The dead children we must see | Hacker News Reader

The dead children we must see

newyorker.com

210 pointsjbegley506 comments

The choice of which dead children we must see is political and commercial. AP has many dozens of journalists staffed in Israel, and allegedly only a couple stringers in Syria, where over 300,000 civilians have died in the last 10 years. The children killed in Tigray (tens of thousands) are through the lens of this article less important for us to see than those of Uvalde.

I suspect it isn't political but rather that being a journalist in Israel is safer than being a journalist in Syria. So naturally one will be represented more than the other. No politics there.

try telling the family of shireen abu akleh about how safe it was to be a journalist in israel

They didn’t say Israel is safe, just safer than Syria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_dur...

Syria is much less safe than Israel is, but millions of people live there, and newswires can buy information from them; that's what a stringer is. The allegations I've read are that, on a good day in 2018, AP might have had one stringer to get information from. That's a decision AP made, not a reality it had to conform to.

It is safe to be a Western journalist in Israel, but if you are Arab reporting on Israel from an Arab perspective, it is quite dangerous.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/world/middleeast/palestia...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/30/reuters-al-jazeera...

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/...

That was in an area administered by Palestine. It can't really be considered "in Israel" at all. I think it strengthens his point that it's hard to get comprehensive journalism in an area either controlled or actively contested by terrorists.

The Palestinian Authority administers the West Bank. No country in the world considers them a terrorist organization.

Our thinking here is, we're going to settle Israel/Palestine once and for all, on this message board thread; a pity, we think, nobody ever thought of just tossing the question to us in the first place. The lives that could have been saved.

> or actively contested by terrorists.

The Palestinian Authority isn't a terrorist organization, but Hamas does maintain an active presence in the West Bank. The government also explicitly encourages terrorist attacks in the region through the Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund.

Kinda strange. First article says Palestinian leaders rejected request about investigation under international supervision and refused to show the bullet, claiming it was an armor piercing round. While IDF soldiers use standard ammunition.

The general international consensus is that Israeli soldiers killed her, but you can personally claim anything you want, that is your right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Shireen_Abu_Akleh

That is probably true.

Doesn't change the consequence, but probably true.

Yep. And I wonder why we don't see more childhood cancer death images linked to the multinational chemical conglomerates and industrial corps that pollute our waterways and air continuously, it couldn't possibly have to do with corporate donors (sorry, advertising customers) to media or the incentive for media to only cover deaths that generate reader engagement and subscribers.

Kill 10,000 people 5-15 years earlier than their otherwise natural trajectory for death by dumping PCBs in the river (ignoring that additional cohorts will have an increased disease burden going forward for....decades? Centuries? Who knows if you can un-shit this bed), no one gives a shit apart from a symbolic fine of 1% of annual revenue 20 years later. Certainly no actual punishment for those involved.

Kill a couple thousand with a plane into a building and the world's most powerful country starts a war.

I know nothing about the case, but you got the lurking benefit of doubt for those more abstract killings. Like the poor guy that thought it was a good idea to put Freon in refrigerators. Oh, and also put led in gasoline.

Some people can more or only feel sorry for small children or animals, because they are obviously innocent, while a grown up could have done something to deserve it. I think that is a failure to the extreme of having a hard time dealing with more abstract (maybe indirect is a better word?) crimes.

"Oh, and also put led in gasoline."

Freon and lead were engineering decisions. Both had properties that fixed a burning issue at the time. Unfortunately they also had ... side effects that became apparent later. Neither involved "a guy", they involved entire countries, blocs and multi national enterprises.

The guy in question knew very well about the negative effects of lead[0]. The way in which you're right is that under capitalism, the profit motive distorts and chews up any moral precepts of any individual. The machine demands efficiency no matter how many lives it consumes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

The article says it was widely known that large doses of lead are toxic but says they found that 0.08% lead in gasoline was safe.

Today it's widely known that large doses of solanine (a compound in potatoes and tomatoes) are toxic, but the amount commonly in food is thought to be safe. So we haven't banned potatoes.

But even if some insane or evil scientist invents a harmful compound that becomes widely used, I'd be mainly angry at the US Public Health Services, or the equivalent public health agency in other countries. It's their responsibility to only allow safe products. They conducted a study on leaded gasoline and decided not to ban it. And every other country allowed it as well.

So we have to conclude every country's public health agency was either corrupt or incompetent, or that the harm from leaded gasoline at the dosage used wasn't obvious at the time. (Or both.)

This one:

    the harm from leaded gasoline at the dosage used wasn't obvious at the time

I think the same is true of lead in (house) paint.

Reading a Thomas Midgley Jr. biography might change your mind.

He was famously warned of leaded gasoline's dangers, had to take a vacation to Miami to recover from lead poisoning. And also was famously a co-inventor of CFCs.

His only saving grace is that his name is also on the list of "inventors killed by their own inventions."

I interpreted the same fact the opposite way. Midgley was okay with exposing himself to lead and thought taking a vacation to get "a large supply of fresh air" would fix his lead exposure. This sounds like someone who didn't believe there were long term effects from chronic exposure to even very small doses of lead.

One is not like the other.

Humans have eat potatoes for about 8000 years. So that seems to be a pretty large scale experiment.

While deciding to put a safe amount of a dangerous material on a product used in large scale is not a good decision.

Not sure how to explain (as I have little time now) but here is a simple way: - both potatoes and led have safe and dangerous levels - one - potato - was used since at least 8000 years ago - the other was not used on such large scale

It seems to me that we need to define safe levels in other way:

- safe levels on small scale and uses rarely

- safe levels on large scale or used constantly

The Romans were using lead thousands of years ago too.

Small amounts of lead don't kill you immediately, they just make you a little dumber, a little more aggressive...

Unfortunately it's an 8000 year experiment with no control group that can only detect large or acute effects. We don't know if regular exposure to potatoes slightly decreases IQ or increases risk of cancer or any other effects. (And, in fact, potatoes grilled over a fire are suspected to be carcinogenic.)

With leaded gas, the problem was also these small, long term effects that had never been established despite lead being used for thousands of years.

> The machine demands efficiency no matter how many lives it consumes.

Aside from typical drivel, what evidence do you have of lowered quality of life compared to other modes of economic structure? Of all the economic systems in the world, capitalist societies have had life expectancy (from birth, age 10, age 20, etc.) trend upwards. Famously, the Soviet Union dropped life expectancy in a time of peace, as did East Germany.

The US of A is known for its individualism in stark contrast to many other societies, so you're going to have to prove a lot with this statement:

> the profit motive distorts and chews up any moral precepts of any individual

What evidence do you have that the sensor(human experience) is adequate to detect incremental or longterm change?

We could literally nuke the entire planet and 30 years later have a generation for which cancer, long winters and ruined before time cities are normal. The species sucks at perceiving reality

What?

There are countless ways to use the machine.

If citizens have little or no influence on their government it might be better not to horrify them with... shall we say... reality(?) If all we have is poisonous water for you then you can just drink it without knowing what is in it.

If we are going to do some kind of democracy we need you to have access and/or exposure to the full horror of the situation.

The market machinery needs a good definition of profit. If it must all be measured in one unit we can do that, money, gold, sea shells or quality of life, it doesn't really matter to the game.

We ironically build the proverbial hospital then go look for ways to profit from it. It follows that treatment must be as expensive as possible in order to maximize profit. You could consider the hospital the profit.

If we are going to modify your reality for you then your opinion is anything money can buy and we wont have the advantages of totalitarianism either.

There would be no difference between building or bombing hospitals. It would just be a matter of which is more profitable.

Other models of economic structure is a fun topic but we are not in a position to do it. We might want to rewrite it in Rust but the best we can hope for is some small modifications, close some of the worse bugs. It is hard to let the imagination run wild if it's not going to happen.

A history of led in gasoline: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...

Leaded gasoline was partly a business decision too.

One of the alternatives, which we use today is to add ethanol.

Ethanol had the business problem of being an alternative fuel in its own right, which competes with gasoline.

Lead was chosen over ethanol as it could be patented and licensed out.

> Some people can more or only feel sorry for small children or animals, because they are obviously innocent, while a grown up could have done something to deserve it.

Now that I've had a kid, I understand what it means when people say kinds are innocent. Children are innocent in the way animals are innocent; they don't possess the mental faculties to understand morality. That doesn't means kids are good. They can be cruel, mean, and annoying, and to a very high degree. But, just like we don't consider it a moral failure of a dog when it jumps up and steals a piece of bacon from the table, so too do we not consider the things children do moral failures.

This differs from an adult. Adults understand morality, and thus can never be innocent in the same way, even if they act with the upmost character.

Children with cancer seem to get more than their fair share of coverage and attention already, although that attention generally doesn't include attributing their cancers to industry.

This is just it.

When the subject is children with cancer, cancer is the enemy. A faceless threat that everyone can stand “against” without hesitation. And this completely misses the critical fact that cancer is often a downstream effect.

I think that cancer awareness really needs to expand to include underlying causes. As it stands, the cause and effect are so disconnected that awareness often leads only to sympathy/empathy/compassion instead of driving people to anger and to push for systemic changes.

I think it's because on an individual basis, attributing cancers to a particular cause is very difficult. It's only when you're dealing with large populations that statistical trends become damning (as happened with cigarettes), otherwise it's usually very difficult to point to a specific kid and say his cancer came from a specific business.

And the twisted thing about all of this is that when we start seeing large numbers, humans tend to stop caring. We care about an individual's story, but our ability to care diminishes the moment there are two, and all but vanishes when it's a large group.

So I'm not really sure what the answer is. If the individual cases chosen for awareness campaigns could be selected based on their traceability, it might provide a bridge from cause to effect.

Or maybe it really needs to be a multi-pronged effort. Present individual cases to people care. Separately, present aggregate cases so people start linking those individual stories to systemic factors.

Well you got 400,000 children dying of Malaria every year. Between the time you wrote your post and I responded 400 children died.

Since there isn't any way to use their deaths to further a political agenda no one cares.

>Since there isn't any way to use their deaths to further a political agenda no one cares

Stats and images of sickly children have motivated (and "motivated") donations to countless non-profits and NGOs that lobby for the Democratic party, and religious organizations that lobby for Republicans. This is straight out of Contemporary Politics 101.

Ouch.

But accurate.

Yes, surely. I'm curious if you have more to say about this. Semi-relatedly, one could read this article as a journalist attempting to convince the public to normalize a more emotionally potent form of journalism.

I feel generally defensive of journalism, especially on HN, and I'm a little reluctant to dissect it too much. I worry about the utility and unintended effects of emotionally potent journalism on a consumer public so locked into narratives, and with such superficial, social-media-mediated connection to actual journalism.

I'll just add that when I say "commercial", I mean exactly that. This is AP's former Bureau Chief in Jerusalem:

Matti [a former AP journo and critic] states that the AP’s Jerusalem bureau – like all other major news operations based in Israel and the Palestinian territories – employs too many reporters because of this hostile obsession with the Jews. The truth is the story of Israel is that of a nation rising from the ashes of the worst genocide in human history, being attacked from all sides upon its inception. Depending on your point of view, it’s also a story about the persecuted becoming the persecutors. All of this, of course, is happening to the people of the Bible, the descendants of the Hebrew slaves who were led out of Egypt by Moses and from whose ranks emerged Jesus Christ. It’s as if a new chapter of the Bible is being written in our times. Whether you think the Bible is mythology or the word of God is beside the point. The point is we are all human beings who love a good story, and this one is particularly good.

I read that a couple days ago and it's been pinging back and forth in my head ever since.

> "It’s as if a new chapter of the Bible is being written in our times."

It's debatable who fits in as the slaves in Egypt in the allegory ...

That's why it makes such a good story (née clusterfuck). No matter where you sit, you can pretend to be the hero of the story or the persecuted victim.

> ...hostile obsession with the Jews.

Framing it like this not only evokes guilt in Europeans (in most Caucasians, perhaps?) but also effectively stifles them from voicing any support, let alone criticize Israel; and more importantly, without much consequence or thought, label any pro-Palestine group as pro-Terror. In fact, the Israeli Left themselves, a tiny minority rallying around organizations like Haaretz and B'Tselem, are under constant threat of de-legitimization, because in broader terms, they talk the same talk as pro-Palestine groups.

The main difference with Syria is that those who are doing the killing are not funded by the US. Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military. On the other hand, it is estimated that 90% of the deaths are by the Syrian government, which is not funded at all by the US Government:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil...

See, this is exactly what I mean.

> Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military

Generally speaking, Israel is part of the West and we expect them to have a higher standard than some dictatorship.

That being said, how many deaths can be attributed to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan? I assume order of magnitude higher than what we're witnessing in Gaza. It seems Israel doesn't get the same free pass for some reason.

The Israelis have killed more children in two months in Gaza than the US killed in 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

There's a reason it's Afghanistan people cite here, and not Iraq. Even counts of dead children aren't neutral. There's no way around taking time to learn about things; you can't sum things up with a grisly picture or a grim scorecard. Or you can, I don't know, maybe it works great. It's what we've been trying to do up 'til now. How's it going?

The Israelis have also killed more kids in Gaza than the U.S. did in Iraq from 2008 to 2022 (according to UNICEF).

https://www.unicef.org/iraq/press-releases/more-9000-childre...

I'm really not interested in lining up and correcting the scorecards, so much as I am in the broader point that what people suppose to be simple, clarifying jolts of information --- body counts, horrible photos, whatever --- don't so much clarify as nudge people towards a preferred narrative.

That doesn't make them wrong. There is truth and there is falsity and for every important, complicated truth, there are people who "prefer" the narrative that conveys it. But it's not the body count that establishes the truth, it's the underlying work that went into revealing it.

The truth of the situation you're intent on nudging us about is intensely complicated.

I am sorry but stating the truth is beyond criticism. If someone is wrong you can state a different fact that illuminates their facts, or wait until they lie, which they must do if they are sticking with the wrong ideas.

You can't criticize someone for saying something that's true, and people only do so when they are losing the argument. If you're so beaten back that you're resorting to that, I will help you: Hamas killed more Israeli children than Saddam killed American children.

In addition to the problem that the parent commenter seems to be comprehensively wrong, just as a matter of fact, they're also obviously not just stating simple facts to contribute to the body of knowledge we draw from to make our own conclusions; there is a clear subtext to the "facts" they're providing (again, scare-quoting because that's not what they are --- though, give it another month, and check again).

But, more generally, you're just not responding to anything I actually wrote.

"Your facts are biased," is only a legitimate rejoinder if you offer the rest of the facts. Otherwise it is a tool that could be used against anything the speaker doesn't want to acknowledge.

