Also this is nothing new, human rights were undermined constantly. Look at declaration of human rights and let's use Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Waterboarding is widely deemed as torture and yet it was used by CIA in their War on Terror and to my knowledge nobody was punished for it.

Another one is of course article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

This one is dead, governments routinely spy on peoples electronic correspondence and ignore their privacy. And it seems that nobody gives a shit.

Of course Article 14 is also very sketchy:

Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

This is my favorite one when I am talking with progressives who are supposedly staunch defenders of human rights. It is interesting to watch how many people are then using legalese to weasel out of this one.

Asylum is part of Article 14:

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Again, many people may bog this down into legal battles of who is asylum seeker, if Belarus is not safe country for many such people trying to cross Polish borders etc. Call me cynical, but I do not see how this should be some barrier nobody will cross.

For a moment I thought Poland was being flooded by Belarusian citizens fleeing Lukashenko's government and was wondering why they were complaining about what was clearly some divine plan to make Poland great again by heaping ruin on its neighbors one by one and rejuvenating the Polish population with millions of their Slavic brethren, but I see now that these are in fact the usual migrants.

The way I see it, we can group people who want to move to a new country into three main categories: highly-skilled individuals that basically everyone agrees should be let in, people fleeing active warzones that a majority (albeit a smaller one) agrees should be let in for humanitarian reasons, and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better (you probably want a few of these people around to do certain low-skill jobs). The latter group is by far the largest and is what causes the most problems, since if allowed to move freely with open borders they will demographically swamp your population in a way the first two groups will not.

Since any reasonable immigration policy would be able to distinguish between "real" and "fake" refugees, I support maintaining a list of "ongoing conflicts from which people fleeing may claim asylum" (most likely at the national level, allowing for variation depending on financial ability and local tolerances) and deporting anyone who can't prove they are from one of those places, ideally in an interview with some other former refugee from that area hired to screen them and who would be justifiably mad at e.g. some Nigerian trying to pass themselves off as a Syrian. Perhaps some version of this has been tried locally in the past, but clearly not at a scale commensurate with the challenges we face nowadays.

and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better

I'm modestly surprised I haven't seen the trolls of 4chan and similar try to sell this as "Zionism". It seems like it'd be effective because the term is very negatively regarded in (far-)left circles, but also kinda applies if you squint just a little bit: these are outsiders with no recent history coming unrequested to this "Promised Land" -- the American (immigration) Dream has a pretty heavy religious component between "City on a Hill" and "Streets of Gold" -- without regard to how this impacts the current residents or their long-term self-determination.

I'm not really that far right or fond of trolling, but it seems in-line with It's-Okay-to-be-White-posters.

That…doesn’t make any sense. “Zion” has a specific meaning: it’s a hill where David built the original kingdom of Israel. What’s the equivalent to an economic migrant?

The idea of a mythic "promised land" is broader than a specific hill in Israel. Lots of (early) American narrative references biblical history around the concept, from the place names ("Bethlehem, Pennsylvania", and even more obvious in heavily-Mormon Utah, which features Zion National Park and a Jordan River) to the idea of fleeing persecution to practice religion safely. And it's not just White Americans -- even MLK referenced the (more or less abstract idea) in one of his most famous speeches:

I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.

I don't think it's hard to see parallels with the American immigrant narrative -- consider "The New Colossus" inscription on the Statue of Liberty, although perhaps the Jewish tradition of interpreting the history and text there varies substantially.

Okay, but for a random Muslim sneaking from Belarus to Poland to Germany, or a random Nicaraguan looking for a job in SoCal, there’s nothing religious about it. Is there?

Not strictly, I suppose. Although the acceptance of "life will be better if I can move myself over there" without necessary direct evidence strikes me as at least a bit of a cargo cult mentality, it's probably not religion per se.

Although the acceptance of "life will be better if I can move myself over there" without necessary direct evidence

What makes you think there isn't direct evidence?

