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Islam was kind of ok when appropriated by syncretists who appreciated the latitude offered by simply being Not The Dominant. Mutazilites, Sufiism, Ahmadism, Hui Islam.
This of course all went to shit when the Saudis leveraged their stewardship of Mecca and the Aramco money to turbocharge Wahabism. Maintaining local control by exploiting Islam is one thing, actively exporting it is another. Salafi dominance was only checked by matching ultraconservative evolutions in Hanafi and even Shafi subschools like Deobandism or Dawah. Its an arms race for Who Is The Best Muslim and governments that profited from islamism as a wedge issue now are struggling to tame the beast. Every country that tried to distract from internal failings by promoting religious revivalism always falls prey to even more extreme versions of the religion, and that becomes an impossible trap to escape. Failing regimes are propped up by external aid because the donors suffer more if the regime collapses, not because of the worthiness of the regime. Pakistan getting 40bn of World Bank loans is because its implosion will massively destabilize Western Europe through refugees and nuclear proliferation, not because a milirary dictatorship surviving off Islamist revivalism is a stable polity worth investing in.
Who would spin up this? Israel's current western opponents certainly would not unless it was the US that attacked Israel.
Not at all. If the international community was neutral, all the Gazans would die of their own inability to produce any food or trade of value. They only exist as an entity because of large influxes of foreign aid.
Poor Yazidi and Kurds. Its like the classic joke: Hitler announces a press conference announcing he will kill a million jews, romani and clowns. The reporters ask what did the clown do to deserve this.
The lot of a minority in an Arab state is to suffer indignities daily and attempts at forced conversions regularly, with the occasional pogrom for good measure. The lack of visible (to western eyes) discrimination is entirely due to subject populations being wholly subjugated or externinated. There are no more assyrians or chaldeans or zoroastrians, but because they are all gone there is 0 discrimination against them. If there is 0 discrimination it is 100% tolerance. I am logik.
Pretty much the only factor fueling this whole thing was that the party leader and MEP [Péter Magyar] was pictured shaking hands with the ‘lady’ during some public events.
So is this guy named the equivalent of "Senator John America"?
Yes there is no famine. The gazans are not starving, distribution is uneven and that is causing likely malnutrition and food insecurity but not famine. Famine is a loaded term to evoke sympathetic terms, so lets use the famine cases and population effects.
https://adst.org/2014/05/the-famine-in-biafra-usaids-response-to-the-nigerian-civil-war/
Biafra war:
1967 prewar population: 13-15m
Deaths attributable to famine: 1-3m
Percentage: 8-25%
https://www.refugeesinternational.org/events-and-testimony/accountability-for-starvation-deaths-in-tigray-six-months-after-the-war/ Tigray War: 2020 prewar population: 6m Dearhs attributable to famine: 150-600k Percentage: 2.5%-10%
Now lets look at Gaza: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/24/death-toll-from-starvation-in-gaza-rises-to-115-as-israeli-attacks-continue 2023 prewar population 2023 prewar population: 1.9-.2m Deaths attributable to famine: 111 Percentage: rounding error. Literally.
If the argument is caloric insufficiency, goods restriction, etc, fine. Thats real. But the argument is that Gaza is being starved to death, and the numbers simply don't bear that out.
Total deaths is about 50-60k in Gaza, which by Hamas accounts is entirely pregnant women and journalists. Oh wait no Hamas itself said that they have replenished their numbers of dead "matyrs" https://www.memri.org/tv/sami-abu-zuhri-hamas-gaza-war-babies-women-wombs-martyred-american-campuses
Famine is a loaded term, not to be employed lightly. Whatever the morality of the Gazan suffering - I make clear that I have no sympathy for people who incompetently execute their desires to assault their neighbours only to whine about retaliation after - the charge of famine is one that deserves to be taken seriously. Harvard college students on hunger strike go below the 1200 calorie per day average, Gazans report mass starvation and famine since 2023 yet have rounding error deaths attributable to hunger. I'll revise my position if the external blockade results in the so called mass starvation, but I've got family records of eating pondweed to survive, with multiple children dying during ww2 and entire clan extensions wiped out during the great leap forward. Don't fucking toss around "famine" just because its a high valence term, it degrades the meaning.