"Reality is too complex to understand, therefore the understanding you are offering must be wrong," is also a way to argue against anything, unless it's accompanied by some part of that reality that the other person cannot explain with their theory.

I don't know who you're quoting here, but it isn't me.

"The truth of the situation you're intent on nudging us about is intensely complicated."

The act of stating facts is criticized as being "intent on nudging us," and rather than challenging those factual claims or contextualizing them, the line suggests epistemic disengagement in the face of a reality that is "intensely complicated."

In summarizing the thread to this point you might want to start by acknowledging that the things you're referring to as facts weren't, and that my critique was that the assumed facts weren't contextualized. I don't think "epistemic disengagement" is a rap you're going to be able to pin on me, sorry.

I mean, to me it seems that they are in fact just stating “facts”. What, in your eyes, is the “correct” way to state those purported facts that would “contribute to the body of knowledge we draw on the make our own conclusions“?

Except he was NOT stating the truth, not even remotely close to the truth, and I replied to his post.

I think your post is a good next post for the conversation, I am only complaining about vague methods of shifting the discussion away from facts and towards suspicions.

An Israeli father (and media in general) thought his own daughter died and turned out to be wrong when she was released (she was kept as a hostage which I don't think is right but she was not killed). https://twitter.com/moghilemear13/status/1728629391373029792

The same media that's wrong about this is giving other information based on similar assumptions (granted that they were corrected).

I would be overjoyed if a significant number of the assumed casualties turn out to be mistaken but I am not hopeful.

That's not even true. 5,500 children (according to Hamas) is less than 9,000 in Iraq (according to UNICEF).

And around 33% of that total is from failed rockets in Gaza (based on figures collected in previous wars).

Sadly the troops are only in the early stages of controlling the area and that number is going to rise a lot if the war is brought to a military completion the way politicians sound like they intend to.

If you check the figures most of the deaths were early in the war before people actually believed the IDF that they should move South. Once they did that civilian deaths dropped dramatically.

So I don't think it's in the early stages, although this ceasefire is going to restart some elements, which is unfortunate.

Hamas needs to surrender - everything they do makes life worse for Palestinians.

I don't think Hamas is structured in a way that is able surrender, especially now that its "political" wing has totally lost whatever diplomatic or local credibility it had. It only took one month for the coalition to destroy Saddam's regime but it took eight years in all to overcome the random violence and isolated terrorist resistance. Some really bad things happened during the latter part and that's what did the most damage to America.

Sir, you are posting fake news.

You may be right. I can't find exact statistics, but I saw a few sites giving numbers of 20,000 - 30,000 (for Afghanistan). The rate of children being killed in Gaza however is far more.

All of these numbers come from Hamas, is that a source you trust?

They've been roughly reliable in the past. Past performance isn't guarantee of future results, of course. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/26/can-we-trust-c...

Good discussion at https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/82572/why-are-s... about the issue.

A quick Googling doesn't find me a counter-estimate from Israel. Given the very clear evidence of large scale bombardment of the Gaza Strip (Israel claims 6,000 bombs dropped, and Hamas is known for favoring populated areas; https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip...), counts in the thousands seem very plausible.

They've already botched major events, like the death toll from PIJ's accidental strike on Al-Ahli Hospital. There's also an ongoing concern about "Gaza Health's" practice of including Hamas fighters in civilian death tolls. They're the best numbers we have or are going to get, so they can't be ignore, but their reliability is probably not a good hill to die on.

Israel's had its own counting issues. It's a challenging enough task with a functioning government and control over the area, let alone an area with more than an a million evacuees going in various directions. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip...

I don't doubt they include Hamas fighters, but I do doubt that Israel's targeting has been so effective and precise the deaths are mostly Hamas. US intelligence estimates 20-25k Hamas members (https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html); I don't think half of them are likely to have been already taken out.

I don't think you'll see me saying anything about the accuracy of Israel's numbers in this thread.

Both of your numbers, Iraq and Afghanistan are simply not true.

Also, as a percentage of civilian population Gaza deaths are very close to Iraq deaths, except way less dead children in Gaza vs Iraq.

That's also not true. It seems every single thing you write isn't true.

Afghanistan child deaths: 26,000 vs 5,500 in Gaza (according to Hamas).

I protested the Iraq War when it happened too. It was started on false premises and cost a ton. The outcome was good, the us did withdraw and these is a democracy now, but the costs were high.

Can you provide a citation on your claim of "an order of magnitude" or retract it please?

At present it's not clear Israel is being held to any standard. What is the lower standard you would like them to be held to?

It would also be worth explaining why you think any country is due "a free pass" when it comes to killing. And what that "free pass" entitles you to.

> Population-based studies produce estimates of the number of Iraq War casualties ranging from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 to 1,033,000 excess deaths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

I'm surprised you're asking for numbers that are so easily accessible. Perhaps you're only thinking of people directly killed by US soldiers while the parent comment was considering all violent deaths caused by the war the US started?

> Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military.

Israel spent $23.4b on it's military vs $3.3b from the US. And the Israeli economy is $522B making the US "funding of Israel" 0.6% of their economy.

That's hardly "funded by the US government". And on top of that the US is "funding" Israel in return for technology, so it's more a purchase by the US than anything else.

3.3 billion dollars is a substantial sum of money. If it's as insubstantial as you claim, can I then safely surmise that discontinuing that funding would be a political nothingburger? Would American zionist politicians shrug and say it doesn't matter if we don't give Israel that 3.3 billion, or would they cry and scream about it? Probably the latter. And Israeli politicians, would they shrug and say it doesn't matter, or would they echo their American counterparts? I think the latter.

They US gets a lot in return for their funding, it's not a one way deal at all.

So you need to take into account what the US would lose. It's far more complex than your shallow "cry and scream".

You mean like getting "the only democracy in the region" to be our ally in supporting America's wars in the region? This is the most often touted "benefit" but to say this actually has value to the average American is farcical. Most of America's support for Israel is rooted in religion and ideology, not any tangible benefits to America.

https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-israel-2/

>The U.S.-Israel economic and commercial relationship is strong, anchored by an annual bilateral trade of nearly $50 billion in goods and services. Several treaties and agreements, including the 1985 U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA), solidify bilateral economic relations. Since the FTA’s signing in 1985, the United States has become Israel’s largest trading partner.

I think it's fair to say that the US has strong connections to Israel. I don't know if it's fair to imply it's totally dependent on the US as they implied, but I think it's more complex than the aid being a small percentage of the GDP.

> Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military.

US funding of Israel is at most a few percent of their GDP. Some years it drops to below 1 percent. If the US stopped funding Israel nothing would happen in Israel. Israel is more than capable of looking after themselves. And they have nukes.

The only political repercussions of cutting funding for Israel would be in the US itself. It buys votes. They’re not actually doing it for Israels benefit.

Israel is an incubator for weapons systems, and generic contributions buy access. The US manufactures the ammunition for Iron Dome, and the DoD is generally keen on adding something like Iron Beam to the abilities of every branch of the service.

This is just a side effect of the Israel lobby pushing for strong alignment between the US and Israel. The lobby pushes for alignment and dollars and military cooperation follows. You can mixing up cause and effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_Sta...

For example AIPAC is pledging $100m to target in primaries progressive democrats who have not supported Israel recently. That is a hell of a lot of money: https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/11/17/powerful-pro-israel-...

the bombs being dropped on Gaza are american bombs. It is not 1% of bombs being american, so I don't know what GDP relativism has to do with it.

Are you replying to someone else? I didn’t mention gdp or even imply it.

And it buys itself invaluable feedback by way of Israeli military being the beta users of many weapon systems. And of course intelligence sharing

Why would you compare (mostly) military aid to the GDP? Aid from the US has comprised around 15% of Israel's defense budget in recent years and the current bill under deliberation would almost quintuple that sum.

It is the largest recipient of American foreign aid since WW2

It's not just the money, it's the fact that Israel has backing from the US at the UNSC, and from a military point of view.

Remove that and Israelis will be making peace with Palestinians very quickly.

Syrian government and Russia.

> not funded by the US

Hey just curious here, mind explaining why/how the US is currently occupying 1/3 of Syria and taking 90% of it’s pre-war oil production?

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the afterword of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States:

>But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.

This is also a feature (the defining feature, IMO) of causal narratives.

Right. It's a thing to be aware of, not a disqualifier; if you simply filter out any content delivered with an agenda, you can't learn anything.

I'm going to agree harder: it's a thing to be aware of as a fundamental mechanism which may or may not be related to agenda or judgement in any given instance.

True enough but the poison is in the dose. Too much and you're left with Nihilism.

The trouble revolves around how much judgement is required on any given subject. On the right subject people can come perilously close to laying out facts devoid of interpretation; on the wrong subject either no one can or no one believes anyone can - which is pretty much the same thing.

And what exactly is wrong with a nihilism? If we don’t really know what’s going on, maybe we should accept that truth and move on with living better lives less swayed by political propaganda. Given how many relationships have been ruined because both sides were certain of their political facts, a nihilism seems simply better.

Broadly, nihilism rejects purpose and meaning. I don't see how one can justify we "move on with living better lives" within such a worldview (i.e. why act that way when nothing matters?).

What the last two comments are really saying is that "nihilism" isn't the right word for the state you enter when you give up on developing an accurate picture of the world from luridly presented tragedies in news stories.

The right word would be "apathy".

No, that's not at all right.

There’s many forms of nihilism, and purpose nihilism wasn’t the subject of my comment.

A Nihilist is more stable than you think. A tree doesn’t need purpose to grow, and neither does a human. Instead they follow a process that’s expressed by the body in response to the environment. For humans we not only have physical sensation but also memories, ideas, and thoughts. Without a worldview these all still happen, and your body will still react to your thoughts and sensations without a purpose. A healthy Nihilist would not feel sad about having no meaning, since they never had one anyway; on reflection, they might feel happy that there’s no obligation to respond other than how their situation moves them to. A Nihilist can do what is morally right without the restrictions of a purpose that proscribes them to do otherwise.

I'm curious how you reconcile the explicit rejection of morality in Nihilism with your personal morality. I feel these are in conflict.

---

Longer take:

Defining what is morally right requires value judgement, and Nihilism rejects morality. What Is (facts) can't tell us what we ought to do. [1]

To build a moral framework on what one ought to do, you must necessarily ascribe meaning and value judgement otherwise it can't claim to be moral and it would merely be actions you perform devoid of meaning.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

There isn’t a fundamental difference between ought/is. Both moral judgements and facts are based on reasoned beliefs.

Why do you think meaning is required for making a value judgement? I can very easily claim that killing humans is wrong without relying on any metaphysics, just like I can claim the sky is blue. Both are beliefs based on reasons; meaning can be discarded.

That meaning can be discarded doesn't imply it ought to be discarded.

---

Morals/meaning have a shaky absolute foundation, in that deep down nothing probably matters and the universe is indifferent.

However I'm a person, born in modern society; everything has relative meaning even if the epistemological foundations are shaky.

I see Nihilism similar the mathematicians trying to prove foundational math [1], and similarly doubting it's actually fundamental.

Yet here we are using math to amazing things! Math doesn't need to be true for it to be useful. I find useful things valuable.

Meaning, in particular shared meaning, is similarly valuable and worth pursuing even if they can't be proven.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory

Nothing objectively matters. You are free to invent things and ascribe them meaning. Meaninglessness is a discovery, meaning is a creation.

>why act that way when nothing matters?

I agree but I think the breakdown is even stronger than that: Nihilism gives you no way to decide what is "better" in the first place.

My take on Nihilism:

If you've gotten to Nihilism, you have a blank slate to build what you Do believe.

Ascribing meaning to things has value. For example, human life in Nihilism is unimportant, which may or may not be true, but we all benefit from the shared belief in the value of life even if it's technically wrong.

So don't stop at Nihilism as the conclusion but rather use it as a canvas and build up what's meaningful to you. With any luck, others will find the same things as you meaningful.

This is a really positive take and I appreciate you writing it.

You're welcome!

It was my way out of Nihilism. The pursuit of being good is more important and valuable than us all agreeing on what is good (or even that good exists at all). And given that goal, all you can do is try your best.

The best direction to move from nihilism is absurdism. You can still be correct but now you can enjoy it.

You're left with wisdom, not nihilism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

Can a fact not simply exist without presentation? pi does not need an agent to exist; it simply is. Circles and the relationship between their circumference and diameter existed before minds existed to comprehend them.

Behind every human presentation there is a judgment, sure, but many facts simply exist in nature, ready to be observed and judged without a preexisting agenda.

I'm naturally suspicious of people who put "People's" in front of words where the word should be implied. It's like a People's Republic, you know? What's Zinn's agenda? Perhaps he is telling on himself, in this quote.

Yes. Perhaps Howard Zinn has an agenda.

If you don't like Zinn, how about Popper by way of Deutsch in The Beginning of Everything:

We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden, and hence fallible, as all our theories are. . . . The growth of knowledge consists of correcting misconceptions in our theiories.

Pi is a great example. Did circles exist before minds existed? Or are circles approximations of the observed world?

I was thinking about this in the shower the other day. Circles don't "exist" because they are a pure abstraction; as an element of mathematics they are simply a bag of conclusions that are inevitable if you are willing to accept other axioms. The language with which we talk about these axioms and conclusions might be fallible, and certainly the conclusions themselves may be fallible (though not likely so for elemental enough mathematics), but the kernel of truth in logic at the middle is, I think, unassailable.

Perhaps so. I trimmed down the parts where I referenced Euclid in a similar vein to “conclusions … inevitable if you … accept other axioms.” I was thinking though of this Veritasium video outlining the development of non-Euclidean geometries:

https://youtu.be/lFlu60qs7_4?si=vd1s7vPmV-drPSfP

I mean, yeah, Howard Zinn "told on himself" several hundred pages before that quote from the afterword. His whole thing is that lots of American history is only told from one side and he wanted to popularize a different view. The point of that quote is that not everyone lays their biases out up front the way he did.

In your math example, yes, pi is a constant of nature that simply is. However, in choosing pi over Euler's number or the square root of -1 for your comment, you've made an implicit judgement about their relative importance. That's probably inconsequential for most math facts, but could be a lot more impactful for people presenting history or the news.

> Circles and the relationship between their circumference and diameter existed before minds existed

There really aren't any circles in the physical universe. There aren't any ellipses either. I'm not sure about lines. You're going to hit Planck's constant and the speed of light in any example you name.

Charge seems quantized, so you can probably have the integers and fractions, but real numbers are right out.

Bubbles are perfectly circular, and natural.

That is brilliant.

Also why "unbiased" reporting can never truly exist (however wonderful that would be).

The choice to report something is itself a judgment of the topic.

