> Did the famine in Sudan suddenly get worse, or do social media networks not properly represent world issues?

This thread is going nowhere pretty. But if you want an honest answer to this, the answer is obviously no social networks don’t properly represent world issues.

There are a myriad of reasons for this in the case of the Gaza famine some legitimate and some illegitimate, but one I would call fairly legitimate is that the US provides vast support to one side of the conflict as an ally so it is very natural for it to be a hotter talking point than the famine in Sudan. People feel they are complicit in what happens in Gaza.

This is flame bait: the sentence before the one you replied to clearly explains why they wouldn’t - both are tragedies, but the U.S. doesn’t give military support to Hamas or intervene to shield them from repercussions.

One part of the answer is it's taken decades of organizing to get this much attention for Palestine and Gaza, throughout which a bad situation has gotten steadily worse.

When people bring this up, why does it always seem to be to suggest we should not care about anything, instead of to wonder how we can build more action (just attention alone does not do anything) on more disasters?

Gaza is not just about the suffering but also the fact that the suffering is directly caused by a rich Western nation enabled by all other rich Western nations.

As far as I can tell the US is not supplying the army of Sudan with billions of cash, munition, weapons and unconditionally political backing.

Untrue, the US sells weapons to the UAE which gives them to the RSF. The US also supported the Saudis in their war against the Houthis which killed lots of civilians. This explanation of yours is common copypasta on social media but it's definitely false.

I seriously doubt the indirect support for the war in Yemen or in Sudan through proxies even comes close to the direct support for Israel.

Also please dont dismiss opposing views as irrelevant copy pastas. Im not blind to your argument either. If you have sources that say the level of support is similar after all ill consider them.

The logical implication of your reasoning is that if the U.S. were to drop 5 bombs on the people of Sudan, that killed a few dozen people, US involvement would be even more direct and therefore that would make protesting the deaths of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people morally justified?

As long as the US does not drop bombs, however, it’s completely moral to ignore these deaths altogether?

According to this The Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/09/us-israel-weap...) US exports of weapons are at about 3.3bln.

According to this article (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-time-to-stop-us-arms-...) US exports to Saudis are more in $ value:

> In the five years before the war, U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia amounted to $3 billion; between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. agreed to sell over $64.1 billion worth of weapons to Riyadh, averaging $10.7 billion per year. Sales to other belligerents in the war, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), also rose exponentially.

Not sure about the quality of these sources, but these seem to not be complete garbage and they suggest at least comparable volumes of weapons export.

Labelling support for one as "indirect" and the other as "direct" is begging the question via rhetorical framing. The Saudis wouldn't have a functioning military if it wasn't for US support, they receive more weapons as a percentage of their arms from the US than Israel does.

I don't want to split hairs and do bean counting. But the level of passion surrounding the war in Gaza and the level of detachment surrounding the war in Yemen is a contrast that can't be explained by your hypothesis. There's a mental fixation and a level of moralizing that tells me other factors are more salient.

You're drastically underselling your point: the US didn't just passively sell arms to the Saudis—US foreign policy deliberately supported their bombing campaign in Yemen, since the Houthi group is a common enemy to both (and to most of the world, really). It was only very late into the Saudi atrocities that the US government started to balk—late, because, as is our topic, US domestic media narratives entirely ignored the civilian consequences of what the Saudis did in Yemen.

There's an entire Wiki entry devoted to this question,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Saud... ("United States support for Saudi Arabian–led operations in Yemen")

(It might be clarifying to remember that the start of this conflict, the Saudis weren't the aggressors. The Houthis (at least from the US PoV) were the aggressors. The US (and others) viewed this as a defensive war against the Houthi rebellion, in which war the Saudis were allies and partners in defending the legitimate Yemeni government against a violent, Iran-backed, terroristic insurgency. This was the context in which the US sided with the Saudi military).

Which western nation invaded Israel and still holds the hostages?

This is a good point. I try to check out Wikipedia's league tables[0] now and again to put things in perspective.

Of course raw death toll isn't the only way to judge the newsworthiness of a story, but it is illumiating how things (presumably via trad media, social media, psyops) either enter public conciousness or don't.

Particularly I find it absurd how little I hear about the Yemeni civil war.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...

> Why was the famine in Gaza so hot when Sudan's famine is two orders of magnitude worse?