Gaza had near 0 capacity to grow its own food after it blew up its greenhouses and it relies entirely on foreign trade/aid to obtain food. It attacks said source of aid, then whines when aid is restricted in turn. It is pure bad faith action and it places the burden of responsibility on the defender for the consequences suffered by the attacker which is an insane inversion of responsibility. Hamas and PA rejected solutions that require commitment to peace and acknowledgment of Israel, holding out for maximalist aims. The 2 or 3 state solution is ideal, but will a Palestinian state be held responsible if it continues to launch attacks or fails to hold its own bad actors responsible? Jordan and Egypts masterstrokes were to disclaim West Bank and Gaza as their territories, leaving then to be Israels problem going forward. Hamas and PA are also unable to function without Israeli aid but also are existentially founded on opposition to Israels existence. This is an impossible circle to square and the expectation that Israel should moderate its "stop trying to kill us every time we step away" position is insane. Israel has 20% Arabs, what happened to the Gazan christians. Hell what happened to the Shia.
There is no Gaza famine. There is no Gaza genocide. There is no Israel ethnic state. All the arguments against Israel are tortured caricatures to ensure that a big bad bogeyman is available to act as a recurring saturday morning cartoon villain, always coming back with a dastardly plan so the cheerleaders can shout hooray when the bad guy gets egg on its face. Maybe the Israelis should make sure their entire cabinet and media team is made up of Mizrahis or Beta Israelis, preferably the swarthier and more squashnosed ones to emphasize lack of slavicised ancestry.
Oh god is it all anti-slav discrimination again? Putin senpai please notice your kin!
Genocide and/or Ethnic Cleansing of Israelis has widespread supermajority public support among Palestinians. So does does destroying America. The extrapolations from such things are not hard.
But we don't exclude them do we?
They could, however, be called "Egyptians" with no major disruption to that polity, which many of them, or their ancestors, once were. The reason this doesn't happen is because having rump "Palestinians" as a grievance group is an intentional tactic.
A) Recognized Islam as a greater threat; or B) Were religious fellas hoping for a restoration of the holy land, eventually. Or maybe the rapture.
Ot C) see Christianity as having developed from Judaism and consider themselves culturally tied to Jews. Also, they are more likely to be politically conservative which means they support American allies.
Supporting Israel because it brings about the Rapture is basically a weakman.
Not every social movement is equally amenable to a definition. The more top-down/theoretical/intellectual it is, and the less history it has, the more definable it is. Marxism in the immediate wake of Marx, for example, is easy to define: if you agreed with the empirical claims of Marx's writings and traversed more or less the same bridge from is to ought, you were a Marxist. On the other side of the spectrum, you have, say, early Vedism, with its decentralized networks of charismatic teachers, regionally delimited textual canons, abortive explorations of new spiritual/intellectual territory, and so on.
In general, successful top-down movements are more fractious than successful decentralized movements. Or at least, they're more likely to split on clearly defined intellectual lines. As the new movement acquires prestige, the pressure to maintain a united front against outside challengers weakens, and the internal "attention economy" becomes large enough to tempt intellectuals to carve out a niche for themselves within it by attacking or reformulating the orthodox tenets. One clue as to the nature of wokism is that its internal fractures don't look like this. On an intellectual level, there's barely any disagreement at all. Most infighting is along personal lines ("Are this person's sins bad enough to warrant cancellation?"), or "intersectional" lines ("Should Asians call the police/make a stink when they're mugged by black men?").
My tentative one-sentence understanding of wokism is that it's a vulgarization of strands of left-wing thought dating from the 60's and 70's, (including CRT). In turn, what differentiated that era of leftism from the popular Civil Rights Movement was its institutional base in academia, which insulated it from both the particularism inherent to real-world politics and from the low level of abstraction demanded by popular movements. I haven't studied CRT in any depth, so this is a weak point of my argument, but loosely speaking I think what happened is that it replaced the concrete grievances of the CRM with a quasi-metaphysics of oppression, with new jargon to match (e.g., demonizing "whiteness" and "patriarchy" instead of "white people" and "men").