OurWorldInData.com is probably what unbiased "reporting" looks like, and obviously even they have to choose what to research and present.

At a deeper level, that site presupposes that quantitative data is a good way to interpret the world. (I don’t disagree, mostly!) Of course some things are easier to turn into numbers than others.

For some data there are multiples discordant sources, or critics directed to the unique source. Selecting (and therefore neglecting some) isn't neutral either. A real (non-disputable) consensus is very rare.

You can exercise judgment in choosing a topic: fair enough.

Within that topic, you can present all the facts that you know, or just the ones that support a certain narrative.

The facts you know are also selected subjectively, both by yourself and by the people who make you available to those facts.

Yes, and then bias is also a statistical phenomenon too, yadda yadda. But we all understand we're talking about the subset of bias that any specific actor can introduce due to ignorance or ulterior motives, and could in principle choose otherwise. Objectively unbiased reporting may be impossible, but intellectual honesty is possible, and should be required of people more.

Agreed. Even if one cannot achieve an ideal, there is no reason why one should not try their hardest to live up to it, instead of abandoning it as "all or nothing".

> Within that topic, you can present all the facts that you know, or just the ones that support a certain narrative.

Let's say you are reporting on the elevated rate of gun violence in Chicago compared to other US cities.

Which of the following facts do you include in your story? (For sake of argument, assume these are factually accurate statements.)

1. Chicago votes predominately Democrat.

2. Chicago has a higher poverty rate than other cities.

3. Chicago has a large black and Hispanic population.

4. Chicago has more gangs than other cities.

Why not all of those facts? It's only four short sentences, it won't take up much space on a printed newspaper let alone an online article. Throw in some more facts about American gun crime rates vs other countries for good measure, some facts comparing Chicago to other American cities, etc.

If it's your intent to report facts about gun violence in Chicago, and only that, then dropping those other facts detracts from what you're doing. It makes it look like you're insinuating possible causes. Like that voting Democrat leads to gun violence, or that poverty causes gun violence, or that hispanics and blacks perpetrate gun violence.

By mentioning certain remotely related facts, it looks as if you're hinting at giving an interpretation of the central facts.

If you want to convey facts about a topic like gun violence in Chicago, then stick to facts closely relevant to it. Like different ways of slicing up the data. You might show a density map of where in Chicago most of it has happened over a certain period, or demographics about gun violence.

Now if you want to explore a link between gun violence and something else like poverty, then you have to get your ducks in a row about that. Such a subject deserves to be treated by a sophisticated researcher with an expert background in statistics. If that researcher postulates some kind of link, they have to look at all the reasons why that might be false, not only true.

The idea is to report all the facts that at least a substantial minority of the public believe to be relevant, regardless of which way they swing politically. All of those facts qualify under this standard, and also the ones I suggested as well. If you leave out the part about Chicago being a Democratic stronghold city, half the American public are going to be yelling that fact at the article and concluding that the writer is biased. And if you leave out the comparison of American gun violence to other countries, you'll have the same accusations of bias coming from other readers.

If you want to preempt those accusations of bias, then you need to cover your bases and present all the facts that the public may believe to be relevant. Even those facts which you personally believe to be irrelevant distractions from the narrative you prefer.

What you're doing there is a form of populism: adjusting the biases hinted at your article to the anticipated biases held by the public, as to somehow pander to everyone at the same time.

That's not the same as avoiding biases.

The idea isn't to pander to the majority, but to include facts that at least a substantial minority believe are relevant even if most people think those facts aren't relevant. This would not make the majority feel pandered to, it would probably make most people believe the article isn't ideologically aligned with them which is the entire point. Democrats would say "why the hell is the article mentioning that Chicago is controlled by Democratic politicians? That's not relevant!" And Republicans would say "why the hell is the article mentioning that America's gun violence rate far exceeds that of other developed countries, that isn't relevant!" However in both cases they would have to concede that the article did include the facts they personally believe relevant (those facts which the other objects to) even though it also included irrelevant facts. This isn't pandering, this is impartially reporting the facts that some significant fraction of people might believe to be relevant while at the same time not conforming to their preferred narrative by omitting facts inconvenient to their narrative.

You can't pander to both at the same time. What you can do, and typically is done, is pander to one or the other by conforming to one narrative or the other, choosing or omitting facts according to the needs of one narrative or the other. That is pandering.

I think this is the wrong question to ask. I'd prefer to see reporters refrain from "connecting the dots". it's not a good fit for the daily/weekly news cycle.

there's a lot to discuss on this topic without "contextualizing". you can report on whether gun violence is up or down YoY, whether the percent delta is above the noise floor of the last few years, compare against trends in similar US cities, that sort of thing.

once you start including facts like 1, 2, 3, or 4, you are crafting a narrative, whether it is explicit or not. it's irresponsible to include this stuff unless you are prepared to make a detailed analysis of whether these factors actually predict crime, thorough comparisons against other cities where the same facts are true, possibly some regression analysis. most journalists lack the time and capacity to do this.

I don't think it's really that hard to report in a way that is unbiased enough to be useful. Just ask yourself, am I leaving out facts that my political opposite would think are relevant? But even just focusing on facts, however selected, would be better than what we have now which is a news media that decides what they want you to think first, and then reports or buries a story based on this.

It can be hard to even realize you're even being biased. As a professional journalist, just the fact that you're reporting on a region at all is a thumb your employer has put on the scale. It wouldn't be, were journalism evenly distributed across all conflicts, but there is no market for that kind of journalism, and so it isn't done.

That doesn't mean people should disregard journalism done from "journalism hot spots". But it's an important thing to keep in mind, and I think it bears especially on the question of how much emotional valence we should want invested in stories.

A view even allowing for a "political opposite" is already really limited for this purpose. What's the opposite of a christian anarchist? Is a soldier fighting a genocide its opposite, or is a pacifist? It's not that the model is useless but it's not very useful for this.

Karl Popper:

“Twenty-five years ago I tried to bring home the same point to a group of physics students in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following instructions: 'Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!' They asked, of course, what I wanted them to observe. Clearly the instruction, 'Observe!' is absurd. (It is not even idiomatic, unless the object of the transitive verb can be taken as understood.) Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems.”

In philosophy of sciences, it is known that every fact is a fact of some or another theory. That's what "theory-laden" facts are. When some or another claim is not under dispute, such a theoretical claim is accepted as a fact. We accept many theories, whose theoretical claims have attained the status of facts. Same thing happens when it comes to newspapers, journalists: whatever they present as facts are facts of a certain of way of describing an event/process/slice of the world. As long as such descriptions are accepted, facts of those descriptions(theories) reach the status of facts: when someone disputes these descriptions, he is branded as extremist/conspiracy theorist/right wing/labels that many find abhorrent.

agree, and then we get into the world of combative self interest, its hard to move forward to a solution when so much energy is spent trying to undermine one's opponent -- I did like your description of theory-laden facts though, so thats what they were trying to teach me in science 101 :)

You may find these interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=%22theor...

>> when someone disputes these descriptions, he is branded as extremist/conspiracy theorist/right wing/labels that many find abhorrent

Not always true. The goal of facts is to create trust and order. So when disputing "facts", it will initially cause chaos and disorder. Additionally, challenging a "fact" should come with reasoning (usually through the scientific method), and not an unresearched response. For example, flat-earthers deny a fact, yet offer no research. In such a case, a derogatory label is provided.

https://physicsworld.com/a/fighting-flat-earth-theory/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

There is no such thing as "scientific method". Only school boy conception of science espouses such a view that there is a scientific method. What we have are a set of heuristics learned from the history of natural sciences. These heuristics function as guard rails: for instance, a theory that is postulated to explain already-collected facts is ad hoc; a theory should solve new problems; a theory should solve predict novel 'facts'; do not increase theoretical entities unnecessarily; do not try to explain away by postulating various sub-entities; do not confuse a description with a phenomenon; save the phenomena; etc.

When you or I drive/walk, what do we experience: flat earth, of course. In other words, both flat-earthers and spherical-earthers experience the same. Further, flat-earthers reason that if the earth were to be round, one would fall off of the surface of the earth on a sea/land travel. Since such an incident never occured, flat-earthers reason that the earth can't be spherical. Flat-earthers reasoning is not spurious, they are entirely reasonable.

How to help them, you have to make them pilots and fly at 50000 feet, and they can experience the sphericalness of the earth directly. In other words, you can't transfer knowledge via authority. That's why there are disputes about what sciences are? Are sciences reduced to a set of theories, or just experiments, both theories and experiments? What happens when one theory gets supplanted by another, better theory? These are deeper questions about knowledge.

When I am sick, I trust some or doctor about his knowledge to diagnose. In some cases, even patients start doing research on their own (you can find many stories on this forum) to figure out when the doctors are not helpful. No one creates chaos, if one is genuinely seek knowledge. Instead of seeking knowledge, one seeks fame, followers, etc. Or as the other commenter said 'when so much energy is spent trying to undermine one's opponent'. That's a different story.

We have to be careful about psuedo-winning against those who create chaos. Here is an interesting piece by Late Prof. Larry Laudan: "Science at the Bar--Causes for Concern" [1], originally appeared in Science, Technology, and Human Values 7 (41):16-19 (1982)

[1] https://faculty.washington.edu/lynnhank/Laudan.pdf

> But there is no such thing as a pure fact

Yes there is. People who say otherwise just want to push their partizan viewpoint.

You can present non-biased facts, it's just that it's hard and not financially rewarding because when you're non-biased you loose the polarized audience. Sticking to a single world view gives you a loyal audience.

That quote tells more about Zinn’s views than anything true about the world. Explains a lot about that propaganda piece of a book that has little to do with actual history.

Summarising things is lossy, and every piece of information we don't say might have consequences for the audience.

But we need to do it so that we can stop talking.

AP and other mainstream "news" sites only care when Jewish people from Israel kill someone, they are of the "wrong" or unprotected religion.

Other peoples in the region can kill with impunity and no one will report on it at all. Syria, Yemen,Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc... silence is the game

If a Jewish persons defends themselves though, that is front page news.

I don't know if that's true. Problematically, I don't know if anybody else does either. The implications are significant either way. Under those circumstances, amping up the emotional impact of the stories being told seems worrisome. But not amping it up has had poor outcomes too, so who knows?

There are many reasons for this, one of the key reasons being less insidious than you imply. Americans see Israelis as people with the same "western" values, same cultural and ethical norms. Most Americans are not shocked by tribal violence in Yemen (as despicable as it is by general humanistic standards), but can relate and identify with Israelis both experiencing violence and inflicting it.

I agree with you that we need to always provide clear context for what is happening in this specific situation, not rush to judgment and not to be as reactive in general. Israelis are defending themselves, Hamas is clearly using their own people as human shields. Saying that, Israel does have other options in this war, options that would reduce the civilian death count (e.g. allowing women and children leave Gaza for Israel, even at the cost of an increased terrorist activity).

Worth noting how treacherous is the American assumption that Israelis are just geographically displaced westerners, since a plurality of Israeli Jewish trace their origins to West Asian and North African states.

I don't necessarily see how this is treacherous. Most Israelis, at least at and around the time of founding the state of Israel, were European immigrants. Some of the founders of Israel weren't even religious. Of course, it's safe to assume that at least practicing Jews carried over some traditions and, perhaps, values from their non-western origin, but it's not like fifth generation Polish Jews were in all respects non-westerners by the time they moved to Israel.

Once again: a plurality of Israeli Jewish people are not in fact European, but were instead forcibly expelled from Tunisia, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, etc. The west's persistent belief that Israelis are culturally just like them, and see the world in the same terms, is problematic and not just a little bit racist. Moreover, there's a particularly disquieting subtext that Jewish people could be expelled from the Levant and a just status quo ante restored to the region; that outcome would probably amount to a genocide of the Mizrahim. See also: "decolonization".

It also helps to understand that the "browner" an Israeli citizen is, the less likely they are to agree with liberals like me in the west about Israel's policies towards Palestinians. Israeli citizens of middle eastern ethnic origin are much more conservative than those of European origin.

I see, thanks for clarifying.

I believe they are a majority now.

> the less likely they are to agree with liberals like me in the west about Israel's policies towards Palestinians

Not quite true? From what I read, any solidarity with the Palestinians is considered treacherous.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JQS-_9K5-Dk&t=592

> ...more conservative than those of European origin

Speak about racism and decolonization, immediately followed by this? The capitalists funding settlements and displacements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, or the Kahanists & JDL aren't necessarily only Mizrahi or only Ashkenazi.

I mostly agree with your extra added context. But a significant part of Israel does see itself as "Western". It's true that there are also 20% Arab citizens of Israel (some of whom also consider themselves "Western", but not all) and I think around 20% religious Jews (again, some would consider themselves "Western" but not all).

I don't think it's a stretch to consider big parts of Israel as very similar culturally to the US.

> Moreover, there's a particularly disquieting subtext that Jewish people could be expelled from the Levant and a just status quo ante restored to the region; that outcome would probably amount to a genocide of the Mizrahim. See also: "decolonization".

Also a genocide of the Ashkenazim. While certainly some have dual-passports and some legal claim to "go back" to Western countries (but not all by a long shot!), we're talking 2nd/3rd/4th generation people in many cases. Forcing people to go to countries they have no connection to, which people fled in many cases because of the Holocaust, would be itself an act of ethnic cleansing. Which already happened to the grandparents of many of these people.

> It also helps to understand that the "browner" an Israeli citizen is, the less likely they are to agree with liberals like me in the west about Israel's policies towards Palestinians. Israeli citizens of middle eastern ethnic origin are much more conservative than those of European origin.

True. Though right about now, almost everyone in Israel has moved "rightward" in their views, I believe, and unlike the response in the West, the Israeli public is very sure that the only thing to do that makes sense is to destroy Hamas, somehow. (The "somehow" is an important differntiator between different value systems - some people worry more about Palestinian civilians, and some, regrettably in my mind, worry less.)

Jews from the Middle East, too, are often seen as Westerners of a sort, because European colonialism treated e.g. Algerian and Iraqi Jews as intermediate between Europeans and other local populations. They were accorded privileges and often merged into European society. Look at the Sassoon family of Iraq as one striking 19th-century case.

I suppose it is similar to how educated Ismaili Muslims are viewed as Western-adjacent, because their hereditary spiritual leaders the Aga Khans have been resident in Europe, and intermixed with the European aristocracy, for a very long time now.

> Other peoples in the region can kill with impunity and no one will report on it at all. Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc... silence is the game

It's been a few years, but for MONTHS we saw nothing but news about killings in Syria and Iraq: at the start of the Syrian civil war, and then later during the rise of ISIS. Yemen, Lebanon, and Afghanistan have also been widely covered, albeit less so.

