That’s true; I am assuming that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the overall age distribution of civilians. Maybe efforts to minimize child casualties skew the actual distribution one way, or maybe children’s greater frailty skews it the other way. I don’t know but I think that my assumption is reasonable as a rough estimate.

Let me try to explain it another way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not what I am assuming. My assumptions are only that none of the dead combatants are children and that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the age distribution of the civilian population.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About half the inhabitants of Gaza are under 18 years old, so 1/3 of the dead being children corresponds to a ratio of two civilians killed for every combatant. This is not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties.

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I understand that that’s the intent. The problem is the methodology, which is as I said just multiplication by five. Calling it a gold standard implies that there’s actually some sophisticated analysis going on, and there isn’t.

The “gold standard in the field” is apparently to multiply the Hamas numbers by five. I’m not kidding. That’s where the 186,000 number comes from. This is low-effort bullshit.

Edit: Also this article is just wrong about what the 335,500 number is claimed to be. It is what you get if you extrapolate the 186,000 number to the end of the year, not to September.

I wouldn’t want to be the guy tattooing an elephant’s butt.

The main weapon that Hamas has against Israel is international opinion. The way Hamas wins the current war is by continuing to operate in heavily populated areas until the civilian death toll from fighting there becomes so large that Israel has to retreat in order to avoid losing US support.

how much friendly fire we and our allies have done

Preventing all friendly fire is hard. Militaries aren’t just putting on an act.

Knife laws?

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser earlier this month proposed allowing only knives with a blade measuring up to 6 centimeters (nearly 2.4 inches) to be carried in public, rather than the length of 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) that is allowed now.

This would ban bringing a kitchen knife to a picnic, but would it have done anything to prevent this attack? Maybe the guy was carrying his knife around openly before he started stabbing people (which would be crazy) but I suspect that he wasn’t.

African countries have been deliberately sold dangerously defective medical products in the past (although not by UNICEF, as far as I know) and of course that was wrong, but if for that reason the WHO decides not to approve this vaccine, it doesn’t make sense to blame present-day UNICEF. They can’t change the past; they can only offer medication now.

“It” already began last year and now we’re at the point where this isn’t even an escalation.

This is a little more complicated than the trolley problem because pulling the lever doesn’t cause the train to kill one person instead of five. It causes the train to go onto a completely empty track where it won’t hit anyone, but there’s a small chance that changing the train’s direction will cause it to derail and crash into a crowd of people, killing many more than five of them.

If derailing kills 50 people and the chance of derailing is 1 in 100, the average number of deaths from pulling the lever is only 0.5. But you’re going to be pulling the lever a lot, eventually one of the trains will derail, and when 50 people die do you want to be the guy explaining that the expected value of your action was positive?

What if you’re really unlucky and the train derails the first time you pull the lever? Then you can’t even point out that pulling the lever in the past saved lives.

Deusdedit Mubangizi isn’t exactly a white guy.

I wonder if it’s a translation error. A newspaper in English would use the present tense like that to describe something that already happened. I’m not sure why, since that’s not how English works in other contexts. However, Russian (and therefore presumably Ukrainian) is different - the present tense would denote an ongoing process.

You really didn’t read the article.

UNICEF is ready to buy and ship the vaccines but

Three years after the last worldwide mpox outbreak, the W.H.O. still has neither officially approved the vaccines — although the United States and Europe have — nor has it issued an emergency use license that would speed access.

And the W.H.O. decided not to issue an emergency license back then because it wanted to ensure that research data was generated, he said. Authorizing widespread use would have cost researchers that essential opportunity.

The article is worth reading. It’s critical of the WHO but does include that organization’s point of view. My TLDR would be that regulators are much more concerned about approving a treatment that harms people than they are about doing nothing and passively allowing people to be harmed.