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Comment by BJones12 | Hacker News Reader

From my understanding there is an argument about whether 12% or 16% of children meet a certain threshold of food availability, which affects whether or not it is called a famine. One is regarded as not a famine, one is regarded as a famine, and there is argument over what data to use.

And the definition does matter, because 'famine' has the meaning of a certain level of bad thing happening. If we do not preserve the meaning, then the word will not have a meaning, then we have no more word to talk about that bad thing, so we will pay no attention to averting or fixing the bad thing because we don't have the literal ability to talk about it.

I'm in favor of being able to have a productive discussion about famines and how to avoid them, so I'm in favor of having a word for 'famine' with a clearly defined meaning.

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Ok, so the aggressor is saying “it’s not a famine, we’re only starving 12% of the children.” You do understand that this is not a good faith argument, right? You might care about preserving the meaning of the word but they don’t give the slightest shit about it. They are not trying to preserve the meaning of the word so that we have the ability to talk about it. They are trying to muddy the waters of the actual facts of what is happening so that people talk about whether there is actually a famine or not rather than the fact that a large number of children are starving. Stop being a patsy and doing their work for them.

> they don’t give the slightest shit about it

Who cares?

We just watched this nonsense happen with the word genocide. Both sides were careless with it. Now, it's lost meaning. Famine is still a hard line in the sand. All the evidence points to Israel having breached that line. The solution isn't to get rid of the line, it's to point to the line, point to the ground and say you're past the fucking line.

If "genocide" lost meaning, it's because people got pulled into a debate around the word rather than focusing on the fact that innocent people are being killed in large numbers. Whether "genocide" or "famine" or any other atrocity, the response to "this doesn't actually meet the definition" should be "you're trying to deflect from the atrocities you're committing and I'm not going to fall for it."

The use of percentage here can really mask the scope of a problem.

A village of 100 people where 50% are starving is better than a country of 1,000,000 where 10% are.

The word “famine” does not have a clearly-defined statistical meaning outside of some very specific circumstances. We abhor the idea of famine whether it occurs at 12% or 14% or 23% of children because we see all of these things to be very bad circumstances. One particular organization chose a 15% threshold for a legalistic definition in their framework, and the government is lawyering this because they can lawyer an arbitrary threshold and they think that will help them win some PR points. Thats all this is.

PS Do you really think the number “15%” is some natural value that nature or the Bible or teams of scientists chose to define “famine”? It’s an arbitrary threshold that someone picked because it’s a bit larger than 10% and less than 20% and divisible by the number of digits on the human hand.

> It’s an arbitrary threshold

But it’s a threshold. Remove the threshold and we lose accountability. Any level is simultaneously abhorrent and unavoidable.

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