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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Let me try to explain it another way.

    We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.

    If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.


  • That’s not what I’m saying - I don’t have a term that represents “#deadKids/#allCivilians”.

    If I were to use your notation, I would write:

    #deadKids/#allDead = #deadCivilians/#allDead * #allKids/#allCivilians

    I recognize that it’s macabre to treat this as a word problem, but the math works out if you do. If out of 100 dead people, 33 are combatants and 67 are civilians (the 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio I have calculated) and half of the dead civilians are children, then there are 33 dead children, which is the “one third” in the headline.




  • If we assume that (1) the civilian population is 50% children and (2) none of the combatants are children then:

    (fraction of the dead that is children) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (fraction of the civilians that is children)

    (1/3) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (1/2)

    (fraction of the dead that is civilians) = (1/3) ÷ (1/2) = (2/3)

    This is where my 2:1 civilians to combatants number comes from.

    The fact that among the dead, the ratio of civilians to combatants equals the ratio of adults to children is a coincidence.


  • Many people seem to think so but the evidence doesn’t support their argument. A 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed isn’t particularly low but it is far closer to the best that Western armies have been able to accomplish than it is to the ratio seen from armies that are not trying to reduce civilian casualties. For example, Russia’s ratio in Mariupol is approximately 8:1 and that was against Ukrainian soldiers in uniform who weren’t deliberately hiding among civilians. Urban warfare always involves heavy civilian casualties.














  • I can’t listen to an hour-long podcast right now, but I want to clarify that by “mistake” I mean a war of choice that that USA started but did not win. I think this is a definition that does not require subjective judgements of intent or justification, because if future defeat had been common knowledge then the public and the government as a whole would not have chosen to go to war. (There may have been those who wanted war for their own reasons which did not depend on victory, but their ability to steer the country towards war depended on convincing others that the war could be won.)