It'd be one thing if we were talking about middle class Indians piling into an inordinately expensive and crowded Toronto apartment and a shitty mall degree. But I think most asylum seekers to Europe are probably right that it's a better deal.

Mmhmm.

Looking a little further…it might actually be mostly Iraqi Kurds? That’s not a terrible fit, and I can see the irony,

But I suppose drawing attention to the fact that Belarus is apparently encouraging the problem wouldn’t be as funny to channers.

It looks like this is actually a fourth category: people Belarus has lured into making the attempt?? I’m left with a lot of questions.

I’m not sure they fit the usual categories. Maybe 2 if they really are persecuted Kurds. Maybe 3 otherwise. But I have to wonder how many would be there if Belarus wasn’t subsidizing them.

ideally in an interview with some other former refugee from that area hired to screen them

What if they are from two different sides of the civil war? What if one of the sides fractures into opposing factions? You would have to implement a tracking system to ensure your willing helpers are not lying to you.

Setting up a protocol to verify which language an asylum seeker can understand does not seem so difficult. Tape recorders should be a sufficient tech level for that.

“Glory to Arstotzka.”

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will.

Then your state is not sovereign. Most people want to, and believe that, they live in a sovereign state, and the cynical abuse of asylum is one thing that will force the issue. Either they can, and will, suspend asylum because Poland is in fact sovereign over its territory and borders, or they simply cannot, in which case they are ruled from Brussels. Poles, naturally, don't want that.

The sooner the system of asylum breaks somewhere, the sooner it breaks everywhere, and I hope to see it this year or next, not this decade or next.

Your view of a sovereign state is antiquated, it seems to stem from the days of Lois XIV.

Modern states are very much limited in what they can do. Internally by these pesky little things called constitutions (some of which give rights even to non-citizens!), and externally by international laws and treaties.

If Poland wants to exit the EU and renounce the 1951 refugee convention along with all other international laws, there is a process for that.

The reason modern states are so limited is that they aren't sovereign, they are clients of an empire.

There is no such thing as international law, because law can only exist with a monopoly on force that grants the monopolist sovereignty. Sovereign states are in anarchy, and if they have normalized processes of interacting with each other there is an ultimate authority in those matters who actually is sovereign over them and itself lives in anarchy.

In practice, the British Empire (who invented the concept of "international law") routinely broke its own norms when convenient, and so does its successor in the United States. This should tell you that they aren't confederal norms formed by spontaneous consensus, but imperial commandments that aren't opposable.

The process doesn't matter, sovereign is he who can decide the exception to that process. Just because Western propagandists have decided to rebrand the concept of sovereignty with something that isn't it doesn't make the concept spontaneously vanish.

I honestly don't even see how it's in America's interest to enforce this current status quo on Europe. Would America have blinked if Merkel never changed her mind on Syrian refugees? My impression is that most Americans don't really care and even the atlanticists have other concerns.

It doesn't seem that different from the same tangle of laws and ideology that makes solving the homeless problem in the US so intractable, which certainly can't be blamed on America's hegemon.

Imo it's more correct to say that we have an empire with an international elite that has already mostly supplanted the US, but which still has the strongest overlap with the american elite. For this elite, any and all immigration restrictions are a hassle - they want the freedom to both travel and live anywhere, at the drop of the hat - and they have minimal personal contact with any of the negative repercussions of open borders, either. Due to this, they think that most negative stories are at the very least greatly exaggerated, if not outright fabricated. And they have a whole moral system build up that makes it easier for them to believe this! As well as the money to actively insulate themselves if need be.

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will.

The right to asylum has already been suspended in the EU, the catch is that it is suspended in favor of the refugees. They get all the protections of the asylum laws, they follow none of the obligations.

The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.

The laws say the asylum seeker must be fleeing persecution or serious harm in their country of origin - almost none of them are.

The laws say that asylum seekers must be returned to the first safe EU country they arrived in for said country to decide asylum - this never happens.

