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Your objections here are of ever diminishing returns, and they were pretty scant even when you started. Sometimes, having the humility to admit you missed the point is more constructive than trying to make out someone else made an error.
I not trying to make out that you made an error, I did not understand what you meant specifically (though I think it has little bearing on the rest of my post).
I explained I meant "created" on first query, plus a tangential discussion on colonies. I didn't think it was snippy.
The explanation there did not require anything after the comma. That's the snippy part, the "as implicit from the rest". The tangential discussion was fine and taken as such, the irritating part was the implicit "how could you not understand that". Also the italics. It was a fine use of italics I suppose, but there's just something about italics that is inherently annoying.
You have to be intelligent enough to see the flaw in the logic there, right?
I certainly don't think there's a good statistical basis to argue that the Hamas list undercounts. Although it's plausible that it does undercount, because it's reasonable to suspect people are blown to bits and go unidentified, buried under rubble and not found, etc.
It's entirely plausible that it undercounts, but "they missed 3 of the 46 we can verify, so extrapolate that rate to the tens of thousands we can't" is poor use of statistics. There is no reason to believe the select few they know concretely are a good representative sample of Hamas' reports.
If he was a more talented politician, the more reasonable thing to dispute is the responsibility for those deaths. In the broad sense, there's an argument that the blame lies at the feet of Hamas, but also in the narrow sense, we don't have any reliable way of knowing how these people may have died. I can't tell you exactly what happened in that hospital parking lot, but I can guarantee, if it was a rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists, Hamas would still be listing every victim on their list of civilian casualties. Wherever war takes place, civilians end up the victim of both sides, comparing lists of dead civilians doesn't actually tell you what violence is being perpetrated by whom, just where it is taking place.
46 is a surprisingly good sample size for most purposes, actually. though in this case it's arguably not a random sample, or you could even argue that the sample size is one because the proper unit is strikes rather than casualties.
People generally trust the Hamas list because experts worldwide agree that Hamas numbers in the past were pretty accurate and there has been nothing hinting at being different this time.
This point is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because the idea of "Semites" as a group of people is silly and comes from century old scientific racism. There is no reason to view Jews as a single ethnic group, let alone basically the entire population of the middle east plus white European Jews for some reason.
I don't think colonies were allowed to conduct their own foreign policy, develop nuclear weapons in secret or carry out infowar operations inside the metropole.
There is a massive blind spot in early Zionist thought when it comes to the population already living in Palestine. The general assumption is that since European Jews were a relatively wealthy minority they could simply buy the land and everything would be fine. The people selling the land will get a good deal and be happy, and they can use that money to move somewhere else and buy new property.
On the flip side, every man, woman, and child in Palestine is being considered an enemy combatant, and every last building a valid military target, for simply existing in the West Bank regardless of specifics. Both Herzog and Netanyahu have said, repeatedly, this exact thing in press conferences and official statements, and doubled down on it to ensure there's no room for misinterpretation or misconstruction. Herzog's entire little temper tantrum on live international television last month, was all about this exact statement (and being called out on it by the international press).
That's a weird objection that I've never seen brought up when something is called "anti-semetic". Why is it when you apply the semetic label to non-jews do people suddenly get all focused on undoing the term?
www.israelnationalnews.com
Because it's transparently just meaningless semantic hairsplitting that doesn't even map to common usage.
It's been exactly that way since practically Israel's declaration of independence: "if you don't believe we're completely justified in everything we do, you're an antisemite". The entire point is to devolve the discussion into name-calling and personal attacks.
