This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think it is entirely reasonable to hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas. If I held the Israel government only to the standard of Hamas (whom I consider murderous thugs who need to be wiped from the face of the earth), then I would have to concede that it would be a good thing if NATO invaded Israel and occupied them for a few decades until they learned better.
Per WP, there have been about 70k Gazans and 1k IDF killed since Israel responded to the Oct-7 attacks. Let's assume that 40k of the Gazans were civilians as a ballpark number.
The ratio at which your own soldiers die relative to enemy civilians is reflective of the value system of the society waging the war, what the factor before the count in the utility function is for enemy civilians and your soldiers.
Approximately, the relation of death tolls should reflect the quotient of these values. (The distribution of tactical options is also relevant, of course, if you only ever have to decide between two of your soldiers and one civilian, you might end up killing a zillion civilians and none of your soldiers despite valuing them equally, but I think it is unlikely that this distorts the effects too much in reality.)
A toy example would be that you are harassed by an enemy sniper in a building (back when Gaza had buildings), which is also expected to be inhabited by civilians. You can either call an airstrike, thereby killing an estimated X civilians, or storm the building with infantry, losing an estimated Y soldiers in the process.
I am not saying that you need to value enemy civilians as much as your troops. Few armies would gamble a soldier to rescue an enemy civilian (probably non-allied civilian would be a more appropriate phrasing) in a double or nothing scenario.
But if you have 40 civilans dead for every one of your soldiers, then it becomes reasonable to suppose that you have a callous disregard for the lives of the civilian population, and that is the point where the IDF is right now.
Yes, basically this. If anything, the level of care given to variously 'friendly', 'neutral', or 'hostile' civilians is one of the most direct indicators of how morally the society is treating war. No war is perfect, civilian casualties are inevitable, even in significant numbers. But surely some conclusions can be drawn from the decisions made, both at a tactical level (e.g. what rules of engagement are you following, and what risk tolerance do you have, how high a confidence level do you require) and a general level (e.g. how often does Israel use bombs larger than necessary, how much exposure do you accept in terms of boots on the ground, and so forth). None of this should be construed to mean that I don't understand those real trade-offs.
Pre-war, what I'm trying to say is they had struck some kind of balance. While you could try and judge that on its own, we could be a little lazy and just call it a local, contextual "baseline" level of care. And it was already pretty lopsided. I realize 10 to 1 is an oversimplification, but that's how it is. Just picking out a google result from 2014, not fully randomly but partially (googled IDF riot deaths in a 2014-2016 date span, first relevant result with figures), an article has this to say:
Note that despite the large number of rockets, few people are typically killed as a result because of Iron Dome (whether you think the rockets are normally launched because of this, or in spite of this, is a separate question). But look at those overall numbers for a second. A series of highly emotional murders (cycle of violence) sparks riots which sparks a mini-war. And at our snapshot in time, we have 32-25 dead Israelis/non-Palestinians, and over 700 Palestinians dead. That's a 20x ratio in this case! Not uncommon for the region.
Now let it sink in for a second that the current ratio, as the result of the now almost 2 year war, is up to 35x. I know numbers can lie, but... I really think that the figure should at the very least offer a strong hint as to what's going on, yeah? This seems to align with the anecdotes we get about IDF decisions about use of force on almost all levels. They are decisions, at the end of the day, not inevitabilities, at least within a certain range. Yes, I know the numbers are fuzzy, and you can slice it different ways. There's wiggle room. But historically for modern conflicts, these are pretty high numbers (Gazan density makes exact comparisons tricky) as a quick glance at military vs civilian casualties in recent wars such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan, even Syria over the course of the whole war, can according to some estimates get under 1x, though if you consider 20k Hamas fighters killed as is the Israeli claim, the ratio dips to a "mere" 2-3x or so military to civilian. Again I don't want to oversell these numbers, but the general trends combined with what I've read (from both sides) about current Israeli tactics and strategy seems to point pretty strongly on the side of callousness. The sad truth is a situation of "so what if they are using five human shields, kill them all," like the infamous trolley problem, varies in response to how sympathetically you view the human shields - dare I say you can actually use it as a rough barometer?
More options
Context Copy link
No offense, but this is insane moon-logic to me, and I need help grokking it. It's completely alien to the traditional logic of international law - “it is impossible to visualize the conduct of hostilities in which one side would be bound by rules of warfare without benefitting from them, and the other side would benefit from rules of warfare without being bound by them.” (H. Lauterpacht, “The Limits of Operation of the Law of War” (1953) 30 British Year Book of Int’l Law 206, 212).
However, Israel factually is bound by rules of warfare without benefitting from them; while Hamas factually does benefit from rules of warfare without being bound by them ('there is a class of citizen that laws bind but do not protect, and then there is one that is protected by laws that do not bind').
Note that in the West, citizens in the latter class know it, and thus are far more likely to support Palestine- because not doing so is a refutation of their rights to that special protection in their own societies. Queers for Palestine is perfectly coherent through this lens.
The actual solution is to simply withdraw the protection that society has- if they don't want to follow the laws of war, they must lose the protection of those laws. Laws against genocide are there to protect a society that goes to war and loses from being slaughtered to the last; if a society wants to go to war and not fight that way, the law against genocide must then no longer apply. There is no right to the self-determination of a people without first respecting their right to self-destruction.