The laws say asylum seekers must return when their case is denied - almost none of them do.

If others can selectively apply the asylum laws why can't Poland? What justification does the EU have for enforcing this law when the EU itself doesn't follow it?

Yes, this will mean that for every plane ticket that Belarus buys (or makes some migrant pay for), the EU will also need to pay for a plane ticket, but realistically that is the only way out of the situation. We do not want to compete with Belarus in "who is better at terrorizing delusional migrants", because that game can only be won by shooting more unarmed civilians than Belarus is willing to shoot.

This is a false dichotomy between "give migrants more money" and "shoot migrants". Might I humbly suggest a third option, which is to simply not offer rights and money to outsiders in the first place?

The right to asylum has already been suspended in the EU, the catch is that it is suspended in favor of the refugees. They get all the protections of the asylum laws, they follow none of the obligations.

Governments are vastly more powerful than most humans. This is why we limit what governments can do to people, even in contexts where the individuals often don't play by the rules. For example, even if most criminal defendants are guilty, we still want trials to follow due process.

Of course a lot of people claiming asylum in European countries are in fact economic migrants. And of course many of them will not be swiftly deported. But none of that affects the rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum.

If others can selectively apply the asylum laws why can't Poland? What justification does the EU have for enforcing this law when the EU itself doesn't follow it?

As an analogy, taxes are a legal way for a government to get funds from its citizens. Suppose that one European country refuses to collect taxes from someone. Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.

This is a false dichotomy between "give migrants more money" and "shoot migrants". Might I humbly suggest a third option, which is to simply not offer rights and money to outsiders in the first place?

I was not saying 'give money to migrants'. I was saying 'spend money on migrants', which is different. At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU. Given the general regard for human rights in Belarus, it seems safe to assume that these migrants can be put under enough pressure that they believe that their lives will depend on reaching the EU, and risk their lives in the process. Under such circumstances, push-backs are ugly affairs.

As an analogy, taxes are a legal way for a government to get funds from its citizens. Suppose that one European country refuses to collect taxes from someone. Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.

I think a better analogy would be if the EU agreed to set a minimum tax rate for the EU budget and all signed a treaty that said as much. What happens when, say, Germany decides to not enforce the minimum tax? What gave Germany license to suspend their treaty obligations to pay tax? Why should Poland listen to the EU when the EU tries to selectively enforce the tax treaty? Ok now what gives Germany the right to not ensure fair asylum claims (a fair asylum claim means actually getting them kicked out when they do not qualify)? What gives the EU the right to selectively enforce a migration treaty on Poland?

I will also point out that the EU, and every country, already has a license to just confiscate property at gunpoint. It is called taxes. What happens to those who do not pay taxes? Men with guns come to confiscate their property. Yes the payee generally gets a good deal (civilization) out of this. But force or threat of force is the driver behind the transfer. Confiscating property at gunpoint is what taxes are, EU countries already have this license.

I was not saying 'give money to migrants'. I was saying 'spend money on migrants', which is different. At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU. Given the general regard for human rights in Belarus, it seems safe to assume that these migrants can be put under enough pressure that they believe that their lives will depend on reaching the EU, and risk their lives in the process. Under such circumstances, push-backs are ugly affairs.

The migrants all made a conscious and free choice to go to Belarus, and then to either sneak in or lie to the EU about what danger they are in back in their origin country. If any danger to the migrants exists in Belarus it is because they choose to put themselves in danger. The migrants put themselves in this situation, if the EU wants to tell itself it has a legal obligation to fly them back then fine. But I think how it is now is a bad system because those that stand to benefit from abuse of the system (illegal migrants) do not currently pay the full costs for that abuse (getting back home), so they should change the law. It would seem ideal to me (and Poland) by scrapping the right of asylum entirely.

I figure that a lot of people on the anti-refugee side do not actually recognise any "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum", and think of asylum as a privilege rather than a right. An acceptance regime that produces false negatives is therefore not perceived as anything like robbing people of their rights.