This claim is factually a bullshit conspiracy theory.

Nothing in this article denies any of this. Not sure what your point is. Everything is political.

Rereading this comment, I'm seeing that I wrote that tens of thousands of children died in the Tigray conflicts, but that's not the case (or what I meant to write); that's an estimate of the total civilian death toll.

The choice is not difficult to understand. What prompts more of a concern about these particular dead children (civillians, really, but since the topic focuses on children, let us stick with that) than others, is largely about the level of support from the USA government and military for the party doing the killing (talking about USA here because the magazine that published the article is The New Yorker). It is difficult to care about everything bad happening in the world, but when one's government (that one votes for and funds through their taxes) is directly standing behind it, it tends to get people (more) involved. That a lot (most? I don't know the exact proportions) of the ammunition and advanced weapons and machines that are killing those children are made and given to Israel by USA tends to get people to feel more strongly about it, too. Similarly with the funding (mentioned by a sibling comment) and the political protection.

Everyone already knows what the words "bombing" and "shooting" mean, and it would be hard to find someone who considers war to be a good thing. The entire question is which dead children and whose misery we pay attention to.

This article doesn't help answer it. It's just a journalist trying to justify a more emotionally powerful and eye-catching form of journalism in a world where a huge number of people are already addicted to doomscrolling. If anything, we need mutual disarmament in the area of giving people an endless stream of depressing and enraging news in ever more optimized ways. I would treat this piece similarly to an oil industry worker explaining the benefits of using more fossil fuels, or an alcohol industry executive expounding on the positives of drinking.

> The entire question is which dead children and whose misery we pay attention to.

It does.

> Images of dead children have great emotional and political power because most people in the world rightfully agree that their deaths are intolerable.

All of them. How is this not obvious?

> All of them. How is this not obvious?

Not sure if you are in agreement with the comment you are replying to or challenging it. If the latter - your stance does not address the question. All unjust deaths are tragic, we could have thick magazines published daily listing details of unjust deaths of children just in the US. So the question is what do we pay attention to? (Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.)

Not all deaths are unjust, and ergo, not all deaths are tragic.

We collectively believe child murder to be beyond the pale. I don’t think it’s rhetorical but I also don’t think it’s debatable. So, the essence of my comment is this, to be clear: if a child dies due to some consequence of society we’re capable of changing, we should be forced to look upon those images.

I agree with you in principle: if a person (don't think it's reasonable to limit this to children only) dies due to some consequence of society we can change, there is a shared responsibility on all of us to face this injustice. But this is wildly impractical, attention is a valuable and limited commodity. This whole thread is dedicated to that specific notion: neither the media, nor individually we can't collect, process and raise awareness of all unjust deaths. So then the question is, what is the process for choosing and reporting these injustices?

> if a child dies due to some consequence of society we’re capable of changing, we should be forced to look upon those images

Just to reiterate: this is impossible due to various unresolvable constraints.

> > most people in the world rightfully agree that their deaths are intolerable.

> All of them. How is this not obvious?

Counter-examples are staring in your face in real time. Some are using kids as human shields as we speak, because as far as they're concerned those kids go to heaven anyway (whereas they themselves go to heaven if they kill people of other faith, so why not give kids a favor too?)

I wish I could upvote you a hundred times.

"it would be hard to find someone who considers war to be a good thing"

In the general population, yes.

However, Hamas certainly didn't believe so. Extremists of all kinds, the same, even in the US.

Putin didn't either, though, I guess, he must've changed his mind on that one since the whole thing didn't really go according to his plan.

Yevgeny Prigozhin certainly didn't believe war was bad, nor does Erik Prince.

I also have my doubts about the "defense" industry. There are certainly people in the (illegal) arms business who very much believe war is a good thing.

I wasn't aware society had agreed that war journalism or photojournalism should be neutered.

Maybe I challenge the premise of the article in the sense that... Yeah. No shit?

Honestly... These days I'm so emotionally exhausted that I just see an article like this as a way to get a good by line. Shut up we know kids are being blown up.

Right now I just want to eat maple syrup greek yogurt and listen to pop music while I browse HN. I just can't with the dead kids 24/7 any more.

If you feel like that, an internet break could help.

You're not wrong.

I need an internet break too.

Same here. I know the kids are dying, some of my closest friends share pictures every day and then denounce everyone who unfollows them for being against their existence. I'm sorry. What do all the journalists and activists want me to do? Odds are I've already done it. Please stop telling me about it, I know. I'm not turning away because I don't care about the kids, I'm turning away because the more we keep this up the less I'm able to care about anything. I just need a break but they make you feel like shit for it. And maybe I should feel like shit for choosing to ignore suffering because I can't keep looking idk. I'm just so tired.

In any case, I thought the place with articles about the intricacies of pointers in C++ would be safe from the politics and dead children. Clearly I was wrong.

This article, had you read it, underscores the “yous” in the world who “know,” but make excuses about emotional exhaustion to take a pass on confronting the actual horror of it. If you really “knew”, you’d want everyone to stand up and demand it stop.

There are only so many hills one can afford to die on before hitting emotional burnout. It's not an "excuse" for the parent, it's simply an acknowledgement of the emotional reality.

This argument is not at all a new one, and I think dates back to the dawn of modern media, the idea that "if only the public knew the horrors something more would be done". Frankly I'm really skeptical. Humans have known intimately the horrors of far more death and violence throughout the majority of our history, and still do in much of the world. It's only very recently that some areas have happily managed to make it to the point where "the vast majority of us have never seen actual carnage". And looking back through millennia of history, I don't see any particular sign that knowing it made it particularly less likely. On the contrary, mass exposure to any stimulus physiologically and psychologically tends to have an inuring effect. Outrage and shock are (and to maintain a healthy state of mind need to be) transient in nature. If it's just steady state it's not special it becomes the new normal.

As with many things there's probably a spectrum not binary, and there are legitimate debates around to what extent people get disconnected from physical reality basics. I can perfectly well believe getting too abstracted is bad, but at the same time getting too close seems to clearly be not good either, resulting in higher stress or flat out PTSD and then cynicism/nihilism on top if no progress can be made because the situation simply isn't reactive to individual outrage. In general I'd say the biggest hardest aspects of politics and geopolitics are that way precisely because they're incredibly complex with large numbers of powerful competing very entrenched interests and arguments, good arguments on multiple sides even, it's not something where the public being upset for awhile necessarily means it just all gets cleanly resolved.

And even if public outrage and shock does manage to spark some political movement, that absolutely may or may not be a positive thing. Plenty of horrors in history have been committed in response to "DO SOMETHING!!!"

Edit to add: Despite having commented and upvoted, I do agree with others that while in principle there are interesting intellectual and more specifically technological discussions to be had here, this prompt in particular is not a productive one and doesn't look to be producing something good for HN. A lot of the same well worn circles, ignoring complexity, adding a helping of mutual flagrant disrespect and condescension that turns people off, done in at least one case while also actively decrying people being too "politically encamped" without a shred of irony. So here I am having commented, upvoted, and then flagged. Doh :(

"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

--William Randolph Hearst before the Spanish American war

While I agree with most of this statement, there is one example I can think of that caused actual change. I would say Emmett Till's mother's decision to have an open casket funeral and refusal to have his remains touched up by the mortician, was the spark the Civil Rights movement needed.

My guess is that this war’s lasting legacy may not be some geopolitical break after years of conflict but the images of the innocents we’ve seen, including children, killed in almost every imaginable way.

I think this war will be seen as the beginning of the end for the western worlds support for Israel. The director of the ADL was recorded as saying: "The issue of the United States’ support of Israel is not left and right. It is young and old.”[1]

It may take a few years or even a couple of decades but eventually there will be a viable US presidential candidate who is more tempted by the votes on the table than by the pro-Israel lobby.

[1] https://justicereport.news/articles/2023/11/14/adl-director-...

This is assuming people's viewpoints don't evolve as they get older.

“Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit.”

A quick search shows the quote originating in the 19th century.

I may offer myself as an example.

As a young man I was generally pro-Israeli, I can remember a teacher in high school telling us about how great Israel was the morning after 9/11, how they fought all those wars against Arabs who hated them (for no reason at all), Moshe Dayan's cool eyepatch, etc etc.

I'm 36 now, and things are different:

- I know who Netanyahu is, and what he's said.

- I know who AIPAC are, and what they've said.

- I know who the ADL are, and what they've said.

- I know how the British Mandate of Palestine ended

Younger generations will be finding a lot more of what I learned a lot more quickly.

As a younger person than you, I moved from being vaguely pro-Palestinian in the past to being staunchly pro-Israel now that I have learned more about:

- how Israel has repeatedly needed to fend off simultaneous attacks on its existence

- what the rules of war actually are, and what counts as a war crime or not, and how restrained Israel has been in this regards

- how Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are highly radicalized and even celebrated the 9/11 attacks on the very day of

I’m not claiming to be representative of people my age. I’m simply providing a counter example to you, to show that “learning the facts a lot more quickly” can lead one to different conclusions.

For me, I will unapologetically stand on what I perceive to be the side of civilization, against the forces of barbarism that we saw unleashed on 10/7. Others may perceive differently, or have different values. That’s fine, but it doesn’t make one perspective the obvious and objectively correct one.

Look at your list of arguments.

AIPAC, the ADL and 1948 Britain (?) are not Israeli. We agree with some of what they do. The Israeli public is VERY conflicted about Netanyahu. It's like saying that since Trump got elected, America is a racist misogynistic country.

I am Israeli. I want to live without fear of being gunned down in my house or at a rave at 6 AM like the 1200 people who died on October 7th. I want to live without fear of a rocket fired from Gaza exploding on my house.

Am I allowed that right? If I am, pray tell, how do we get from October 7th to there?

You deserve all that.

I’m not sure creating a new generation of angry orphans in Gaza will get you there.

But that's the problem. What will?

It feels like everyone in the world is criticizing what the IDF does. Nobody seems to have an alternative. Hamas keeps repeating that they want no Jews between the river and the sea and they plan to commit October 7th-like atrocities again and again. What is the IDF and the Israeli government supposed to do?

> But that's the problem. What will?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

I don't know what the solution is. People much smarter than me have tried to come up with one. What I can definitively say is large-scale civilian casualties in Gaza is unlikely to prevent another October 7th someday, and may well help cause another one.

Some problems are intractable. Christians in the area have been arguing since 1757 about who's allowed to move a ladder, without resolution, and no one even died over it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_Quo_(Jerusalem_and_Beth...

Civilian casualties in Gaza are a tragic, unfortunate side effect. It's terrible. But October 7th changed things. 1,200 dead, 240 kidnapped, more than 100,000 still displaced. "Some problems are intractable" is not good enough anymore, our lives are in danger.

So Israel acts, with the goal of destorying Hamas's military ability. If you forcibly take away the other side's guns they can't shoot you anymore. That's not a syllogism, it's simple logic.

This is a solution with a terrible cost, brought about by Hamas's continued active use of their citizenry as human shield. Hamas can end this today by disarming and surrendering. The Gazans would get a functioning state and a better life for their citizens.

Israel doesn't have this option - right now it is do or die.

If there is a way to neutralize the threat from Hamas without civilian casualties, I'm all ears. If not, I assert that any reasonable westerner would act exactly the same. Go ahead and prove me wrong.

Oh, I don't doubt we'd do the same. We did it in Afghanistan.

IMO, that wound up a cautionary tale that proves my point.

Israel, like the US in Afghanistan, cannot achieve this goal via their current approach, no matter how much they wish it.

There's a huge difference. With Afghanistan, Americans living in Chicago or New York or Houston were halfway across the world. This is here. Gaza is 35 miles from Tel Aviv and 40 miles from Jerusalem.

I don't know what the goals were in Afghanistan. Short of ICBMs, I don't see how Afghanistan could ever threaten the US. The threat against us is local and immediate and has already proven to be real.

Rightly or wrongly, the US went into Afghanistan because of a "local and immediate" event in New York City in 2001. It serves as an illustration of how hard it is to change a population's ideology via force. The distance isn't really what matters.

Again, I don't doubt the threat. It's demonstrably real. I doubt the IDF's current response to that threat is going to be successful at neutralizing it. I strongly suspect the response to that threat is going to make things worse in the next few decades.

There's still a large difference. The Afghan government collapsed. The Afghan people, presumably, did not fear for their lives enough to stand up to the Taliban. Biden said "American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves."

This is not about Israel protecting someone else. This is about physically protecting our home. We do this or we die.

Hamas rockets have the range to reach about 80% of Israel's population. They've shown willingness to amass and fire them in large numbers. It's not a question of "if", but "when". Again, would you sit and wait?

> The Afghan government collapsed.

So'd the Palestinian one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007) No elections in seventeen years, now.

> The Afghan people, presumably, did not fear for their lives enough to stand up to the Taliban.

I would presume, as with Hamas, that it's the opposite; that fear for their lives is precisely why they do not stand up to violent extremist groups controlling their area.

> Again, would you sit and wait?

I'd start with fixing the intelligence failures that permitted the attack to proceed.

Ignored warnings: https://www.ft.com/content/277573ae-fbbc-4396-8faf-64b73ab8e...

Halted overnight/weekend operations: https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-israeli-intel-unit-wasnt-o...

I'd also be investing a lot in expanding things like Iron Dome and border surveillance.

There are actions available that are not "flatten entire blocks of Gaza and displace a million people, generating the next generation of pissed off extremists".

First let's continue to distinguish between the PA, that's still functioning (for some definition of the word) in the West Bank, and the Hamas government of Gaza.

> I would presume, as with Hamas, that it's the opposite; that fear for their lives is precisely why they do not stand up to violent extremist groups controlling their area.

I can accept that.

> I'd start with fixing the intelligence failures that permitted the attack to proceed.

Of course they're doing that, and will continue to do that after the war ends.

> I'd also be investing a lot in expanding things like Iron Dome and border surveillance.

Here's the thing about Iron Dome and border surveillance. These are like watchdog mechanisms and monitoring systems for software. You can add as many of these as you like, at some point you're going to have downtime. You and I don't know of all the times significant attacks were planned and foiled. We do know of all the rocket attacks - of which there have been many over the years - and Iron Dome is not perfect.

> There are actions available that are not "flatten entire blocks of Gaza and displace a million people, generating the next generation of pissed off extremists".

You've suggested defense. I agree. We should be better at defense. We should fix as many bugs in our defense as we can. But as the quote goes, the bomber will always get through. Things will not materially change until the extremists on their side* are removed from power, both for Israelis who live in fear of attacks, and Palestinians who live in fear of Israeli retribution - but also in dire economic terms and without prospects, even well before October 7th.

