The great thing about creating both sides of a conversation is that the other side can be reduced to pretty much a screaming adolescent. You say something, you reply on behalf of the other side, then you “cleverly” demolish the reply you created in the first place.
If you want to know what I believe, you can fucking ask me. If you have a response to what I said, I would appreciate it if you quoted me directly instead of responding to the words you put in my mouth, you sanctimonious shithead.
You hypocritical piece of shit, you did exactly the same thing not 10 posts back:
I asked you if my interpretation was correct.
Btw, were you not taught as a child that "He did it too!’ was not a suitable defense?
I guess you’re blind as well as stupid, because you missed the question marks on my post? I was also asking you if you agreed that Hamas has solved warfare.
I’m not the one pretending to be offended by my position being summarized. There’s nothing wrong with doing so, but if you’re gonna act all butthurt about me doing it, I’ll happily point out that you do it as well.
I am pretending to be offended. @Banquet_Bear is pretending to care about children.
How can you, the only one capable of sincerity, even stand to be amongst us?
Oh, dear God, you’re so close!
If only you applied half that scrutiny to statements made by the Hamas Ministry of Health…
So, and just to be clear, this is a question: you were actually offended by me doing exactly what you did a couple posts earlier? That wasn’t just a rhetorical trick, you actually felt offense about that?
It’s pretty frustrating, I’m not gonna lie.
You keep finding humor in this.
…what the fuck are you talking about?
Go fuck yourself, there is no good faith discussion here. We are done.
You are leaving the conversation?
Welcome to my ignore list; I won’t see your pithy fucking drive by posts anymore. Hardly a loss; I don’t remember the last thread you actually contributed to.
…I do.
The information provided by the Hamas Ministry of Health has been scrutinised. They’ve proven to be reliable in past conflicts, more often than not shown to be an undercount. The numbers are used by the UN. They (were) used the the US State Department. They are used by Israel. Many different organizations are painstakingly verifying the numbers, matching the names of dead people to names on the registry.
Nobody outside of randoms on the internet and propagandists repeating a talking point think that the numbers coming out of the Hamas Ministry of Health are unreliable. And considering the state of the conflict at the moment, where thousands of people are still missing, buried under the rubble, it is very very likely the numbers are a severe undercount.
Not surprising you have done as much research into my posts as you have into what is happening in Gaza.
Oh, and you forgot to add “Now look what you made me do!”
Sure thing, Buddy Bear.
…paywalled.
But if the article is talking about this, then the author of that article is just a stupid fucking idiot who doesn’t do their research.
This is exactly what I said. The numbers are going through a verification process that could take months, even years. In the past when this has happened in almost every case the Hamas MOH figure ended up being an undercount. In this “war”, with the healthcare system and civilian infrastructure smashed, and thousands of bodies still missing under the rubble, it almost certainly will be an undercount.
Well, so much for pretending that “the Gaza Ministry of Health” is independent and authoritative and not just a propaganda arm of Hamas.
How convenient that everyone who disagrees with you is a “stupid fucking idiot”, a “propagandist”, or an “internet rando”.
…he’s a stupid fucking idiot not because he disagrees with me, but because it appears he didn’t do his due diligence before he wrote the article. Because you agree it looks like he got things wrong, don’t you?
…fortunately, the numbers are being independently verified and scrutinised, as they have been in every conflict. If they are good enough for the IDF, they should be good enough for you.
No, clearly you didn’t read what he objected to, because your article addresses none of his points.
The UN originally put out one set of numbers, which included both identified bodies and people who were reported dead but hadn’t had their body identified yet. This number came from one Hamas run Gaza agency. Then they switched to using a different set of numbers that only counted identified bodies, so the total number went down, but (as your article points out) not because fewer people had died, but because the extra people needed to be identified, at which point they would he added to the higher tally.
So far, so good. No problem with any of that, and if that had been the objection raised by critics, they’d indeed be wrong.
The problem is that almost the entire difference was made up by women and children.
While it’s theoretically possible that all of the counted-but-not-yet-identified casualties happened to be women and children, it stretches credibility to believe that this is the case.
Your own article backs me up; it says that the claims are unfounded, but the numbers it cite agree completely:
If there are 35,000 dead, and of those 24,686 are identified, then there are about 10,500 unidentified dead.
If the revised totals for women and children are 7,797 and 4,959, and this is roughly half of what it was before the revision, then the number of women and children was revised down by about 12,000.
So, the entire discrepancy in numbers is in women and children, and if you expect us to believe that the discrepancy is entirely due to the unidentified dead, then that means you expect us to believe that all of the unidentified dead are women and children.
That does not seem like a very credible claim to me. It seems like the number of women and children casualties are inflated in order to lend credence to claims that Israel is being indiscriminate.