The dominant/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed dyads were raised to a higher level of abstraction in three ways. First, whites/men/straights were made into categorical oppressors, so that in no situation could e.g. black people be said to be oppressing white people, even where the dictionary definition of "oppression" would strenuously disagree. Second, with the aforementioned exceptions, any disparity between groups defined in opposition to one another was held to be reducible to oppression (by definition). For example, if deaf people have a communication disadvantage vis-a-vis hearing people, it's because society has made a decision not to accommodate them, which is oppression. Third, and related to the previous two, oppression was transformed from something that is done to something that is -- the animating spirit of Western civilization. Nothing is untainted by it. No branch of government, corporation, small business, or seemingly innocuous interaction between two members of the oppressor/oppressed classes has ever been totally free of oppression. There may have been some attempts in the past to fix this state of affairs, and they were laudable, but paradoxically, they were also completely ineffectual: oppression is alive and well. In fact, the need to combat it is (permanently) more urgent than ever.
Fast-forward to ca. 2012. Proto-woke has virtually taken over academia, old-school racism is dead, the highest office in the land is occupied by a fellow traveler, university attendance is higher than ever, and social media has appeared on the scene. The time is ripe for the left's intellectual capital to be cashed in for political capital, and for them to go on the offensive. The doctrinal innovations of the academic left are distilled into a few slogans, like "Racism = Power + Privilege" (i.e., you are racist if and only if you are white), which are opportunistically weaponized against political enemies, and abused for petty reasons like earning victimhood points/attention in order to increase one's social status, or settling personal scores. The energy of the movement is sustained by bringing down high-profile targets, which in principle can be any representative of the "mainstream" (anything normal), even if (in non-woke terms) politically inert, or any person, organization or symbol that stands athwart progress. The academic jargon is imported into corpo-speak to help put a respectable face on tribalistic malice -- e.g., any anti-white policy can be defended in the name of "prioritizing underserved/historically marginalized communities" or whatever. Markers of tribal identity emerge, like blue hair and that childlike, anodyne style of art. Encouraged by the stipulated universality of "oppression", new groups clamor for protected class status, using woke jargon to make their case to varying degrees of success. Not every wokester can, or has to, advocate for every protected class equally -- for the most part, they advocate for their own, if they belong to one -- but they almost uniformly signal at least lukewarm support for each other's causes as they come up, and borrow legitimacy from a shared verbal and philosophical pool. Woke-internal conflict is rare relative to the size and effectiveness of the movement; when it occurs, it's largely reactive, prompted by news stories that pit one protected class against another. Despite wokism's immense reach, its conflicts are mainly litigated outside the public eye. Such conflict as happens has a low intellectual caliber, because no framework was previously developed for managing disputes between protected classes, and it's too late to develop one that won't immediately succumb to the Schmittian hurlyburly -- on an abstract level, it's just "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable wall?" The woke recipe for critique, its philosophical core, is reduced to cartoonish simplicity, while its real-world ramifications are determined by historical/political/biological/cognitive contingency -- as seen in the reactions to transgenderism vs. transracialism, and the irrelevance of "theory" thereto. (I'm sure there was some theorizing post hoc, but by this time wokeness had outgrown its dependence on theory.) Etc. etc. etc. In short, the thing that came to be called wokeness metamorphosed into a fully-fledged mass movement. "Defining" woke is a category error, because it became messy upon contact with the real world. It's like trying to define a person.
The above paragraph is meant to characterize "classical wokism", b. ca. 2012, d. 2024. (To be honest, I'm not sure how well it describes its heirs in 2025 since it's so much less visible now (unless you have an account on Bluesky, which I don't).) As time goes on, the ideas and organizational forms of the left will continue to change in ways that defy easy definition.
