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.
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.
Even Master Chief’s Mjolnir armor from Halo wouldn’t pass. (It would stop one bullet but not three in a row without time to recharge the shield.)
There are also anti-materiel rifles (generally bolt-action) which use that ammunition.
The soldier has a blank shoulder patch even in the original photo. Odd.
The railing in the photo has blue and yellow stripes, which is unlikely in Russia, but I don’t see anything about the soldier himself that makes him obviously Ukrainian. (Maybe experts can distinguish by camo patterns?) The comments in Russian on that Reddit thread are ridiculing the use of this photo on a Russian poster but provide no further information.
3 point blank shots from 14.5×114mm rounds
How is that something a person could wear? Those bullets penetrate light vehicle armor.
I can’t find the source of the photo although I did find artistic interpretations of it from both the Ukrainian and Russian sides, with the corresponding patches on the soldier’s shoulder.
But note that the image on the billboard has the patch on the soldier’s shoulder replaced with a gray rectangle. (It’s easier to see in the full-size image.) Someone didn’t like the soldier’s nationality…
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.
Note that this article is from three days ago. There’s still only one F-16 destroyed.
That’s how many 21st century Americans think, but not how I expected Ukrainians to think. I was raised to eat what I was given, and when I became a vegetarian my family thought I was being ridiculous and even mildly offensive. My grandfather would tell me how people could only have moral objections to food because they had never been hungry. I’m sure he would have said “pragmatism” meant that a soldier eats whatever is edible.
When I said “Soviet culture” I was referring to the way people behave in their daily lives, not to their political beliefs (although my impression is that even the few communist true-believers left at the end were still culturally much more similar to other Soviet immigrants than to Americans).
The main weapon that Hamas has against Israel is international opinion. The way Hamas wins the current war is by continuing to operate in heavily populated areas until the civilian death toll from fighting there becomes so large that Israel has to retreat in order to avoid losing US support.
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.