* and ours, though their damage is generally directed at the West Bank for now

> Things will not materially change until the extremists on their side* are removed from power...

Agreed! Generating a bunch of new extremists in Gaza via 6,000 bombs (so far) and a land invasion that leaves a pile of rubble in its wake is not likely to accomplish this.

You continue to make the same logical fallacy; "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this".

I addressed that. Take their guns and they can't shoot you.

I'm not a general. I don't know if the bombing was militarily necessary. The IDF high command thinks it was, and has proof that every bomb targeted a Hamas asset.

Israel has called again and again for civilians to leave. The vast majority did. They're not doing great but they are alive and safe, at least from Israeli attacks. International aid has been brought in over the past week.

You seem to imply there is an alternative. I explained why bolstering defense is not enough. I explained why doing nothing is not an option. I explained why this action will remove the threat, however temporarily. I agree with you that more nonviolent action is needed, after the dust settles, to achieve a more permanent peace. But for now, how do we address the immediate threat?

> Take their guns and they can't shoot you.

It is not possible to stop people from becoming suicide bombers by any means other than convincing them it's a bad idea. There is no way to take away all the resources that can be used to create bombs.

You can make it a lot harder and through intelligence and direct action stop them periodically.

There's a big difference between a single person or a three-person group creating a makeshift bomb, and an organized 50,000-strong terrorist organization.

The gaza invasion is strengthening the resolve of the terrorists. There are millions of people in Gaza. You can't stop them all. You can't watch them all. The vast, vast majority of them want to see Israel destroyed and now are more willing than ever to sacrifice everything to even just inconvenience Israeli's.

Having spoken to Israeli Arabs, I know for a fact this isn't true. Like in any other conflict, the vast majority of Gazans just want to live their lives in peace.

Not saying we'll ever be best buddies but a mutually beneficial peace agreement is definitely possible - under the right conditions.

> "Some problems are intractable" is not good enough anymore

"some problems are intractable" isn't an argument here, it's a fact. You can't just say "this fact isn't good enough". The entire idea that an occupation of Gaza could possibly lead to a demilitarization of Gazans is incredibly naïve, Iran will never stop arming terrorists in Gaza. Occupying a hostile territory always leads to more terrorism, not less. There is no reason to believe that this occupation will make Israeli's safer, and many reasons to believe it will make them less safe. Obviously it sucks to be in this situation, but rejecting the reality of the situation doesn't help anyone.

Palestinians are not the only group with atrocities committed against them here. This situation is so sticky because both sides have legitimate grievances that allow them to make compelling moral arguments for their actions.

If you break it down by religion and ethnicity, support for Israel in America is the highest among white evangelicals. Young white people are leaving religion in increasing numbers and aren't going back to it. Your average white evangelical church crowd today looks like a nursing home field trip (and this demographic trend is very much on their minds. They're trying everything they can think of to reverse the trend but none of it works.)

America's support for Israel will never recover to the heights it once enjoyed.

Doubt it.

I can see you have picked a side in this debate. In this case: Palestinians, or at least not-Israel.

Warning, what follows is an everything-sucks-and-there-really-is-no-solution.

Here are some basic facts as I understand about the long-term situation. First, how messed up is the Gaza strip?

- Gaza is an open air prison that has no functioning economy and Israel controls all electricity, food, water, etc to a practical extent. It has no real jobs or industry, it survives on humanitarian aid from the UN and in particular Qatar.

- To underscore that, Gaza really has no economy. They have no resources. Their population isn't particularly educated, they have no high-tech, they have zero relevance in the world economy.

- Gaza is run by a terrorist group and is effectively a mafia state. Remember when I said no jobs? Welllll, actually the only jobs are with 1) the government (run by Hamas) or 2) as a terrorist... in Hamas. The only money that DOES flow into Gaza (of the legitimate sort) must flow through a government state, and Hamas maintains that grip with violence and intimidation.

- Gaza was once run by Egypt for about 25 years in the latter part of the 20th century. They eventually said "no thanks" and handed it effectively back to Israel. They Egyptians HATE the Palestinians. This means, no immigration, no leaving Gaza through Egypt, no settling/expanding into Sinai. ZERO CHANCE. The Egyptians will let the Palestinians starve.

- Gaza will not get any territory from Israel. That is not happening, not now, not ever.

- Gaza has, over the last 75 years of becoming an open air prison and totally dependent on outside help, gone from 340,000 people in 1970 to about 1.5 million in 2010 or so and still growing. Keep in mind, this is an area with no real economy, no jobs, no trade, no means of self support. This isn't some Malthusian complaint. By going from 300,000 something to 1.5 million, the sheer scale of the problem is much greater. The threat the Gaza population poses is far greater. The amount of money that would be needed to fix Gaza is 500% greater. It basically guarantees they can't grow food for themselves, that there probably isn't enough water longer term. It basically is an unsustainable population for the area and region they live in. It makes EVERYTHING far worse. Basically, the largesse needed to modernize a country of 350,000 people is far different that the amount of political will/influence it takes to fund 4-5x more people.

- to make things worst, the only real function Gaza has geopolitically to be a thorn in Israel's side. Currently, Iran is funding this because Israel is quietly aligning with Sunni Arab states (Saudis, etc) who are the blood enemies of the Shiites/Iranians. Thus the only other money that flows into Gaza is for proxy war, which ... goes through Hamas and cements them. This means there will NEVER be peace, because the only jobs in Gaza are Hamas foot soldiers, and the only money that really flows through is because Hamas keeps up the fight with Israel.

- For the Palestinians, they have always survived because oil was important, and it provided money to the Arab world, and the Palestinians were a proxy to keep Israel in check. But oil will "soon" (in the geopolitical sense) NOT be important. EVs and alternative energy will vastly undercut demand in oil, and when the extra money stops to the arab states AND the rest of the world decides that paying attention to the Arabian peninsula they have no other use for is dumb, the money will run out for the Palestinians.

- A bit longer term, Global Warming is heating up, and to survive it you need a functioning grid, a good economy (aka you need money). The Palestinians are in a prison, and it'll start getting hot. But in terms of predicted population movements/displacements from Global Warming, the Palestinians are small fry.

- A separate state for Gaza with the current leadership and stated goals of destroying Israel is meaningless, and probably counterproductive. First off, it means Israel can cut off all water / electric / communications to Gaza as a hostile state. Then, when-not-if Gaza pops off rockets across the border AKA an Act of War, it isn't an interaction between a captive wards of Israel, this is Gaza-the-soverign-country vs Israel-the-sovereign-country who outguns them vastly and they can carpet bomb them.

- "Pressure Israel for Peace" is just a bandaid on the current situation, and gets it to the previous state of "holy shit there is no solution". Israel is facing a demonstrated terrorist state, and has no reason to surrender territory, concessions, independence, or ANYTHING to Gaza. Not because I like Israel, it's simply historical fact. They would be colossally stupid to do so, and would only do it for vast sums of money. Gaza is their enemy, Palestinians are their enemy, and not in the European sense of "these two royal houses hate each other but they people are just peasants that want to work on the farms and don't care about the royal games". The Palestinians at the ground level hate Israel to a fundamental core, and unfortunately there's no way to undo that.

- "Stop supporting them militarily" is also a fantasy. Even if you did, Israel is a fairly wealthy economy and trading partner. They are practically a member of NATO/EU. You think Israel would dry up without US aid? Look, what stops the extreme right of Israel, who have effectively controlled Israel since the failed Camp David talks of 2000, from carpet bombing the Palestinians in response to rocket bombing acts of war and possibly using nuclear weapons on Iran, is that we give them a lot of money. If we stop giving them money, their patience with the current stalemate ends and they explore a "final solution" and yes I know what that implies on all levels.

Is there a non-final solution?

Do you think the collective, young, ignorant, radicalized population will wake up one day in Gaza and realize "man, fighting Israel is pointless" to the point that Israel actually agrees they are peaceful and lets them build an economy? I would sooner believe in the old testament's wildest fantastical stories than that happening.

Do you think that some country desperate for people allows a million plus Gazas to move to, say, Siberia, and that the Gazans would do it? I mean, uh, maybe? Seems pretty unlikely.

Or what will probably happen, is that oil money dries up, so all the money to Gaza dries up, the Israelis refuse to help, the Egyptians refuse to help, so then they plead with the UN for enough assistance, but no one does anything besides token/publicity based support, and the (likely at this point 2-2.5 million people) Gazans starve en masse.

Look, the UN is not a world government, the international court of justice is a joke. There is no group of nations with real influence that will do anything to Israel, it's a functioning Western government with a good economy. Nobody is messing with that, because it is good business.

Listen, there's an easy solution for Gaza. They have a lot of people, and no space or freedom. Detroit has a ton of space, and lots of freedom. Let everyone move, give them a vote, and let 'er rip.

Well the terrorist demand in the USA is outstripping supply...

Very good take. It seems clear to me that the status quo will remain for the far future until Israel eventually decides to enact their "final solution to the Palestinian problem" of mass expulsion/genocide/forced starvation which for all we know could take 1000 years.

Whoa whoa whoa whoa.

Why are you using justicereport.news as a source? I hadn't heard of it but after clicking through it a little it's clearly a fringe crazy spam site (objectively-- take a look at some of the articles)

If this is worth discussing you can easily find a better source

It was the first result when I searched for it. The original source is this:

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/491344/American-youth-break...

Points for it being legitimate:

- Congruent with what the ADL publish on their own website

- recording sounds fine

- ADL have not denied it

Points for it not being legitimate

- Heavy biased source

- I'm not an audio engineer, so I only have an amateurs intuition of what sort of recordings sound real

> The dam—which currently is held in place by the standards of news organizations and by law-enforcement organizations who, for understandable reasons, have tightly guarded these crime-scene photos—will inevitably break.

Read between the lines: “We used to control the types of dead children we wanted you to see. But the darned social media is ruining it for us. Now you might see some dead children you weren’t supposed to”

People have an enormous inertia for almost anything, no matter how trivial. It's a wonder anything gets done. I'll pick an issue out of a hat.

Let's say I show your average member of the United States a photo array of one hundred seventeen (117) dead infants. I tell you they all died of a single cause. People make sounds. I say "This happens every year, to roughly this degree." Wow! More noises are made. People sound like they want to do something about it. Write to senators, pass laws, protest.

But when I get down to brass tacks and say, "Hey, those are all boys. That's how many die from circumcision each year, roughly, in the United States. And by the way, the NNT (number needed to treat) is pretty high, you need a least a hundred circumcisions to prevent just one urinary tract infection." And it all will just stop.

New noises, about religious freedoms, and tradition, and the son looking like his father, and "won't he be made fun of?" appear in place of the original noises. And I could say, "It's only done maybe one in ten times in Europe, civilization hasn't ended there" and it won't make a lick of difference. It's not about guns or anything else, people just don't like to change, even over some fairly trivial business. I'd be willing to lay odds that nobody reading this comment who was pro-circumcision has changed their minds. And I would not be shocked for almost any issue that I selected would have a similar outcome.

Are people more callous than they are unwilling to change? Perhaps. Are they burned out from hearing Sarah McLachlan's voice starting off an ASCPA commercial, and, in a parallel to Terror Management Theory, most people will, to some degree or another, shut themselves off from a vast and bewildering array of suffering against which they could make only the most ineffectual showing, knowing that for every bit of effort they expend, it will not reach millions of humans and other creatures whose life is primarily one of grim endurance and a kind of mute hope? I could not tell you.

If taxpayer dollars are being used to kill those children, I'm totally favorable people see in graphic detail what their taxes are buying them overseas. It's a matter of public transparency and accountability. Otherwise democracy doesn't work.

Yes, "you are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions" is the most elementary moral principle. Here, "you" is those deciding and implementing US foreign policy, which overwhelmingly supports the slaughter in Gaza (via Israel), and the depredation that preceded it (via Egypt and Israel).

Israel would be far more violent toward Gaza if they had no western support. Ironically the US military aid is actually whats stopping them from flattening Gaza here.

I disagree, and the history of US presidential influence (Reagan, GH Bush) suggests otherwise.

It seems many commenters are stuck on the Israel-Hamas angle. The article itself is about more than just that conflict. I encourage others to read the full article (there are not many images of dead kids, for those fearing that this is a slide show of gore).

I think the last paragraph is well written:

"The past six weeks have made it clear that the world will respond to images of slaughtered children, and it’s worth asking why it’s taken this long for people to see what that looks like. There is no question that images of dead children carry an immense amount of weight, which, in turn, must be handled responsibly. But that does not mean that any attempt to get the public to see them is automatically manipulative or propagandistic. It is far more manipulative to edit out the dead children or to hide them under a veil of solemnity and manners."

So how many dead babies do I have to look at until they release Julian Assange for reporting on that same kind of shit?

Woof buddy.

They'd kill him before they released him, just out of principle at this point.

Ha, as if they have principles.

In mainstream Western media, it largely depends on group victim and privilege points of individual actual victims. You're not going to hear about the suffering of any individual Palestinian child while you are going to see a 30-minute biopic of an Israeli child playing nonstop. And "Support for Palestinians is antisemitism" screams Likud and ADL, while Jewish Voice for Peace and Combatants for Peace urging nonviolent solidarity and peace are banned, silenced, and ignored. This is the insanity of so-called liberal neoliberal left media beating the drums to war with authoritarian hardliner war hawks who want endless cycles of violence where only a political solution can lead to the lasting peace ordinary people need and deserve. This response to the "third intifada" is repeating the historical failures of America in Afghanistan and Iraq by a corrupt leader who was on his way to prison with a convicted racist in tow. Every civilian life lost is a tragedy, but unfortunately some lives are deemed more equal than others in the eyes of the mainstream media who have the power to put their thumb on the scale.

It seems the focus of these articles are dead children in Gaza. You don't see raw footage and photos of the dead children in Israel unless you go looking for it. Why is that?

It's subtle and powerful propaganda.

If showing 'the other' people dying on tv/print/web is generally normal, and showing 'our people' dying is generally tragic, there's a deep suggestion that 'the others' are less worthy of dignity than 'ours'.

Though, statistically speaking, one might expect to see a lot more murdered Gazan children, given that so, so many more have been horrifically killed, every year.

The second photo in that article is of an Israeli child's blood-stained bunk bed.

Because there are not nearly as many of them. Haaretz documents 12 children under age of 12, incl. as killed during Oct 7.

So if you have 12 kids on one side, and thousands on the other, you'll see more footage of Gazan children, assuming no bias in reporting.

At least 36 Israeli children killed in Oct 7th: https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/by65800qmt

Is there a source for "thousands of Gazan children under the age of 12 dead"? I'm sure many were (killed) but thousands seems on the high side of that estimate. Gaza's population is extremely young so unfortunately civilian casualties will include a lot of children.

