Response: Call of Apathy: Advanced Warfighter | Hacker News Reader

Response: Call of Apathy: Advanced Warfighter

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37 pointsdeedub8 comments

It's not just video games that desensitize us to the horrors of war. Turn to any major network around 8-9pm on a weekday and you will see one of those CSI shows where murder investigators walk around a terribly mangled body, crack jokes and focus on some suspicious looking powder on the victim's collar almost as if the burned, dismembered or scarred corpse shown in full view is not even there. My 4 year old nephew is still awake at that time and I have to be conscious of what channel is on TV.

I'm almost semi-convinced that they are training us all to become apathetic to those images so we can go to war one day.

Ironically the networks then go and blur out Kate Winslet's nipples in Leonardo Dicaprio's DRAWING when they screen Titanic. I guess murder is more natural than sexuality :S

> Ironically the networks then go and blur out Kate Winslet's nipples in Leonardo Dicaprio's DRAWING when they screen Titanic. I guess murder is more natural than sexuality

yeah, a problem is featured in this doc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTL3XMDwY0c

It's the complete opposite here in Austria, you can show body parts all you want but violence will land you an 18+ rating very quickly.

> "If we ever return to peacetime, will this technology be used against American citizens?"

The follow-on to this line of thought is: for how long will the operators even reasonably know who they are actually using the technology against? Would a drone pilot from, say, the US gulf coast have any ability to distinguish between North Korea or Northern China? Or Iran and Afghanistan? Or a Taliban compound in Afghanistan and a somewhat-remote domestic compound a la Ruby Ridge?

To say nothing of what is possible when augmented reality overlays can turn real-time video feeds into essentially fully-CG interpretations of the battlefield and targets.

I guess I don't see where you're going with this. Let's say the government wanted to trick a soldier into thinking he was killing a North Korean but he was really killing a Chinese soldier. What goal would that serve? Presumably, China would let the world know pretty fast what happened. Let's say the soldier thinks it's Afghanistan but it's really Scottsdale, AZ ... It seems like it would be hard to keep that a secret so why bother?

the gp might be alluding to operations where it would be pretty hard to find someone staff for. You'd need very motivated people to kill a journalist in Scottsdale, but you could rely on any operator if you could make it look like a terrorist in Afghanistan.

Yeah, that was the gist of it.

Not that you could wage a full-scale war with deceived pilots never finding out. But that you could quite likely staff an operation that would otherwise be illegal/unconscionable, with soldiers who wouldn't even realize they were party to it.

Previous NH discussion of the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3657026

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