Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

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> Killing innocent people is against international law and harms the country doing it. While killing terrorists is acceptable and even desirable to many people.

Enemy combatant has a very specific meaning and that _can_ include people aiding and abetting the enemy. Thus, "actual terrorist" is a fairly nebulous term along with "innocent people". War is hell for a reason. Except for in obvious cases like Mai Lai it is never clear whether to call a person "innocent" for allowing an enemy combatant to seek shelter in their home - for example. But you have to make a snap decision: is the woman carrying what looks like an oddly shaped baby actually carrying bomb? Groceries? Why is she walking so close to the convoy? Did we issue a warning? Did she heed it? A bad decision will cost you many more lives than taking one. War is hell.

> the targeting team has developed a far more flexible pretext for violence

Doubt. The kill order chain is most likely AI flags target -> fed to human operator -> operator confirms -> kill order. Of course, your counter argument is that the human is given pretext ("this is a target") and thus assesses it with the assumption but in theory it's actually a better situation. 80% accuracy is still better than previous generations warfare. You dont want to end up on the thermals of an apache carrying a tube you need to replace your broken sewage system.

The news is polluted with pro-Palestinian nonsense. It's very clear absolutely no one on social media has any idea what hamas does, or what the people of palestine have done to aid and abet the terrorists. This is not to justify just dropping bombs on people without cause but I would be pretty satisfied with a best-effort approach to the loss of civilian life given how deeply embedded hamas is.

And then the Israelis put that target they only have partial confidence about into a system called "Where's Daddy?" which will track their target until he goes home to his family at which point a kill order is sent out to drones and warplanes to massacre his entire family. [0, 1]

Is that the "pro-Palestinian nonsense" you were referring to?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...

[1] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

See the part where I said aiding and abetting a known target makes you a target. "What about the children" is a very poor argument. Would you rather a fireteam kick down the door and have to shoot the entire family when they all scurry to a room and grab arms because daddy told them to? Because that's what happens - all the time. There's no "put down your weapons" like you see in movies. You have about 50ms to make a decision to neutralize a target.

I know people who are very screwed up after having to shoot children carrying weapons because their parents told them to. I know people who've had to make the kill/no-kill decision on a woman and her child approaching a convoy. It's a fucked up situation. That's why we try to avoid war.

You can't just deploy operators when a guy goes home to his family. It's expensive, dangerous, and difficult. If you leave him alone he could be ordering people from his home to kill your people. Unconventional war is by definition unconventional. If they fought like a regular military their families would most likely not be targeted. I have no data but I can tell you absolutely no one wants to kill women and children. Except for hamas, that is.

At this point, "aiding and abetting" seems to be "existing while inside Gaza." See the deliberate execution of the world central kitchen workers in a three-phase strike to ensure maximum casualties as an example.

I mean, that's not true. But you won't agree with me as it's en-vogue to be pro-hamas. You should actually be ashamed of yourself how little you understand about how these terrorists operate and how boldly you claim shit like "genocide" and "execution".

I am against systems designed to target and slaughter civilians. I am against using starvation as a weapon of war. I am against rules of engagement so loose that it allows the military to kill a convoy of people coordinating directly with the Israeli military on a aid mission who are using GPS devices to transmit their location to the Israeli military using three separate strikes over 2.5 km. I'm against dropping 2000-pound bombs on dense civilian areas. I am against rules of engagement so loose it allows the Israeli military to kill three of the hostages it was purportedly trying to save while they're waving white flags. I am against using snipers against people hiding in churches and hospitals. I am against an approved collateral civilian kill rate of 15-20x.

I consider these positions to be pro-humanity.

If in your view, holding these positions makes me pro-hamas, I encourage you to examine if you are using an unnecessarily binary framing to analyze the death and destruction going on.

You can't just scowl seriously and declare "war is hell", and pretend that excuses everything. War may be hell, but it's only hell because of the individual decisions of actual people up and down each belligerent's chain of command.

Yes, but Hamas instigated this by attacking civilians and the PLO—and only the Palestinians and its silent backers—threw away a dual-nation solution during the Clinton era.

So when we include decisions, it’s important to be impartial here.

Blaming the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks solely on the PLO is a convenient lie that seems to only serve to justify the increasingly harsh treatment of Palestinians by Israel. The historical record shows that both parties were not willing enough to compromise in order to create the two state solution [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit

The convenient lie is papering over the blame where it squarely belonged.

Like many of my generation—Gen X—I was closely following the on-goings because it seemed so close (Berlin wall, Russia seemed like an ally; more peace in our time); but in the end Arafat scuttled the deal because he did not want to compromise and give-up any part of Jerusalem.

“Arafat rejected Barak's offer and refused to make an immediate counter-offer.[100] He told President Clinton that, "the Arab leader who would surrender Jerusalem is not born yet.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat [1]

The citation [100] here is Jimmy Carter's book, which not only does not support the wiki summary (Camp David was based on a proposal from Clinton--not Barak, and Barak had "twenty pages of reservations" about the proposal himself), Carter also concludes:

[1]

> There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were succesful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.

In regards to the following talks at Taba, which perhaps the wiki is conflating with Camp David, Carter continues:

[2]

> A new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made.

[1]/[2] Jimmy Carter - Peace Not Apartheid (it's on Libgen, go look for yourself like I just did)

> but it's only hell because of the individual decisions of actual people up and down each belligerent's chain of command.

If a 10 year old takes up an AK-47 and points it at you what are you going to do? If a woman carrying a child sets a suspicious package down what're you gonna do? This isn't a "decision by the chain of command" outside of ROE for the AO. Everything else is on you.

If your answer is "call the chain of command" your entire unit is now dead. Congratulations. The variance in the decisions is due to the fact you can't make decisions by debating the internal psychology of the moron who may be trying to kill you. Innocent people will die. That's war. I'm getting downvoted to death here because it seems the posh liberals sitting at their desks don't understand what an actual life or death decision feels like. To be honest I'm not shocked. The toughest decision most people make is what to have for lunch and even that is enough to give the yuppies anxiety.

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