I'm not sure what "no bias in reporting" can even mean in these situations. The loss of any child is a tragedy. The whole situation is just a tragedy. I'm not sure what the media is trying to do with footage of the dead. Maybe we should start running footage of children killed in car accidents to encourage people to drive more safely? Maybe we should do a few takes to find the best "dead".

6000 children so far, not including those whose bodies are still under the rubble.

https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-repo...

> Maybe we should start running footage of children killed in car accidents to encourage people to drive more safely?

Yes.

Here are the numbers by age of a victim:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/1/know-their...

    133 babies below the age of one
    482 toddlers (1-3 years old)
    344 preschoolers (4-5 years old)
    1,042 primary school children (6-12 years old)

Numbers are for 7th-25th October. So ~2 thousands <=12 years of age already more than a month ago.

I'm somewhat dubious of Al Jazeera and Hamas numbers. Neither are exactly objective or reliable sources.

But I'm sure the number is high given the dense population and the large proportion of children. Very tragic. I think this will be clearer over time but this conflict will be seen as whatever it was before Oct 7th and after Oct 7th.

Not clear where we go from here. On one hand I blame the Palestinians, both in terms of their recent and historical actions, on the other hand we wouldn't be in this situation without Israeli government actions, strategically and tactically, over the last few decades. But then this government is in power because of the Palestinians. There are of course other players that have been working on creating this mess.

Most likely we're still going to escalate from here. It's sad but it's hard to see any other way.

I don't think this is going to work with car accidents. We'd all just have PTSD from watching dead children and likely drive even crazier and be more violent.

This is abusing the term children.

The majority of this number are adolescents between 15 and 18 that are active participants in the conflict.

Also, it should be noted that even the source for the 6000 UNRWA is providing comes from the Gaza government, i.e. from Hamas.

The article doesn't state that 36 children <=12 years of age were killed on Oct 7. And the picture shows a bunch of teenagers among the 36. So it doesn't disprove the Haaretz numbers.

I didn't say those were <=12...

As for "no bias", I did not have anything sophisticated in mind. Just that roughly proportional concern would be given based on the size/urgency of the attrocity.

But it never really works like that for all sorts of reasons. I remember in 9/11 the media was running the footage of the planes going into the towers over and over and over again endlessly. It's still burnt in my head. We never really got much in the way of footage from Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Yemen, or Sri Lanka. Even Russia and Ukraine seemed to get less coverage than Israel and Gaza. The media always seems to have some sort of bias. They want to a) make money b) they have an agenda, and they somehow chart their course between these objectives. What I've never seen in any conflict is this sort of ratio of causalities reflected in reporting. These days I also guess social media platforms have a bigger impact than traditional media anyways.

This has real world impacts. E.g. thinking Russia vs. Ukraine we had a lot of western volunteers travel to fight for Ukraine, and many got killed, and very likely the media of various kinds played a major role in people's emotional response to the point they go and die for Ukraine. You might have two people living next to each other, one of them on Pro-Russia social media who is convinced that Russia is defending itself against NATO, and another who is going to Ukraine to fight against Russia. You also see similar things in internal politics, e.g. in the US and other places. So the media is biased and manipulative, people are lazy, easy to influence, and respond emotionally. And the world seems a less stable place. A post-truth world I guess, if there ever was truth.

you cant find it even if you look for it, its taboo in jewish culture.. Palestinians have no problem parading dead children, and hamas uses it as a weapon

(speaking as a non-american) I don't think that the press publishing pictures of dead kids after school shootings will change anything in how the US views that issue specifically. All it will do is throw a bunch more gross photos out there on social media.

People in the US are too politically encamped for pictures of dead kids to move the needle on gun rights at this point. It's not happening; it's been made clear over and over again that no matter the cost in human lives, "muh guns" is what triumphs over everything else for Americans. The consequences are obvious and the stalemate is so eternal that "a school shooting happened in the US" doesn't even make the local news here anymore in 99% of the cases.

From an ethical perspective, publishing those pictures will only harm the relatives of the victims - once it's been normalized by a regular outlet to try and push this needle, there's a whole array of sleazeballs out there with less ethics that will do it for every shooting, regardless of the wishes of the family, whether that's to move the needle or to just be a dick to the relatives.

It's also not comparable to the horrors of war in this case - there the needle can be moved with that kind of shock imagery because people are so used to the sanitized view of war. School shootings are already bloody - it won't move any needles.

I think the pro-gun side is convinced that there will be many more dead kids in a world without guns, so showing them pictures of actual dead kids isn't going to do much.

> People in the US are too politically encamped

I think politics is the wrong label for this. Politics is the forum in which the underlying worldviews express themselves. There are a few, strongly developed worldviews at play here and reducing it to just politics misses the depth of the disconnect.

Speaking as an American, I can tell you that pictures of dead kids is not going to do anything to further the gun control agenda. Nobody but a madman supports murdering children. In fact, murder is illegal in this country, as is assault and brandishing firearms. These laws don't stop insane people from using weapons to murder people. Just like strict knife laws don't stop stabbing. The problem is society is degrading to a point where people are willing to take lives.

The more I see dead kids from a school shooting, the more I will advocate for armed guards at schools to help dissuade would-be shooters from attempting anything. I would also advocate for the abolition of "Gun-Free Zones" as they only advertise to criminals that nobody is likely to be armed in these areas.

Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.

Um, fine over here in the UK. I mean our entire yearly list of shootings is a bad Saturday night in Chicago.

And before anyone says "what about the stabbings", our per capita stabbings are about half the US!

You can go to jail in the UK for a drunk tweet on X (twitter). That is not a free society at it's core.

Your other freedoms are breath away from being all gone.

Amazing that a US colleague of mine was fired for saying "fuck" to another US colleague. Really free country that with protected speech...

When people say freedom in the US it tends to be people free to be assholes to their fellow countrymen.

Edit: I have freedom from not being shot in the face in Costco too! That's my favourite freedom.

Freedom of speech is about liberty of life, not liberty of opportunity. Two totally different things.

What do you think I can't say here?

And why was my colleague fired? Surely his speech was protected?

Why don't you just Google "uk man arrested for tweet" and you'll find plenty.

From the Verge[1]: Section 127 of the Communications Act makes it an offense to send public messages of a “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character,”

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/7/22912054/uk-grossly-offens...

Yeah actually read the tweets. They were grossly offensive, threatening violence and nasty as hell.

You think that's ok? One of them for reference:

"kill yourself before I do; rape is the last of your worries; I’ve just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried.”

Do I think threats are acceptable, no - and true threats aren't considered protected free speech. ("true threats first amendment" would be your search term, should you like to learn more)

Do I think offensive, nasty, hateful speech is free speech? Absolutely.

Here's an example of one that I think is an egregious violation of the principle of free speech: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-...

I don't think you have the context for that one to understand it and the sensitivity around it. Think Northern Ireland.

Any absolutist position is a problem. This is fairly balanced and the outcome is proportionate.

You get that there's a difference between the men with guns coming to put you in a cage, and your employer deciding they don't like you anymore, right?

I think most people in the UK are more worried about getting fired than they are worried about going to jail for a tweet, FWIW. (Although of course, in the UK your employer can’t fire you just because they decide that they “don’t like you anymore”.)

Sorry this really is a weak argument. First of all, "free speech" is not and shouldn't be considered absolute. Freedom to express your ideas, yes. Freedom to be obscene? No.

We are not granted rights by the Government. We have natural rights and they are not to be infringed by the Government. That's how our Constitution is supposed to work and that's why we left England in the first place.

Sure, some speech isn’t protected. You can’t threaten the President for example.

But the fact is, the question of whether speech is or is not allowed is far too often a matter of commercial viability rather than objective political value. Look no further than Kanye West being “cancelled” only after a long history of racism and idiotic remarks. The profitability of his Yeezy shoes bought him a lot more free speech than you or I would ever be granted.

Couple that with the fact that healthcare is usually at the mercy of your employer, and very few people in the U.S. truly have the liberty to say what they really think. And before you say there’s nothing worth saying which you would be fired for, ask yourself how long you could maintain good graces if you were known to be promoting unionization.

Actually, you can threaten the president. Several celebrities posted images of Trump beheaded and were not arrested, and were indeed met with wide acclaim.

It’s a felony in fact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_president_of...

Doesn't seem enforced unless there's actual steps taken. I'm just saying what I've seen. I've heard many baseless threats made against various presidents and no one cares.

Rights aren’t simply the absence of enforcement. The fact that threats against the president aren’t prosecuted doesn’t make those threats protected 1A speech.

> Amazing that a US colleague of mine was fired for saying "fuck" to another US colleague. Really free country that with protected speech...

Well did he sue? That's the only way he can get the government involved and see if his speech is protected or not.

Edit: Do the down voters have problems understanding basic logic? The government can't protect anybody's free speech if they haven't been informed about a potential violation. I know most hackers think that the government is God, but they are neither all-seeing nor all-knowing. If you get fired in a way that violates your freedom of speech or violates labour rights, you have to sue and at least get the government involved before you complain about not having any rights.

So did he or she sue?

> You can go to jail in the UK for a drunk tweet on X (twitter). That is not a free society at it's core.

You could go to jail in the US for a myriad of things that aren't even crimes in the UK. Public urination, for instance. And the US incarceration rate is 4x that of the UK.

Not sure which country is more "free".

While that's true - in fact you are if anything downplaying the UKs lack of free speech, as people are convicted for far less - it's not very germane to the UK having lower homicide rates.

I feel like most of us want to live in societies with freedom of speech and low homicide rates, and don't feel it has to be one or the other.

You can in the US too. Although I'm not sure if he was drunk.

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/oklahomacity/press-release...

Have you had many interactions with the police? Like been pulled over, contacted or harassed?

Because for quite a few people in the US they don't have as much freedom as you might think.

Assuming that most people who truly believe that the US is a beacon of freedom to the world, are, at the very least, mildly informed about current events, it is astonishing how they bend reality to fit these beliefs.

The US has one of the highest prison population per capita in the world. It also arguably has some of the most heavily armed, most unchecked, police forces in the western hemisphere. And here we are, with some arguing that saying nazi shit on Twitter is "proof of freedom".

Could that be the result of different socioeconomic, racial, and cultural circumstances?

Or is just hardware?

Pick your favorite race and check the stats for race-on-race shootings in the US. You'll surely find that it's more than the population-adjusted equivalent the ~30 gun killings we get per year in the UK. Race obviously isn't the key factor here. I do wonder why you would even bring it up.

I could also mention that London, which is comparably racially diverse to many major US cities, has far less gun violence than any of them.

Uniform regulation across an entire country makes a hell of a difference.

The EU has a uniform gun regulation zone, the UK has even enforcement, Australia didn't "ban guns" it simply made a few low population territories and states adopt the same regulations as other high population states had; 12 year olds can join gun clubs, every sale requires a registered seller and and a background check for the buyer, contractors can get semi automatics for feral pig culling, my neighbour here has an arsenal of weapons for shooting at all distances out to 5,000+ yards (yes, ULR five thousand yard shooting is a thing here).

The USofA isn't at all united wrt gun regulation.

Twue patriots seem to love moving weapons across state lines and arming conflict areas for profit, no real readily accessed central database, tip toeing around removing weapons from domestic violence offenders who can readily replace what, if anything, is taken.

Australia once held the world record for victims of a single mass shooter - we've had nothing remotely like that since uniform regulation and enforcement.

There are millions stolen guns in the US and a lot of gun crime is committed with illegal weapons. Normally you’d only see so many black market firearms in a former war zone.

> Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.

I would (no sarcasm) love a link to any resources you know of that catalogue or chronicle the role of private arms in preserving liberal democracy. Big bonus if the resources are, or lean, academic.

You do understand you are a literal example of what OP was talking about, right?

The Politics in this one are just too strong to sway anyone at all, regardless of what the argument is. You prove their point entirely.

I didn't read the GP comment as political, but using logic and referencing facts to support their point.

e.g.

> I will advocate for armed guards at schools to help dissuade would-be shooters from attempting anything. I would also advocate for the abolition of "Gun-Free Zones" as they only advertise to criminals that nobody is likely to be armed in these areas.

That seems logical to me. Who will adhere to Gun-Free Zones? Only law abiding citizens. The murderers will walk in there with a gun or a machete and do their thing knowing there won't be anyone equipped to effectively stop them.

Yes, the population at large will politicize these issues, but in the context of this discussion here on HN, why not try to be better and avoid politics as much as possible. Instead, discuss on the basis of logic and facts. I think HN in general, does this better than other online forums (e.g. Reddit). Not perfect of course, but better.

That you right off the bat accuse the GP of being political for expressing a viewpoint and supporting their arguments with logic and facts inhibits open discussion and ironically is a catalyst for politicization of the issue.

It's literally an argument about guns. The poster literally said pictures of dead kids wouldn't change their minds, and then made pro-gun comments.

On a thread that was supposed to be about how guns are so political that no one will ever change their minds.

That was my point. I don't care if they argued with logic.

They were making the point for op by just entirely skipping past the original argument (gun is political and no one is changing their minds) to talk about their stance on guns.

That was my point. I think maybe you missed it?

To me, politically encamped means that you have decided upon a viewpoint without much thought. You sway one way because it's the position of your "camp" or tribe. And because of that you won't change your mind.

"pictures of dead kids wouldn't change their minds" does not necessarily fit the definition of political encampment. If they won't change their mind because it would go against their party's line then they are being political. If they won't change their mind because they believe their stance is correct (based on logic, facts, morality, etc) and/or the other alternatives are wrong (based on logic, facts, morality, etc) then that is not political.

I guess your saw encampment in the GP's comment? I didn't.

Proponents of firearms always seem to fall back on the same argument against a ban: “Take the guns away and the bad guys will be the only people armed”.

This isn’t true though. Guns are used to shoot people because they are available, not because they are legal.

In the UK it is still possible to acquire guns illegally, but they are rare and difficult to come by. There were only 28 homicides from shootings last year.

If you just make it a lot more difficult to acquire a weapon the shootings disappear.

> Guns are used to shoot people because they are available, not because they are legal.

It's fairly easy for Italian citizens to obtain a gun (they need permits just like US), yet their mean death rate from mass shootings is one of the lowest, (lower than UK's) [1]

The problem with changing US gun culture is, right or wrong, the Second Amendment has been literally foundational to our history and culture.

If people disagree with the second Amendment, then it needs to revoked or changed. Until then, it's the law of the land. Changing the second Amendment won't happen. There isn't enough support for that in this country. A half-solution of restricting guns ties the hands of the good guys and empowers the bad guys.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shoo...