To be clear - I do recognize "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum". I just think that right is legitimate when applied to Olga and her kids from Ukraine, and illegitimate when applied to Mohamad and his cousin/wife from Pakistan.

I may be one of those people, but I do consider all rights as privileges. Right means entitlement absent of any duty, which means somebody else has duty providing you with said right. Even original US set of rights in American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man gives government duties through law to to enforce these rights privileges.

In this case right for asylum means nothing else other than duty of you fellow citizens to accommodate foreigners. If society as a whole refuses these duties, then said "right" is dead. Duties related to rights are not enforced by god who strikes you with lightning and they are not enshrined in trajectories of planets in Solar system. They are social conventions and they are direct results of what duties citizens are willing and capable to undertake - we have all seen what happened to human rights during COVID for example.

That's not the issue. I recognize that some claims to asylum are legit, but I don't think these claims should enable mass population transfers. I also think such a mass-transfer is a greater violation of rights than a denial of a valid asylum claim.

Governments are vastly more powerful than most humans. This is why we limit what governments can do to people

Where? Governments assert broad rights to deploy mass surveillance, control speech, terrorize people with the police for political disagreement, even arrest people on completely arbitrary grounds if they're deemed to be enough trouble.

For example, even if most criminal defendants are guilty, we still want trials to follow due process.

Of course a lot of people claiming asylum in European countries are in fact economic migrants. And of course many of them will not be swiftly deported. But none of that affects the rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum.

There's nothing in the constitutions and refugee conventions you keep citing, that would prevent a European government from refusing entry to African "refugees", while following due process.

Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.

All taxes are "confiscating property at gunpoint", and countries clearly can decide their tax policy.

At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU.

This complaint seems a bit incoherent. I'm constantly being told that immigration is a benefit to the host country, how can that be annoying?

As much as I don't like it at a very visceral level, a state unwilling to enforce it's rules by force has, in practice, no rules at all. In modern times we seem to have acquired a very Banksian view on enforcing laws in ways that I don't think we have the material wealth to back up, or even that such a level of wealth is necessarily possible. We like fining people who can't (and won't) pay anyway and feeling good that we've phased out "cruel" punishments that might dissuade anyone not at least middle class.

If you are referring to the Culture series by Ian Banks I have not read it, so the reference goes over my head.

If you are unsatisfied with his view on laws, might I suggest Heinlein? I find it more realistic.

Major Reid paused to touch the face of an old-fashioned watch, "reading" its hands. "The period is almost over and we have yet to determine the moral reason for our success in governing ourselves. Now continued success is never a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what itis , not what we want it to be. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives — such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will! — the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force ."

Interestingly, even Banks doesn't see mass migration as a feature of the Culture.

It's always fun to see just what a person given free reign to create their personal utopia leaves out or insists on. Banks stacks the deck with basically infinite material wealth but then goes back and insists that certain cultural traits (also including sex-swapping and universal promiscuity) are apparently necessary

In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks too much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods are intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest, nor turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture. Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part of the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly good reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested parties in the locality).

A Few Notes on the Culture

YMMV on whether Banks is letting himself off the hook with "it's colonialism". And why.

Well, that’s the tension, isn’t it? The Culture wants to spread its memes, but one of those memes says they shouldn’t. All their material excuses are gone. Contact is their way to either resolve or dodge the contradiction, depending on how cynical Banks was feeling about America that year.

So “it’s too much like colonialism” is precisely in character. Any intervention has to be laundered through appeals to principles, plausible deniability, and maybe a historical study.

The justification for allowing immigration for humanitarian reasons is arguably stronger than the justification for the Culture's rampant interference in everyone's business (to often disastrous ends). It certainly fits an individualist ethos better; the individual is choosing to accept the Culture instead of unaccountable Minds enforcing their will on their entire society through often covert means.