The proclamation by UN is regarding a specific refugee camp (Zamzam) that doesn't have any governance, not Sudan as a whole. Gaza has governance, so any famine in Gaza would be announced by the government there, not UN, as far as I understand things.

No, what happened was that the UN made much noise about a famine in Gaza without actually declaring a famine. This went on from the beginning of the war in October (before Israeli ground operations began) until about April or maybe May. Then, an investigation was conducted, found no famine, and declared how important it is to prevent famine.

It wasn't "noise", it was perfectly legitimate concern about the intentional deprivation of food and other essential supplies by the occupying forces.

Per the precious words of their so-called Defense Minister:

  “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba.

  “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he adds.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...

And of their National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir:

  As long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands - the only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.

https://x.com/itamarbengvir/status/1714340519487176791

Whether the situation ultimately met the technical definition of "famine" or not by the time Biden successfully twisted Netanyahu's arm to compel the establishment some form of humanitarian aid to flow into the territory -- is basically a matter of splitting hairs.

Let's have some empathy, please.

The famine in Gaza generates a lot of outrage because there was a line of trucks loaded with food rotting outside, as there is an apartheid system in place actively withholding food to generate said famine. We have even instances were soldiers were caught in camera gunning down starving people trying to get food, like the infamous flour massacre: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_massacre

Al Jazeera can't be used so you cite....Instagram?

yeah, seeing shit with your own eyes, with links to original tiktoks and time stamps are better than state-sponsored EXTREMELY biased media

>The famine in Gaza generates a lot of outrage because there was a line of trucks loaded with food rotting outside, as there is an apartheid system in place actively withholding food to generate said famine.

That sounds... pretty similar to what's happening in Sudan? From the OP:

>[...] Some of the shortage is down to theft and damage by the RSF and other militias. But much blame lies also with the SAF, which is loth to allow food into areas, including most of Darfur, under the control of the RSF.

>A single convoy of aid trucks can wait six weeks or more in Port Sudan to be cleared by the SAF for onward travel. Even then, almost all of it goes to SAF-controlled areas. Only a tiny fraction has reached Darfur. [...]

Sudan is, like, over 1000 km wide. The Gaza strip is only 25 km in its longest side. In one case sheer distance imposes some logistic challenges to deliver aid. In the other the distance that separates starving people from food could be traversed by foot, if occupation forces were not playing target practice with them. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini... and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/13/if-gaza-w...

Because the media shapes perceptions and creates narratives

It sound alike you already know the answer to your question.

If you ask me, though, I don't see why it's not possible for grave suffering to exist in multiple places simultaneously.

I can tell you why:

My capacity to give damns is finite.

If you happen to be some saint who has infinite capacity for empathy, good for you. I think most people share my sentiment, though.

It’s not that I don’t care.

It’s just that my ability and will to do anything more than care is lacking.

Presumably if I cared enough I’d donate to some charity, but I feel fixing this kind of stuff is why we have governments with humanitarian aid programmes (which I happily pay for through taxes), which should theoretically be a thousand times more effective.

It’s also worth noting that many times we simply cannot do anything about it. Gaza does not have a food shortage because there are huge amounts of aid ready to be distributed, it’s because there’s a hot war and the Israeli government strictly controls access. Someone like Jeff Bezos could give the Red Cross a billion dollars and it wouldn’t matter unless that came with something only governments can arrange like a cease fire or military escort.

I reiterate that I can't care because my capacity to do so is limited:

* First priority is caring for myself. I can't care for anyone if I don't.

* Next is immediate family.

* Then it's my closest friends.

* Followed by my other friends and extended/distant family.

* After that are my professional connections: Co-workers, bosses, subordinates, clients, suppliers, and so on. They are who I derive a living from.

* Now I get to strangers I happen to meet during my life. This is actually an important group as, indeed, most if not all friendships, professional connections, and even family originate here.

* Finally, after all that, I can maybe care about strangers I have not met and will never meet during my life.

I'm sorry, my damns ran dry somewhere in "strangers in my life" before I got through them and I think that's actually being generous. I don't have any left for someone on the other god damn side of the world who is literally meaningless to me.

If you have a finite capacity for empathy, it probably isn't empathy you're measuring.

That's just Iranian info-ops. They're kinda everywhere these days.

Before the 2020 election, troll farms controlled by the Internet Research Agency ran almost half of the largest BLM and conservative Christian Facebook groups in America, serving impressions to more than 140 million per month.

It is certain a similar thing is happening here. The goal being twofold, to create divisions and infighting within the rival, and to undermine the rival's soft power on the world stage.

The [social] media battle is terrible unbalanced and fights for your focus.

You're shocked that global antisemitism outpaces famine outreach? What are the ratio of antisemitic to helpful comments in the responses to your question? Millions of foreign deaths will never outpace putting up yard signs to accuse your Jewish neighbors of genocide.

Thats a pretty strong claim, not wrong, but pretty strong as far as views go.

Watch what they do. In the west, the pro-hamas crowd openly targets Jews, not Israel.

This is far too strong a claim to make without support. You have no evidence of that and a huge unquestioned assumption that it’s impossible to have criticism of Israel decoupled from anti-Jewish sentiment, which would need at the very least to account for the many Jews whose opposition to what’s happened in Gaza is rooted in their faith. Given that Netanyahu has consistently had roughly ⅔ of Israelis disapproving of his decisions, I would especially need you to show your work explaining how your claim is compatible with the observable data.

The formula is displaying an emotional trauma inducing anecdote on mass media coupled with a narrative suggesting action that must be taken to prevent future trauma to the viewer, and then inflicting that trauma and followup narrative repeatedly that as many times as possible through all available media channels. There are hundred of thousands of things that occur on a daily basis all over the world that would induce trauma by viewing or even knowing about them, but if you own TikTok, you can show violent civilian deaths in Gaza instead of Xinjiang prison camps, or Sudan or wherever.

This formula can switch people from fearing to go outside to rioting in the streets in a weekend with enough media power. Anyone who explains what's going on with data and statistics, and doesn't almost involuntarily go along with the trauma conditioning, for better or for worse, is considered to be defective emotionally and an outcast.

Which is why TikTok must die - then social media in general.

It is all very toxic and manipulative

> This kind of sensational event is what social media was designed for

I agree with you! It's much harder to do viral tictoks with harmed israelis, because they built a marvelous defense system, so palestinian rockets (or terrorists) just don't get through.

I feel like that’s a bit like saying it’s fine for an adult to kick a kid. The kid was asking for it after all, even if the adult was never in any danger.

So you say that palestinians as a society are politically incapacitated like kids, and should be governed by some external authority until their society matures enough to self-govern?

I didn’t say anything like that. That’s what you heard.

In the analogy you make I think it’s more likely we need to call CPS.

> CPS

> Child protective services (CPS) is the name of an agency responsible for providing child protection

> Child

(c) wiki

Well, if you compare them to kids, doesn't it mean that they don't have the right of self-governance, as kids don't have full legal rights/responsibilities?

There’s also the fact that Europe and the US support Israel and sell weapons that are used in Gaza and the West Bank. Given the West involvement it’s expected that this is talked about more often in Western news and social media. Just like it’s normal that European news report more on the Ukraine war than the US does. It’s closer to home.

> What's happening in Gaza is a black-and-white injustice. It's disgraceful -- the sort of thing that shocks the conscience.

You say this as if it's a fact, when it is simply your (apparently very biased) opinion. Yes, famines suck, and yes, Gaza is a tragedy. But the situation in Palestine is anything but black and white, it's a direct consequence of one of the most complicated and intricate political messes on this planet. There is nothing clear cut about it, despite what tiktok (just assuming here) wants you believe.

I applaud your good-fauth engagement with GP. Honestly I thought that calling conflict in the middle east "black and white" had to be either subtle humour or outright trolling.

>it's been going on since the inception of Israel

It's been going on ever since at least Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been warring over who controls the Holy Land. Remember the Crusades? Or the Holocaust?

I'm not sure if it's even worth going all the way back to ancient Egypt's involvement even further back seeing as there's so much on the dinner table already.

Resolutions to the conflicts Israel has with its neighbors are complicated for many reasons. Lasting peace requires a willingness to compromise and to stick to agreements made, which is extremely difficult politically. The moral questions are not that difficult. Do Jewish and Palestinian people have a right to live in their holy land? Yes. Do they have the right to unlawfully occupy land, murder or terrorize or torture their neighbors? No.

both sides will say they "murder" or "terrorise" as a defence. that’s where the moral question comes from and proving "who shot first" etc.

You can't prove "who shot first" because the answer depends entirely on where history starts. People who want to argue about unanswerable questions like these don't want peace. They just seek justifications for further bloodshed. The actual moral questions are not difficult if you believe a Palestinian life is worth as much as any other life.

Israel has “new historians”, legit society polarisation due to its conduct and handling of the conflict, and over 500.000 demonstrations against Netanyahu’s demonic government.

What do Palestinians have that shows their will to believe an Israeli life is worth as much as any other life? (and Palestinian lives also, especially their children’s)

What’s happening in Gaza is skillful manipulation by pro-Hamas propagandists after 75 years of wars. Your reduction of this to “black and white” is absurd on its face, and I’m surprised to see HN agreeing with that.

Sudan has had militants going door to door beheading men and raping women, yet that’s the morally ambiguous conflict for you? It’s again a war between two (or 3) militant groups with a long history. How are their civilians not at least as deserving of peace as Palestinians?

People are sensitive to the injustice they see or others push to see.

Collective punishment is a war crime not justice.

> They just want to permanently make life of people in Gaza - at least for a generation - a living hell to teach them a lesson to never try Oct. 7 again.

Nothing fair about that. Most of the people suffering had nothing to do with the events they're being punished for.

>had nothing to do with the events

They support(ed) Hamas.

While I hate the thought of civvies getting caught in the crossfires of war, to say they are/were completely unrelated is a false statement.

Very sincerely: You are no better.

Consider reading what you just wrote, perhaps looking in the mirror, and reevaluating your thought process. Even for Hacker News I expect better than this.

I am annoyed and bored by this rhetoric, when something doesn't suit you, try to attack, the truth is you're starving and bombing people and journalists for "teaching them for next time", there's no look in the mirror, you're criminals. The journalists supported Hamas too?

I realize that many commenters have been egregiously breaking HN's guidelines in this thread, but calling for expulsion of populations is beyond the pale and totally unacceptable. We ban accounts that post such things. No more of this, please.

We've had to warn you many times over the years not to post flamewar comments to HN but this is a degree of shocking I wouldn't have expected from you or any other longstanding HN user.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Most Americans supported or voted for presidents that bombed innocent people. Does that mean Americans therefore “deserved” 9/11? According to your moral logic any action against American civilians is tragically justified retaliation for their support of warmongering US presidents. It’s surprising how easily people justify bombing others when they would never apply those standards to themselves.

American civvies have a role and blame in everything America does since we vote for our President and Congress, regardless which way anyone votes (or doesn't vote). The price for our freedom and power is responsibility.

So yes: 9/11 was quite deserved in the sense that we poke(d) our dirty noses in other peoples' (Middle East's) business. This is separate from civvies getting caught in the crossfire, which is tragic regardless of blame; there is a reason deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime.

For another example: Germans who ultimately voted for Hitler and the Nazi party and thus played a role in the Holocaust, among many other travesties.

Your comment relies on the assumption that the headline from The Economist properly represents world issues. There is no reason to assume this.

This is propaganda and information war and the propaganda machine is very strong when it comes to Gaza/Israel.

There was never a "famine" in Gaza (even if there may be good supply problems causing a level of nutrition issues). The term has a specific meaning and the UN has a clear definition.

On the other hand, indeed Sudan is not a country anyone really cares about...

Yes the situation in Sudan got worse so that it exceeded the situation in Gaza. It has been deteriorating for many months since April 2023.

The collapse of the Sudan is not directly being enflamed directly by any western power compared to the Gaza collapse. So the Sudan conflict is less interesting to us.

The Sudan collapse is being enflamed by regional powers where the UAE is funding the Janjaweed (who are officially declared a g*nocidal outfit) whereas the Sudan government actual is being supported by Iran.

The UAE might be considered a proxy for the US though but this kind of indirection makes the conflict too complicated talk about in the general media i guess.

you can say genocidal, this isn't Facebook. I'd still imagine the UAE has independent goals

UAE 100% will get permission (if not direction) from state department! before they start throwing arms (bought from the US) into middle eastern conflicts

  > Yes the situation in Sudan got worse so that it exceeded the situation in Gaza. It has been deteriorating for many months since April 2023.

During what time period was the famine in Gaza worse than the famine in Sudan?

Analysts have spoken about the situation in Sudan over time and the Risks. The talk of a real critical famine being in effect is recent.

Just to be clear the famine is deliberately being caused by occupying g*nocidal Janjaweed army (the RSF), they are besieging towns across the region destroy to prevent food production, blocking supplies and trade.

Famine is always deliberate and caused by military and political decisions.