> If people disagree with the second Amendment, then it needs to revoked or changed. Until then, it's the law of the land.

I own eight firearms, including a semi-auto centerfire rifle and autoloading shotgun. None of them would be banned under the original terms of the FAWB. My Second Amendment rights would perfectly intact if we brought it back, even if we omitted the grandfather clause.

I guess there's always a world where we bring it back and criminals 3D print high capacity mags for Model 740s but we have to start somewhere.

I think they were agreeing.

oppressive leaders -> disarm their populations

doesn't imply

disarm their populations -> oppressive leaders

I can think of 2 oppressive leaders who tried to disarm but I know of dozens of democratic countries that disarmed their population without any abuse.

> Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.

Oppressive leaders have historically used armed paramilitary guerrillas in order to topple legitimate governments and establish brutal dictatorships, so what is your point here?

Also, various US governments, at several levels, have demonstrated over and over again that they don't fear armed civilians at all, e.g. the 1985 MOVE bombing [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

"But think of the children!"

> Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that oppressive leaders disarm their populations before subjecting them to horrific abuses of their power. We aren't falling for it again.

You've (collectively) already fallen for it by allowing the government to develop a standing army (and not just any standing army, but possibly the most capable in the world of crushing any dissent even if it happens halfway across the globe).

As James Madison put it in 1787, "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." Or Samuel Adams called it, "always dangerous to the Liberties of the People."

https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/...

> You've (collectively) already fallen for it by allowing the government to develop a standing army (and not just any standing army, but possibly the most capable in the world of crushing any dissent even if it happens halfway across the globe).

The military is a non-factor in this, for a lot of reasons. Here are a few:

- What percentage of our armed forces will take their oath to the constitution (not the government) seriously, and will desert/change sides when asked to murder their own people? I expect a lot, but even if zero of them bailed, that's the least of the issues with trying to fight your own citizens...

- What good is all of that military hardware against yourself? Tanks, jets, drones, missiles... sure, you can turn major cities to glass but then what the hell do you even rule over? The US military is great at crushing dissent across the globe because the collateral damage has been deemed acceptable (by us, because we're not THERE). If you start doing any of that shit here, public sentiment will turn on you fast and you'll make millions of domestic enemies instantly.

- The US has 400 million people (ish) and just as many guns (again, ish). The US military is like 2 million, including reserves. Say 90% of people refuse to fight, well that still makes it 40 million vs 2 million. Those odds SUCK. And that's without anyone refusing orders and bailing to the other side (bring some of the hardware with ya!).

- This wouldn't be a traditional war, it would look like all the wars (ahem, military actions) that the US lost and continues to lose. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Our military keeps taking an L to dudes with 40 year old surplus rifles and busted Toyota trucks. Because that style of warfare is asymmetric and HARD to do without creating new enemies at every turn.

There is no version of a civil war that ends well for an established US government trying to subjugate its people BECAUSE of the 2nd amendment. Either rule over piles of glowing, radioactive rubble, or face the reality that it's open season on anything in a uniform and you're outnumbered 200:1 BUT you don't even know who you're fighting until you're already getting shot at. That's the intent of the 2nd, the US military doesn't actually pose a threat to its people because it simply can't win.

That being said... the US government knows all of this, and is just boiling the frog instead. Small oversteps over a long period of time add up to some real nonsense, and I'm not sure your average American has the balls to stand up, say "enough is enough", and push back. Old us threw the damn tea into the ocean (in front of the bastards!), current us will go on an angry rant on X while ordering Doordash. There will be more governmental overreach, there will be more boiling the frog, and who knows how it'll end. But the US military isn't remotely a factor.

It sounds like you've been reading NRA / gun lobby talking points quite carefully as you're hitting all the major bullet points.

>In fact, murder is illegal in this country, as is assault and brandishing firearms. These laws don't stop insane people from using weapons to murder people.

This is exactly the point. Ease of access to firearms for people who are unhinged is a problem. We aren't typically talking about criminals btw. We are talking about mass murderers. It is a very meaningful distinction.

Armed guards at elementary schools is insane. What about churches? Grocery stores? Music venues? Do we need heavily armed guards in every public place in society? This will heal our increasingly fractured society? Are militarized police forces (that are still scared to go in after active shooters) not enough for you?

>Researchers at JAMA Network Open found that of 133 incidents of K-12 school shootings from 1980 to 2019, 1 in 4 had an armed guard on scene. Moreover, researchers found the presence of armed guards failed to result in fewer casualties, instead noting a death rate 2.83 times greater in school shootings with armed personnel...

>the data suggest no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence in these cases. An armed officer on the scene was the number one factor associated with increased casualties after the perpetrators’ use of assault rifles or submachine guns. [1]

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Your gun isn't going to protect you from the government.

100%

If the Government decides you are a threat, they will take you down. Some overweight Sunday warrior with an assault rifle is not going to save us from tyranny. The way you protect the country against that is to promote democracy and vote for people who aren't trying to overthrow the Government if they lose an election.

I would agree, but the evidence is that this isn't really true. Waco and Ruby ridge are examples of the government deciding someone was a threat and their guns allowed them to have considerable political impact. Yes, they were taken down, but their actions drastically weakened gun control in this country.

Individually? No. Collectively? Then I would say it does. Will it cost tons of lives? Yeah of course. But the US cannot bomb its own civilians into a functioning economy or obedient populous. The only force even remotely in a position the challenge the US military is the US population.

> I don't think that the press publishing pictures of dead kids after school shootings will change anything in how the US views that issue specifically.

Hard to say. Maybe not overnight, but it can slowly move the needle.

I want to throw another perspective here. I had a friend on a voice call earlier this month. He lives in California, which in theory has very strong gun control laws.

While on call, his house alarm goes off, so he grabs his shotgun out of the safe and goes to find out what is happening.

We, on the call, waiting for him to come back, heard three distinct gunshots.

Turns out some guy, high on some substance was trying to break into the house, and opened fire when our friend showed up at the door.

This is to my limited understanding, a "strong gun control" state. So from our perspective, it looks like you must have a gun to be safe; that the law does not help.

And this is after California banned body armour, which he was complaining about.

There is no state in the US that has strong gun control laws. It ranges from weak to basically unregulated.

How are New York's gun control laws "weak"? (Or DC for that matter.)

There is not a state in the US that has lax gun control laws. It ranges from nanny state to fascist jackboots.

Used to live in AZ during my undergrad days. I could buy a gun in cash on the spot from a gun show with no background check. I know several people that did just that in the wake of a shooting happen a few minutes off our campus, where a Federal senator got shot in the face. Lots of people thought 44 was going to take the guns away so they purchased en-masse. Nothing happened.

I currently live in Florida. Where I am, if you've got a clean background, it's very easy to buy a handgun or shotgun.

So all the countries where normal people aren't allowed to own guns are somehow ultra fascist super nanny states in your mind? Perhaps you have a strange sense of what's normal.

I can buy a gun from my neighbor without any paperwork or fees in most of the US. How does they qualify as “nanny state”?

'Most' is a stretch here. The majority of the populous states have restrictions on gun transfers, usually requiring a Federally licensed individual to facilitate the transfer with a Federal background check.

27 states require no background check.

Several others (PA for example) split on type of fire-arm (long-guns = no check, handguns = check required, or similar).

Several others put the onus of coordinating through an FFL on the seller, the buyer just has to show up (though that does end up requiring a background check).

So, I'll stand by "most" (though it's admittedly fewer states than I thought - I would have guessed ~35 had no limits).

You can buy a subset of guns without any paperwork or fees. You will still find the NFA firearms require a lot of money and hoops.

Also I would rather be shot at than have hand grenade throw at me like their having problems with in Sweden

https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-new-normal-bomb-attac...

I believe the opposite actually. I think the only reason nothing has happened is because we have sufficiently commoditized school shootings into a media package that is uniform and neutered.

If (ugh, when) the next school shooting happens, the pictures of 8 year olds’ half blown away faces would turn the collective public guts inside out.

Americans are _very_ good at burying their heads in the sand. It’s only when you force them, Clockwork Orange style, to confront what they’ve made, they actually start to change their opinions.

Agreed, it's a meme at this point. What a tragedy. Here's that Onion article.

> People in the US are too politically encamped for pictures of dead kids to move the needle on gun rights at this point.

One thing I notice is how quick people are to ascribe malevolence to those on the right. Meanwhile, leftist prosecutors and DAs who make it a policy point of their election to not prosecute crimes or to not protest paroles, or leftist governors who say they are going to release prisoners and then do, never face any accusations of malevolence, when those same people go on to kill.

To use my own city of Portland as an example, we've had multiple instances of children being killed or endangered by people released with violent tendencies or let out without bail. We've had several incidents of gun crime committed by people just released from jail. Yet, when you point out that the right-wing pro-gun crowd is not the ones at fault in Oregon, since we have copious gun laws, and the main issue seems to be the left-wing that has held power in our cities and state for decades at this point, everyone immediately starts group therapy in which they re-assure themselves that the elected official's hearts were really in the right place, despite all evidence to the contrary.

"The past six weeks have made it clear that the world will respond to images of slaughtered children, and it’s worth asking why it’s taken this long for people to see what that looks like. " Well, despite hundreds of thousands of children being killed in Syria and Yemen wars and currently in Sudan, the question never came up. Why? Because Israelis defending themselves and in this war, Hamas uses Palestinian children as human shields. No one likes Jews who hit back, they wish only to pity them.

In the case of butchering Palestinians, unlike the others, key elements are US murder weapons (material assistance) and Vetos at UN SC to shield from international consequences. An US newspaper has naturally extra newsworthiness in that. No less than they had with “collateral murder” video (cf. Wikileaks).

So the core issue is the US support/weapons, not the death of children? Why then the children that are dying in Yemen are ignored? This is US weapons and US support of Saudi Arabia.

But I somewhat agree with you. There is a huge disinformation campaign to stop US supporting Israel. Iran/Russia and the rest are working extra hard to isolate Israel and then to be completely overrun by its enemies around. It's similar to the same campaign Russia was spreading to stop NATO involvement in Ukraine-Russia war.

You are responsible for your own actions (or the predictable consequences thereof) — that’s the basic rule at play here. Any normal court would deem providing murder weapons to the murderer and shielding the murderer from the law an offense. US taxpayers are privy to knowing what they are sponsoring with their tax dollars. The newspapers are supposed to be part of that process.

The UN SC votes are merely levelling out an entirely disproportionate UN SC focus of Israeli-Palestinian conflict whilst largely ignoring all the rest of middle East conflict that he mentions.

And it's US weapons used all over the globe in bloody conflicts.(others here have already put paid to the myth of Israeli dependence on usa military aid as a proportion of Israeli military spending.)

When Iraq occupied Kuwait, all out assault was launched within months. Israel continues to occupy lands for decades and brazenly keeps committing land theft in addition to mowing the lawn on a regular basis in violation of the international laws. US obediently keeps shielding it from the law with the UN Security Council vetos. Something very disproproportionate there indeed. Even this Israeli newspaper is amused at this history of slavery on the part of the US govt.: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-17/ty-article/.p...

And US violates its own law in donating this huge pile of murder weapons to this occupying party: Section 502B(a)(2) (22 U.S.C. 2304(a)(2)) stipulates that "no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/IF11197.pdf

B'tSalem/HRW/Amnesty have voluminous records of the said violations.

> Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.

https://www.btselem.org/human_shields

> Well, despite hundreds of thousands of children being killed in Syria and Yemen wars and currently in Sudan, the question never came up. Why?

This fake rhetorical caring about "children being killed in Syria and Yemen wars and currently in Sudan" just do drum up argument for killing of Palestinian children is kinda distasteful.

What's distasteful is the fake caring about Palestinian children that all those "Cease Fire" and "Free Palestine" scream. Suddenly they care about children... When you see them openly engage in disinformation, spreading fake propaganda, and calling for violence you know they are there for totally different intentions than caring about the children. These people make me sick, that such evil even exists among humans. They always existed (unfortunately) but seeing so many on the street is scary. I admit that I was never bothered too much and tried to avoid all the news about ISIS atrocities, Taliban, Syria, Turks killing Kurds. But now I see the same people coming out on our streets and realize they were here too, just hiding.

I don't care about what some imagined "They" you just made up, do or don't do.

Anything these papers publish has an associated agenda. Big Journalism is not simply funded, it's purchased as an investment product.

All media has some sort of bias or agenda. This is pretty clearly an opinion piece, it isn’t as if they are hiding some secret anti-school-shooting agenda.

The biggest lie is whenever someone(s) claim to be "unbiased" or "neutral".

Not all agendas are created equal. Some positions on issues are obviously existential essential: economic inequality, pollution, climate change, legal system reform, policing reform, and healthcare costs. There are many other issues that are lower priority than existential threats that are debatable. And finally there are partisan cause célèbres that largely amount to bikeshedding. It's when those who benefit from espousing a particular issue position deny reality and legitimacy of an existential threat or suffering of a group makes them intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.

I'm reminded of a quote from John LeCarré's _The Spy Who Came In From The Cold_:

Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things"; he grinned like a schoolboy. "And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can't compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you, now?

We should examine the methods used by all sides in the conflicts, as one topic, and their ideals as another topic.

I think further nuance needs to be added here. There is a difference between pictures of dead children that are shared as proof of atrocities, and pictures that are shared to garner sympathy

I doubt many would doubt a school shooting did kill children, maybe some would but not the majority. In this case I can see how sharing the pictures of dead children could produce manipulative outputs (regardless of intent), especially since few to no people doubt their deaths

Whereas when it comes to wars overseas, and one side is downplaying or downright denying the death of children, then here I think it's vital to examine the pictures

All war is an unneeded evil. I do not need to look at dead and mangled children to know that war should not exist.

So when your enemies bring war to your doorstep, you refuse to fight it? Or you will fight it only until your enemy retreats, and then you’ll let them regroup?

They'd probably prefer an honest work towards a political solution, like https://www.972mag.com/hamas-fatah-elections-israel-arroganc...

Sure, I would prefer that too. But when that falls through, do you still insist on avoiding war at all costs to you and your own?

Avoiding political solution by a stronger party in the conflict led to the attack. I suggest to not avoid political solution in the first place.

Political solution would have costs to Israel. So does war/oppression/occupation.

Political solution did not just fell through, it was actively rejected by Israel time and time again. Israel basically invited the attack. In no world can you expect violently oppressed people to never eventually violently fight back. Israel's government just thought that it would always be able to control this with force, with just a victim here or there. It was mistaken.

I still prefer Israel to go back to political solution, and away from "annihilation" solution.