It seems to be every international org, and every unbiased org, any unaffiliated with Israel, that have been testifying the same thing. Why would Swedes or Japanese or American Baptists all be lying? The UN, in the link at #3, is saying that their own staff face hunger and “hospitals have admitted people in a state of severe exhaustion caused by a lack of food.”
Israel has always been disliked by basically everyone because "Jews" aside from American conservatives who either A) Recognized Islam as a greater threat; or B) Were religious fellas hoping for a restoration of the holy land, eventually. Or maybe the rapture.
There are very few actual option in this situation. Gazans, by a vast majority, want a genocide of Israel. Israeli's are a split bunch, some want genocide of Gaza, some want peace, and some want to genocide themselves. The people who want peace cant get it. So long as no magical entity comes and brainwashes the Gazans into thinking Jews are cool and good neighbors (see, for example, the fictional jutsu kotoamtsukami it will continue to be. We then are left with two permanent solutions, being genocide of either side. Lay down your chips, which would you prefer?
Speaking as a man who was once described as "manorexic", who genuinely believed I was a fat blob when in reality I was just a regular guy with some muscles, I'm not entirely sure how you deal with this specific case, but I certainly have experience dealing with and eventually overcoming comparable issues so maybe you'll be able to extract some value from that.
I will say, a previous comment seems to have hit a number of salient points, that this occured at a point in my life when I felt I had very little control and that the extremes I went to in pursuing my fitness and diet goals were an attempt to regain control over some aspect of my life. It later turned out I was trying to ignore/brute force a whole bunch of issues and that this really wasn't sustainable long term. As soon as I was removed from the stressors and able to accept the issues I was facing, I was actually recalibrate mentally, that burning need to reshape my body evaporated and now I have a much healthier approach to fitness in general.
Another big factor for me was the content I consumed and the websites I frequented online. I spent a lot of time in bodybuilding and weight lifting forums and it definitely distorted my idea of what was normal.
All of that said, I think it would be great if you could get your girlfriend into fitness in general and weightlifting in particular. While it is possible to go too far and harm yourself, it's a hell of a lot harder than it is with simply starving yourself. The thing that will really help to shift that mindset I think will be her watching female fitness influencers and getting her into that whole eco-system, one where women are striving to be more than just skinny, but actually fit and healthy. The company you keep does influence you and your outlook on life and to our monkey brains, influencers and social media types are company. Also it might help to explain that looking attractive is not simply a question of bodyfat percentages, but also what is underneath the fat. The video I linked earlier actually has a decent breakdown of bf% versus muscle mass for men and what that looks like.
Oh and it would probably be a good idea to one day figure out the source of the problem, I'd seriously recommend looking up things like what female autism looks like and just trying to explore things of that nature. It can seem somewhat orthogonal to the problem at hand, but the mind is a funny thing.
More like saying that the soyuz rocket is propelled by expanding combustion gasses only for somone to pop in and say no, its actually propelled by a mixture of kerosene and liquid oxygen.
I'm sorry but what you said was not equivalent, even if I try to interpret it charitably. See:
An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word.
The LLM, on its own, directly takes the block of text and gives you the probability of the next word/token. There is no "second algorithm" that takes in a block of text, there is no "distribution analysis". If I squint, maybe you are referring to a sampler, but that has nothing to do with taking a block of text, and is not strictly speaking necessary (they are even dropped in some benchmarks).
I would ask that you clarify what you meant by that sentence at the very least.
The old cliche about asking whether a submarine can swim is part of why made a point to set out my parameters at the beginning, how about you set out yours.
The only question I care about is, what are LLMs useful for? The answer is an ever-expanding list of tasks and you would have to be out of touch with reality to say they have no real-world value.
Oh no, they don't need to wait for the destruction of Israel to start warring with their other neighbors.
I don't know about its forecasting value, there's plenty of mess, but sure I'm not opposed to publishing a finer tune on your substack
Sorry they would emulate the great economic and wellbeing successes of Syria, Jordan, Egypt etcetera.
