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Mate, idk, now you’re arguing that it’s ok for toddlers to be sniped during war as long as your government claims they were “human shields”.

I literally don’t know what to say to that.



There is no way for a doctor to know from a bullet wound that someone got "sniped". All bullets lodged in the body look the same, whether they just happened to run in the path of fire, or if a a sniper targeted them on purpose.

This -- this -- is precisely the emotion-laden but evidence-free language that I'm trying to warn people from avoiding. It doesn't help your cause (whatever it is) to misrepresent, assume, or just make things up. People will see through it and stop listening to you. I've largely stopped listening to propaganda coming from Russia and Gaza because they're both very transparently made up bullshit.

The sad thing is that at least in the case of Gaza the plain unvarnished facts are more than enough! Israel is bombing them, they are levelling large chunks of the city, they are killing tens of thousands of children, etc...

State the facts. Don't guess. Don't interpret. Don't weave a sob story based on hearsay from very highly biased people who themselves are necessarily ignorant of the facts on the ground. The doctor didn't witness the shooting, he just dealt with the aftermath.

The facts are bad enough:

Kids are being shot in huge numbers.


There is no way for a doctor to know from a bullet wound that someone got "sniped". All bullets lodged in the body look the same, whether they just happened to run in the path of fire, or if a a sniper targeted them on purpose.

This just doesn't make any sense.

On one hand, it's trivially correct in that no forensic information can ever tell us anything about the intent of the person who fired the bullet.

But otherwise, what you're saying just doesn't hold up to basic common sense. First, "All bullets lodged in the body" definitely do not look "the same" -- some are fragmented or marked in ways that otherwise show signs of having passed through something besides human flesh (more suggestive of an indirect hit) while others are not (suggesting a direct hit).

The circumstances of the entrance would can also say something about the bullet's approximate velocity when it entered the body, and direction of fire. Finally, the location of the wound is itself very important - a disproportionate number of people with gunshot wounds to the head tends to suggest that, well, that's where whoever was firing at them was aiming at.

Such indications may not be sufficient to determine conclusively that someone was sniped. But they do shift the overall balance of evidence, and require us to weight our probabilties for any such interpretations of what happened accordingly (in the context of other available evidence, of course).

It isn't as if the condition of the bullet and the circumstances of the wound provide no signal at all in this regard, as you're suggesting.


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The point that I'm trying to make is that the point of view of a trauma surgeon in a war zone is biased, not because they're bad people trying to spread propaganda but because they have a filtered view of the war: They're seeing a subset of the casualties.

You don't treat dead people in a hospital during a war. They don't get taken to hospital. You treat people "just hurt enough" to require surgery, but not so much that they definitely won't make it with or without surgery...

... such as single gunshot wounds to the head, which are surprisingly non-fatal. There's many(!) stories of people trying to kill themselves by shooting themselves in the head and failing.

The stories told by the people in the article are anecdotes by a select group with a strongly statistically biased view of the world on top of a personal bias against a literal enemy at war with them.

They're probably not wrong and they're probably not lying, they just can't see the whole picture and can't possibly know what an Israeli soldier is thinking our doing at the front line far from the hospital.




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