Not quite sure my statement and yours must be at odds. There is a diplomatic solution to all wars. Likewise, there is virtually always a political reason for every war. If those in power wished, war could be avoided in nearly every situation.

That said the evil, greed, and/or anger of our leaders ensures wars will always be around. But I don't have to participate in them. In the face of an equal force, I'm happy to stand my ground. In the face of an overwhelming force, I am not too proud to flee.

I agree. Adults need to he able to force other adults to see the consequences of their choices.

I don’t want to see any dead children. Why must we see them at all? Just… don’t kill them?

Please?

Its interesting to me why dead children somehow matters more than the average dead person. In fact, I would argue that 30-40 year old person dying is worse than a dead children because of the opportunity cost. It seems to me children dying is worse because there's a perception that they are pure, and that the older dead person have probably "sinned" and deserved it anyway.

You see it all the time, "40 dead children, how could they do this? these are just innocent kids!". What? And those 40 adults weren't innocent?

Do you actually believe what you've just written here?

Yes, 40 dead people is equally horrible regardless of what age group they represent. Is this difficult to believe?

Not who you replied to, but for the first 15 years of my life, if I was killed in a war by any nation, it was considered a war crime, a human rights violation. The day I turned 15*, in the estimate of the United States, the leader of the free world, if I was killed by a drone, I was an enemy solider and a legitimate target, regardless of what I did with my life (ignoring my citizenship for a moment). This level of value will continue until I turn 50 or so, at which point it will once again be considered a war crime to kill me. As somebody who has never fired a weapon or built a bomb, the reality that virtually every government in the world, even those from the Western world that are seen as human rights advocates, would look at my corpse and say "enemy combatant" to avoid taking responsibility for killing civilians - it's just one of many strange realities of the modern world.

* Some sources say 18

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-i...

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...

Surely there’s a greater opportunity cost in the death of a child with their own life ahead of them than a middle aged adult?

What is lost from a dead young adult is all the investment into the person, basically 30 years worth of life experience and work gone. A dead baby is a 9 month ordeal + however long the mother will grief and the community would. However, for the young adult, it would be everyone he had a connection with and the community that would grief. So even here, the calculus doesn't make sense.

I might sound crude, but in the modern era, this is the only way to be effective. Otherwise, we would easily be swayed by the news of a white girl stuck in a well while we can easily swipe away news about hundreds of dead people from war torn zones.

I never had a problem seeing dead children, maybe it's my morbid curiosity at play but it hardly did nothing to me. Until my son was born. Now I try to avoid seeing dead children like the plague. This article didn't help, the main picture is for a torn up baby and it ruined my day ...

Egyptians men “standing tall” with the Palestinians probably feel proud for refusing to provide a temporal shelter for at least women and children. This situation literally wouldn’t be possible if just 1 side out of 3 wouldn’t behave like an asshole.

Why is it ok to kill men but not women and children

Why Hamas built so many bomb shelters and tunnels but literally 0 of them were used to protect the citizens? It’s literally the opposite of what any other government in the world would do.

Is this some bizarre rhetorical question or did you actually spent any time thinking about how this would work practically as a defense for 2.5mil people against a state with access to unlimited amount of precisely targeted bunker buster bombs?

Want to know how well public air-raid bunkers work against advanced bombing technology? Check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_bombing and that's 30 year old tech.

Israel doesn't have an unlimited amount of bunker busters. I think a lot of the destruction is from more conventional precision munitions. The bunker busters are reserved for bunkers, deep tunnels, etc.

This question is one of the talking points of the Pro-Israel side. It's not that bizarre. But yeah, as talking points go, it's shallow/simplistic. The idea is to demonstrate that Hamas couldn't care less about Palestinian lives. They don't invest in any shape or form in protecting the citizenry or making the lives of Palestinians better. It's also meant to contrast with how Israel invests in protecting its population- lots of shelters for a much larger population, Israel has been building shelters in various forms forever. During most of the cold war Israel has been facing enemies with fairly unlimited resources as well, rockets, ballistic missiles, large air forces, even artillery (the north of Israel used to be regularly shelled by Syria way back). So it is actually possible to use shelters as a layer of defense.

Israel's more recent strategy of reinforced spaces in every house/apartment (started IIRC when Saddam Hussein decide to lob Scud missiles at Israel) has worked fairly well so that could be replicated in Gaza. Israeli buildings have taken direct hits by rockets from Lebanon and Gaza with pretty decent survival rates even when the building itself was practically demolished. Though that might require using the concrete for something else than tunnels. Oh no, another talking point.

The better strategy though is not to get into a situation where you're being attacked with bunker busters or try to separate civilian infrastructure from military infrastructure. Other ideas is that when you're warned about an area becoming a subject to aerial bombardments you move away. Sorry, more talking points.

it's not but there's an argument that it would reduce total suffering if you allow those who are obviously not potential combatants to leave the area, even though that's not fair to non-combatant men.

Interesting how the Arab countries surrounding Israel will do ANYTHING except accept Palestinian refugees. They have literally never accepted them in history, only expelled them like Jordan did in the 70s as a recent example. It’s almost like these Arab countries just hate Israel and don’t care about Palestine at all

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_diaspora

    Jordan 3,240,000
    Syria 630,000
    Lebanon 402,582
    Saudi Arabia 280,245
    Egypt 270,245
    Qatar 100,000
    Kuwait 80,000
    Iraq 57,000
    Yemen 55,000

I think most of these go way back to 1948 though. Do you have any statistics about how many Palestinians from the west bank and/or Gaza these countries have taken in over the last 10 years? Also do those countries give the Palestinians citizenship? I think other than Jordan the answer is no?

The answer is no, they don’t at all. They can’t even come in as refugees. All of this “pro palestine” stuff is a facade to openly hate Jews

Why can't they live in Palestine?

Assuming you're genuinely asking for the perspective behind this argument. I think these folks* mostly believe that cleansing is a "least bad" alternative because Palestine is a failed state with broad anti-Semitism and a Jewish neighboring state. No group in Palestine (even Hamas) is capable of enforcing a peace treaty, and Israel is not willing to abide by a peace treaty that Palestine groups do not abide by. Thus, the status quo of attacks from Palestine to Israel by various armed gangs will continue indefinitely, and the counter-cycle of Israeli retaliation, a counter-cycle which inevitable undermines Palestinian groups that deal with Israel. The most likely possible disruptions of this cycle are tragic - either the rise of a right wing group in Israel that cleanses Palestine or the regional hegemony of a current group in Iran that cleanses Israel - and even assuming one of these tragic disruptions doesn't occur, the status quo cycle is already pretty bad.

* I say "these folks" because I don't know that I agree.

They can, if they simply stop launching rockets aimed at civilians. Literally, that’s all that needs to happen. Rockets stop, bam two state solution next day.

"Interesting how the Arab countries do not want to help Israel forcibly displace Palestinians who choose to fight for their land and freedom."

Fixed it for you.

You guys have the gold medal in mental gymnastics. You really said that?

Lots of surrounding countries have experience with "temporary" shelters for people driven out by Israel from the lands Zionists invaded and purged. Why should they not be concerned now as ever?

This article just like most others like that is yet another example of manipulation and bias.

Why, for instance, the author didn't start the story from children killed on oct 7 and jumped right away to following steps of that nightmare?

Etc.

As a non-American looking at your society from Europe I've often wondered how you think you're perceived abroad? How did you think George Bush's and Tony Blair's war in Iraq was perceived?

It's 2023 and the world is still in a state of constant conflict - Jokes aside American has positioned itself as the world police with the largest military ever conceived.

Funding militant groups when it serves your goals, destabilising nations. Invading nations on the flimsiest of premises. Etc.

Huge portions of popular westeen media portrays the American military action as heroic.

But how do Americans actually feel about it? And how do you think the rest of us feel?

It’s generally known that American politics is broadcast overseas to promote democracy and peace, especially since the 90s in Europe. We don’t really care as long as you keep holding elections and not starting wars.

Personally I see showing dead corpses in general as a likely immoral idea due to the fact that it might "commodify" real tragedy.

Or at the very least open up Pandora's box.

Newspapers are beholden to their puppeteers and their profit incentive. It is good business to show dead palastinians, and bad business to show dead US citizens, not only of children but everyone. Death is sterilized for the American taste, it happens everywhere except here.

If it was good for business to show dead children who have been shot, wed see more.

NYorker: Shows dead pics of isreali children and colombine shootings.

Definitely no agenda here. Why not also show images of dead palistine children and homeowners who died during home invasions with nothing to protect themselves?

Isn't the photo you request the first and only picture of a child in the article?

I thought the one in the article was from isreal.

Its not about seeing pictures of dead people, its about empathy.

Large parts of the USA cannot empathise with their own dead children in their own school shootings. Not because they don't have empathy, because its been shaped to not allow any kind of dissent from "accepted"(accepted by which team you support) view points.

There are almost no uniting subjects for the USA anymore.

It is far to profitable to seek division than unity for almost anything, be that guns, health, education, the constitution, the supreme court, equality, civil rights.

the Democrats are incompetent, and the GOP has ceased to be a political organisation.

America has too much anomie and normalization of violence. Australia addressed the matter while America insists on putting intransigent philosophical utopian ideals ahead of solidarity and life.

I think you'll find solidarity isn't an American value, from unions to this issue.

> the Democrats are incompetent

They're reasonably competent when undermining progressives, feathering their nests, and holding on to power.

i thinks its more they are willing to make slow steady progress than try and push bills that wont make it through a split congress and only serve to make their opposition more intransigent.

whats the point of failing to pass a bill that will alienate moderate swing voters loosing you seats in the next election. when you can pass bills that get you some of what you want now and more the next and after each election.

With respect, I don't think you're paying attention. Establishment Democrats would rather a Republican win than a progressive; they've shown this many times now.

> Its not about seeing pictures of dead people, its about empathy.

What's "it"?

The issue. Context clearly dictates they are talking about the main point or issue at hand.

Ok so we're going with the interpretation, "showing dead bodies on TV is 'about empathy'"?

I was charitably trying not to interpret the comment this way, because the rest of the comment rants about how there is too much division. It seems absurd to me to suggest that showing dead bodies will unite people. In practice it seems to do exactly the opposite.

Okay New Yorker you first. Show a picture of a dead child that’s not palaestinean challenge 2023 (impossible)

The media is literally fueling anti semitic sentiments. They are disgustingly complicit in what’s going to inevitably happen to Jews across the world

These articles feel like articles written by journalists for other journalists so they can give awards to each other for “shining a light” on something that they’ve decided isn’t getting illuminated enough.

I’m somewhat cynical about a lot of journalism today simply because it feels like a large cohort of that profession has just gotten trapped in a social-media-attention fueled circle of journalists just doing things to generate praise from other journalists. Interestingly, this pattern seems to be independent of the politics of the involved individuals or venues: they all do it.

I’m not sure how useful it is to the consumers of the journalism: it’s not like anyone is unaware of what’s going on. If anything, most of us are resigned to the fact that we can’t really do much about it other than be angry and frustrated, since people from all kinds of different places and with different motivations just get in the way.

Well put.

Yes, I'm always a bit dubious of this sort of stance where people position themselves as a hero. Rushing out stories without verifying basic facts? We can't wait, the public deserves to know!

This ^.

I love big brain responses.

Just the kind of ghoulish take from such a self righteous upper echelon rag.

I think it's dangerous to publish things like this at the moment due to the amount of dreadful journalism and carefully misquoted titles out there. We are literally in the middle of a misinformation war.

Harsh reactions with consequences result every time the press print things. Adding dead children weaponsises this as the final taboo push.

It takes one mistake, one misquoted image or one manipulation and there's just going to be more dead children.

Edit: to clarify I am NOT against publishing these things. Just now is a really bad time due to rife misinformation and poor journalism. All it does is inflame already terrible situations for people all over the world. Its divisive and dangerous.

This same argument could be made about publishing anything, at pretty much any time in history.

If journalists can't talk about this, the only people who will talk about this are the propagandists.

The two are difficult to distinguish at the moment which is the problem.

I'm sure propagandists(of which there are many) would love nothing more than to be able to show pictures(real or not) of dead babies. And so would truth tellers. What do do?

Are you implying there aren't any dead Palestinian children? Or are you saying that no one should talk about it?

No I'm saying that sources should be verified carefully rather than rushing photos of dead children to the front page and then correcting articles later quietly. The gap between these two events tends to result in more people getting hurt. This has actually happened from major press outfits in the last couple of years (not just Israel/Hamas conflict)

100% agree. Right now, when something "happens" I leave it alone for a couple days until the real information comes out. Remember the "terrorist attack" at the Rainbow Bridge on the Canadian border a couple days ago?

Fox News never was and still isn't a reputable news source.

The problem is that the BBC was and now isn't.

The challenge there is that to some, there is "never a right time". After Columbine, "we need time to grieve", then "we need time to heal", then next thing you know it's 'ancient history' and "we shouldn't revisit it". Next thing you know, it happens again. Rinse, repeat.

All of which is very convenient to ignoring the issue.

and there dead and kidnapped jewish children? maybe blame the terrorist that are more concerned with killing jews than helping the people they claim to represent. Maybe Israel wouldn't keep Palestine in such a stranglehold if the Hamas would quit turning every bit of scrap metal and fuel they can get their hands on into missiles to shoot at Israel.

I think you have no idea how bad, utterly bad, this world can be. How much force is behind the hate that leads people to kill babies.

I don't either. But I think it gets worse by not showing the reality.

I think you're correct.

This topic is breaking my soul. So much suffering and death. Why?

Ungh. I need to watch Firefly and drink.

I don't think we shouldn't show it. Now is just a bad time. The social media misinformation networks are quite frankly more organised than the organised media and the organised media's press standards are low because they want to get the first story out of the door if it's accurate or not.

It's a disaster zone.

By "now" you mean sometime between 2010 and indefinite year in the future?

Because social media manipulation will never stop, I'm afraid.

I agree with you in theory. In practice I wonder if the refusal of traditional media to publish these things surrenders too much ground to social media, which has zero restrictions on "weaponizing" these things to an a degree that would have been difficult to conceive of a few years ago. And on top of that, everything can be layered with the seductive narrative "here's what they refuse to show you", which is often just used as a primer to suck people down some rabbit hole of even worse conspiracy and propaganda.

Actually making social media networks and the posters accountable for misinformation rather than threatening it would be a first step.

How about just not having engagement self enforcing algorithm feeding people stuff from people they don't "follow" or don't want BS from? Censurship of "misinformation" will kill any actual discourse worth anything. Not that Twitter, Facebook et al. have it anymore.

But before the algorithm changes discussions were actually sane.

What misquoted titles? What misinformation?

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