You're acting like the immediate reaction to October 7th wasn't shock and revulsion. I'm saying if Arabic countries drew blood from Israel in any meaningful way this would all just spin up back the other way. I don't think the West is Oikophobic, the West is loserphillic.
Some items I'm looking at this week:
Geopolitics
Europe
Belarus threatens to shift Zapad-2025 military drills closer to NATO border
Spain participated in a Latvia NATO exercise.
Israel is accused of 'mass starvation' as 100 charities blast aid blockade: At least ten people 'die of malnutrition' in 24 hours
Gaza faces 'man-made' mass starvation due to Israeli aid blockade, World Health Organization says
Russia |launches| major military exercise 'july storm' in the Baltic Sea
Middle East
US looking into reports American citizen killed in Syria's Suwayda
Syria evacuates Bedouin from Druze-majority city
Iran
Donald Trump warns that US could strike Iran's nuclear sites again 'if necessary'
Iran says nuclear program will recover after US-Israel strikes
Iran says it will continue uranium enrichment despite U.S. strikes on nuclear facilities
Fires in Iran; Iran accussed Israel of sabotage
Gaza
Belgian King slams Gaza killings as 'disgrace to humanity' (ironic)
Asia
China starts construction of world’s biggest hydropower dam in Tibet; could dwarf Three Gorges Dam
China is acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment 5–6X faster than the United States
Thailand |deploys fighter jets| as border clashes erupt with Cambodia
Tensions between Thailand and Cambodia have escalated following a significant military confrontation, where Thai fighter jets targeted Cambodian military| installations, representing one of the most serious conflicts in recent years. This escalation was precipitated by a prior incident in which a Thai soldier was injured by a landmine near the disputed border area, further straining relations that have long been marred by territorial disputes. Reports of direct clashes between troops from both nations and resulting civilian injuries have intensified fears of broader hostilities.
Thailand Deploys Fighter Jets as Border Clashes Erupt with Cambodia
Thai and Cambodian forces clash at border
Africa
Mozambican Opposition Leader Venancio Mondlane Charged Amid Tensions Over Post-Election Unrest – Medafrica Times
At least 1,000 people killed in a day South Sudan Ethnic Clashes
Cholera and other epidemics are side effects of endless war in Sudan
Mozambique seeks to prosecute opposition leader over post-election unrest
Bio
Scientists resurrected the 1918 “Spanish Flu” virus
Tech and AI
US nuclear weapons agency reportedly breached in Microsoft SharePoint attacks
Starlink is down
Chinese hackers breach US Nuclear Agency in Microsoft SharePoint cyberattack
If you want more complex combat, maybe consider Shadow Empire? It's a deep dive and some stuff is just opaque logistics-autism but there is fun to be had with encirclements, reconnaissance-in-force, spoiling attacks, preparatory artillery barrages before the armoured thrust...
My wife's stereotype of me is that I like dark depressing films that require thought. This isn't wrong, but it's hardly the only genre I am interested in.
So...something like Grave of the Fireflies or Haibane Renmei might be more up your alley?
This looks like a really good piece, although we'll see what the commentariat comes up with. But, how would you feel about picking some of that to use on my Sentinel brief?
I don't know if you realize this, but you come across as extremely condescending and passive-agressive in text. It really is quite infuriating. I would sit down, start crafting a response, and as i worked through your post i would just get more angry/frustrated until getting to the point where id have to step away from the computer lest i lose my temper and say something that would get me moderated.
I would say perhaps I do deserve that criticism, but @self_made_human has made lengthy replies to your posts and consistently made very charitable interpretations of your arguments. Meanwhile you have not even admitted to the possibility that your technical explanation might have been at the very least misleading, especially to a lay audience.
You and @rae are both talking about vector based embedding like its something that a couple guys tried in back in 2013 and nobody ever used again rather than a methodology that would go on to become a defacto standard approach across multiple applications.