It's "in character" in the sense that it's how I expect a utopian leftist who wants to preserve a certain,um, culture to frame things to escape their discomfort with being able to solve everyone's problems but not being willing to sacrifice the specific character of his own society (you see this today with claims of "brain drain").

I'm just uncertain how seriously to take it as a purely principled position.

The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.

Slightly oddly, the Refugee Convention doesn't say anything about applying for asylum at all - it assumes that everyone already knows who the refugees are and that they are already in their destination countries. This makes sense given the historical context, which is that the Refugee Convention was written to cover the specific situation of post-WW2 refugees who couldn't be repatriated for various reasons. The Refugee Convention was never fit for purpose as the a forward-looking instrument and the body of refugee law that has built up around it is incoherent as a result. I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.

The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.

I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.

Looking forward to the post, and best of luck with building up that immune system!

So it was written for the world wars specifically, by countries which were only beginning to establish a “rules based international order,” when the technological gulf between the first and third worlds was at its peak. And then expanded to everyone by the 1967 amendment. That explains a lot.

The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.

My understanding is from the below link, which states (emphasis mine):

What is the Dublin Regulation? The Dublin Regulation determines which country is responsible for considering an application for protection. An asylum seeker can only have his or her application considered in one of the Dublin countries.

The main rule is that an application will be processed by the first Dublin country the asylum seeker comes to. If the asylum seeker applies for protection in another Dublin country, he or she will be sent back to the country that has already considered his/her application or that is responsible for considering the application.

https://www.udi.no/en/word-definitions/cooperation-under-the-dublin-regulation/#:~:text=The%20Dublin%20Regulation%20is%20an,the%20collaboration%20as%20Dublin%20countries.

Maybe I am misreading, so I encourage you to post on it.

Exactly - the Dublin regulation says that if an asylum seeker illegally moves from one EU country to another, then they can be returned and, critically, the EU country with primary responsibility is obliged to take them back. If a genuine refugee, they don't cease to be a refugee (the country with primary responsibility considers their application for asylum in the same way as if they hadn't crossed the second border), and they can't be sent back to a dangerous country. There is a similar arrangement between the US and Canada. There could probably be a similar arrangement between the US and Mexico if the US offered the Mexicans a large enough bribe - probably in the form of a large number of visas for Mexican citizens.

The reason why the US can't just deport every Salvadorean asylum seeker who entered through Mexico back to Mexico is that Mexico is a sovereign state and doesn't have to accept them. A huge part of the problem with modern-day refugee law is that every country with a lot of refugees inside its borders is by default trying to get them to illegally enter another country so they aren't their problem any more. (The reason why the US can't just deport them back to El Salvador is a matter of American laws implementing the Refugee Convention).

Involuntary relocations of refugees from one safe country to another (negotiated between the two countries) were a common part of immediately-post-WW2 practice, and are explicitly contemplated by the Refugee Convention in certain situations.

So declaring these people to by blanket not be real refugees is totally possible?

Of course it is. We can declare anyone to be anything. We could declare them to be attack helicopters and ship them off to the front lines in Ukraine. But we would be lying if we did that.

Under both the ordinary English and the technical legal meaning of "refugee", a refugee does not cease to be a refugee if they illegally cross a border from one safe country to another - they just become a refugee who has committed the crime of illegal immigration. The countries that ratified the Refugee Convention said that we were taking "deportation to a dangerous country" off the list of possible punishments for refugees who commit ordinary crimes. (The Refugee Convention includes an exception for refugees guilty of a "particularly serious crime", although judicial interpretations of ECHR Article 3 and, as far as I am aware, the US Constitution don't).

You can declare that you are not going to grant any kind of legal long-term residence to refugees who illegally enter your country from another safe country (and the UK tried to do this) but it won't be effective unless you can find another safe country to deport them to (as the UK tried and failed to do with Rwanda), or violate the Refugee Convention by deporting them to an unsafe country.

I mean, refugee doesn’t have an actual definition, declaring Kurds crossing the border from Belarus to not be real refugees isn’t a lie.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats