called for Hamas to be ousted from Gaza “through diplomacy”
How do they envision this could happen?
called for Hamas to be ousted from Gaza “through diplomacy”
How do they envision this could happen?
Let me try to explain it another way.
We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.
If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.
That’s not what I’m saying - I don’t have a term that represents “#deadKids/#allCivilians”.
If I were to use your notation, I would write:
#deadKids/#allDead = #deadCivilians/#allDead * #allKids/#allCivilians
I recognize that it’s macabre to treat this as a word problem, but the math works out if you do. If out of 100 dead people, 33 are combatants and 67 are civilians (the 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio I have calculated) and half of the dead civilians are children, then there are 33 dead children, which is the “one third” in the headline.
Nothing can fix things because teenagers will not cooperate. If Instagram could identify all its teenage users, those users would move to a platform that couldn’t. The only thing the restrictions achieve is a reduction in the market share of the platform with the restrictions.
That’s not what I am assuming. My assumptions are only that none of the dead combatants are children and that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the age distribution of the civilian population.
If we assume that (1) the civilian population is 50% children and (2) none of the combatants are children then:
(fraction of the dead that is children) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (fraction of the civilians that is children)
(1/3) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (1/2)
(fraction of the dead that is civilians) = (1/3) ÷ (1/2) = (2/3)
This is where my 2:1 civilians to combatants number comes from.
The fact that among the dead, the ratio of civilians to combatants equals the ratio of adults to children is a coincidence.
Many people seem to think so but the evidence doesn’t support their argument. A 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed isn’t particularly low but it is far closer to the best that Western armies have been able to accomplish than it is to the ratio seen from armies that are not trying to reduce civilian casualties. For example, Russia’s ratio in Mariupol is approximately 8:1 and that was against Ukrainian soldiers in uniform who weren’t deliberately hiding among civilians. Urban warfare always involves heavy civilian casualties.
About half the inhabitants of Gaza are under 18 years old, so 1/3 of the dead being children corresponds to a ratio of two civilians killed for every combatant. This is not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties.
The fact that it won’t have any record of calls I missed while the phone was off or didn’t have reception, although actually that’s probably the fault of the service provider. They can send me texts I missed. Why can’t they send me a list of missed calls?
I don’t understand why browsers support this “functionality”.
But who can stop an oven with a gun?
Shhh, you’re ruining my fun.
Who is more pitiable? Him or the woman who dated him?
I can’t listen to an hour-long podcast right now, but I want to clarify that by “mistake” I mean a war of choice that that USA started but did not win. I think this is a definition that does not require subjective judgements of intent or justification, because if future defeat had been common knowledge then the public and the government as a whole would not have chosen to go to war. (There may have been those who wanted war for their own reasons which did not depend on victory, but their ability to steer the country towards war depended on convincing others that the war could be won.)
A shared commitment to American supremacy.
They say that like it’s a bad thing. Obviously American voters would be fools to oppose it, but even for the third world the alternative to Pax Americana has never been local self-determination and economic success. In the past, it was dominance by the Soviet Union. Now there is no other country able to exert power on a global scale (although China is working hard to get there) but still plenty of tyrants capable of dominating their region of the globe. The USA does not always act to prevent that. When it does, it usually acts in its own self-interest. It has made serious mistakes. (Thanks for that, Cheney.) The alternative is worse.
Removed by mod
I understand that that’s the intent. The problem is the methodology, which is as I said just multiplication by five. Calling it a gold standard implies that there’s actually some sophisticated analysis going on, and there isn’t.
The “gold standard in the field” is apparently to multiply the Hamas numbers by five. I’m not kidding. That’s where the 186,000 number comes from. This is low-effort bullshit.
Edit: Also this article is just wrong about what the 335,500 number is claimed to be. It is what you get if you extrapolate the 186,000 number to the end of the year, not to September.
Does… Does this mean Harris actually isn’t the lesser of two evils? Now I don’t know who to vote for.
That’s true; I am assuming that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the overall age distribution of civilians. Maybe efforts to minimize child casualties skew the actual distribution one way, or maybe children’s greater frailty skews it the other way. I don’t know but I think that my assumption is reasonable as a rough estimate.