More options
Context Copy link
I think that this hinges a lot on the distinction between soldiers and civilians. An enemy soldier for a side which does not respect the Geneva conventions is owed nothing more than a quick death when captured.
By contrast, non-combatants have a (limited) right not to be injured by war no matter whose side they are nominally on. If a bunch of neolithic tribe members were isekaied to the trenches of WW1, they would be entitled to protection, you can not just say "obviously their tribe is not a signatory to the Geneva conventions, so it is fine to bomb them".
It is hard to fight an enemy on equal footing when you are bound by some moral constraints, but often, either the moral constraints are not all that hampering (allowing advancing Jewish GI's to carry out mass shootings against German civilians in retaliation for what the Nazi's did would have been wrong, but it would also not have given the Allies much of an edge), or the fight is very much not on equal footing.
If a police unit is trying to catch a band of letter bombers, they have a lot of advances over their enemies. Sure, there might occasionally be situations where the best tactical option would be for them to send bombs to the band themselves, but they can still win without that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or perhaps your enemy is good at hiding amongst civilians, but bad at killing their opponents.
Keep in mind how many rockets were launched by Hamas from Gaza against Israel with the intent to kill civilians. Just looking at the deaths without considering the causation of the numbers leads to poor judgements. Context matters.
You can't assign immorality to the side with greater competence against the side with demonstrated malicious intent with a low success rates.
Let's put it another way. How many Israeli combatants died in the recent war with Iran? How many Iranian civilians?
Good luck dividing by zero.
The sheer malice of Hamas is pretty much how they convinced me that they should be utterly destroyed.
I think that in the missile exchanges with Iran, there was little in the way of trading risk to soldiers vs risk to civilians.
I also believe that in the context of Gaza, a significant fraction of civilian deaths are the result of decisions with such trade-offs. Infantry is vastly less deadly to civilians than bombs are, but of infantry is also much more at risk from Hamas than bomber pilots are.
I agree; Hamas is just not a "normal" actor that can be viewed the way an opposing side usually is. Unfortunately, the same is true of the Gaza-based Palestinians. There's a reason Hamas has been in control the way they have been, and some of their rivals are just as bloodthirsty. There's not much room for compromise under these circumstances, where on average Israel cares more about the lives of Palestinians than Hamas does.
In the missile exchanges with Iran, Israel signed up for accepting that their interceptions would not be perfect and some level of civilian casualties would be suffered. As it turned out, they lost far fewer than they were prepared for (I don't know what the number was that they projected, or that they were willing to accept). Israel was prepared, reportedly, to put boots on the ground to take out nuclear sites if the U.S. did not lend a helping hand. That would have placed some hundreds, if not thousands, of troops in harm's way.
The IAF also did not lose a single manned combat aircraft, which beat their expectations.
Keep in mind you're comparing "moral infantryman with overmatch in urban warfare" to "precision bombing at scale." Against an opponent with basically the world's best tunnel network.
I do not know enough about how exactly the Israeli military has conducted its operations in Gaza to make a confident judgement. But from my experience in the US Army, the Israelis are clearly trying pretty hard to minimize collateral damage. As hard as the US military does? I'm not sure.
To roughly paraphrase a sentiment I saw on twitter, every dead Israeli soldier is a blood sacrifice for the Palestinian people.
This whole conflict is immensely frustrating and I don't know how far Israel would have to go before I was forced to reconsider my support for them. But I do think one must keep in mind that Israel had to fight several wars of survival against pretty overwhelming odds, that the Arab countries maintain the identity of Palestinian Arabs (as opposed to Levantine) as a useful weapon, and that making forced deportation of a population (i.e. ethnic cleansing) a crime against humanity kinda makes it impossible to deal with a persistently hostile group in any "legal" way.
What's worse, forcing the migration of a population one is at risk of continual war with, or killing them war by war?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, you absolutely can assign greater culpability to the more effective side.
I have a new kitten who is just three months old, and a one year old cat. The kitten loves attacking the bigger cat, but I have to be very careful to keep him from hurting her.
That being said, as Hamas’s intent is seemingly “genocide all Israelis,” I do have very little sympathy for them.
You cannot do so without, as your cat example demonstrates, having a holistic understanding of all the relevant factors at play.
The proposed loss ratio standard is a metric worth considering, but it is hardly a good single metric. If Hamas was better at fighting, more Israeli soldiers and civilians would be dead because they have tried, but not succeeded most of the time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If the enemy sniper somehow is always accompanied by 40 civilians, which one of us is callously disregarding their lives - me or the sniper? It seems pretty clear which one of us would prefer there to be fewer civilians on the site and which one would like more.
Unfortunately, if your enemy does not give a fuck about civilians, that does not mean that you do not have to give a fuck either. If a police department solved a hostage situation by bombing the building and killing everyone inside, they could claim that actually who was really responsible for the civilian deaths was the hostage taker. Still, it would reflect horribly on them.
As an aside, I don't recall that the IDF has made much of a credible move to get the civilians out of the Gaza war. If they had offered a ICRC run shelter where the IDF kept the peace to every Gazan who did not want to die for Hamas when they started invading, that would have updated me a lot towards "the IDF does their best to keep civilians safe". Instead, they told them "we are fighting here, go there" sometimes, but were generally unwilling to allow them into places where Israel would be responsible for their needs.
A police department's job is to protect the civilians of their state. An army's job is not to protect the civilians of other states.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link