I literally said you can extract embeddings from LLMs. Those are useful in other applications (e.g. you can use the intermediate layers of Llama to get the text embedding for an image gen model ala HiDream) but are irrelevant to the basic functioning of an LLM chatbot. The intermediate layer "embeddings" will be absolutely huge features (even a small model like Llama 7B will output a tensor of shape Nx32x4096 where N is the sequence length) and in practice you will want to only keep the middle layers, which will have more useful information for most usecases.
To re-iterate: LLMs are not trained to output embeddings, they directly output the probability of every possible token, and you do not need any "interface layer" to find the most probable next word, you can do that just by doing torch.max() on its output (although that's not what is usually done in practice). You do need some scaffolding to turn them into practical chatbots, but that's more in the realm of text formatting/mark-up. Base LLMs will have a number of undesirable behaviours (such not differentiating between predicting the user's and the assistant's output - base LLMs are just raw text prediction models) but they will happily give you the most probable next token without any added layers, and making them output continuous text just takes a for loop.
You're acting like if you open up the source code for a transformer you aren't going to find loads of matrix math for for doing vector transformations.
How was this implied in any way?
I understand how my statements could be interpreted that way, but at the same time I am also one of the guys in my company who's been lobbying to drop degree requirements from hiring. I see myself as subscribing to the old hacker ethos of "show me the code". Its not about credentials its about whether you can produce tangible results.
I agree with you on this at least. :)
For a given definition of fine, i still think OpenAI and Anthropic are grifters more than they are engineers but I guess we'll just have to see who gets there first.
I dislike OpenAI's business practices, oxymoronic name and the fact that they are making their models sycophants to keep their users addicted as much as the next gal/guy, but I think it's absolutely unfair to discount the massive engineering efforts involved in researching, training, deploying and scaling up LLMs. It is useful tech to millions of paying customers and it's not going to go the way of the blockchain or the metaverse. I can't imagine going back to programming without LLMs and if all AI companies vanished tomorrow I would switch to self-hosted open source models because they are just that useful.
Depends on the siege. Some effectively were genocides of a sort. They could even be religious. Anciently Carthage, as traditionally recorded at least, certainly counts. I mean they tore down all the buildings, killed or sold into slavery all the inhabitants, and salted the earth after (expensive, yet actually very effective, at destroying future crop yields). That's like, textbook genocide, right? Though I'd note that one of the aforementioned axes that deserves calling out is the type of 'intentionality' behind it. In a siege, are you, the invader, secretly (or not so secretly) hoping they don't surrender because you hate them, or are you just annoyed that the city is in your way and resisting? And do you view the civilian occupants of the city as unrelated/irrelevant, as hostages to take or to punish if you can't get to the military opponents, or the actual enemy themselves? Did you actually kill lots of civilians, or did you just burn down their houses and leave? Did you encourage rape and looting and murder, or was there an attempt at discipline? (And then there's the Mongols, who would commit atrocities on purpose, but out of pure, heartless political calculus to maintain their reputation and reinforce their rule, which is almost like a third way)
To a significant extent it's a bit of a loaded word, especially due to modern-day connotations that said genocide or pogrom is state-supported or directed, and I think some leftist scholars and activists go a little too crazy in trying to slice and dice and define it (often in overly broad terms) or even predict it in an attempt to stop it internally in its nascent state (I view the "Ten Stages" as a bad example of this). The fact remains, however, that severity, intentionality, passion vs premeditation, causality, etc. all matter when we assign punishment for crimes like murder on an individual level. We see this in a very real way in state sentencing guidelines and the criminal code! First vs second degree murder vs manslaughter sounds, casually, like a ridiculous distinction until you actually attend a trial with all the messy details. Why not attempt to consider the same factors when it comes to group actions, especially if there's a latent implication that other groups or states have a moral duty to intervene at some point along the way? The bystander effect for states is just as real as it is for individuals, right?
I think the use, or even abuse, of the term as a political cudgel is sometimes cynical, sometimes idealistic, but virtually everyone other than the hardcore realpolitikers can probably agree that we can't totally dodge the ideas even if the words are a little fuzzy. So the temptation is there to treat it like a woke, bleeding-heart liberal thing, but that's unfair.
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?
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