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U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

eminetra.co.uk

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Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#81
post #63

This reads like an AI-generated translation. It looks like the source that they're plagiarizing is this Daily Mail article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9924567/US-drone-pi... The points of difference have a strong smell of machine translation. E.g. "Killing for the sake of killing" turns into "I’ll kill you for the killing"; "Connecting Vets" becomes "Veterinary connection". @dang This article should pro…

No it's not, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210825045512/https://www.audac...

@dang

Thinking better about it...per suggestion of perihelions maybe change to original source:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210825045512/https://www.audac...

or the Daily Mail link?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9924567/US-drone-pi...

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#82

I wonder if Facebook Twitter etc. banning violent and bloody content has prevented the public from protesting these things more widely. It is well known that TV broadcasts of Vietnam led to outrage growing against that war.

Pretty sure the protests during Vietnam were just as large, if not more so. Journalism finds a way, like internet, and genetically modified dinosaurs.

The Iraq/Afghanistan war protests were large at the start, tapered off, and became a non-issue after a few years. Especially in the middle when we were "winning".

Few care about the cost to Afghans. The cost to Westerners has been fairly well hidden from discussion.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#83
post #64
post #55

When we often look at drones and the advent of AI and the fear of automated killing drones but lets take another perspective. AI that assists in preventing innocents being killed. Still manually controlled but an AI to override hostile action when it deems it wrong. We all focus upon AI to identify and select targets, but an AI to help identify and prevent innocents being impacted - surely that approach would be a wo…

Sadly, you'd be wrong about that last one. Even in cases where they would want as few casualties as possible, I believe no military would want some "pos tech" telling them what to do (and especially what not to do).

> I believe no military would want some "pos tech" telling them what to do (and especially what not to do).

https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-inches-toward-letting-a...

Also many an anti rocket/missile system that is automated and AI is (maybe already is in some aspects of tracking) being worked upon.

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/10/7/p...

So whilst the step towards automated weapons of destruction does seem inevitable, there is clearly more acceptance of weapons for preventing lives ending unfairly already.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#84
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210825045512/https://www.audac...

Note for other readers: “no it’s not” refers to the Daily Mail not being the original source. The submitted link (eminetra.co.uk) does look like a ML-generated copy.

Correct. Thanks ricardobeat

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#85

Is it cynical to think this was intentionally leaked to boost support for withdrawing from Afghanistan?

The military method to define any male (and sometimes women) above a certain age as an combatant was leaked 2010. This is simply a reminder that the same indiscriminating warfare are continuing.

If anything this article reminds me of domestic terrorists that define a certain demographic as being enemy combatants and then goes to indiscriminate killing spree. The major difference seems to be that the military personal who actually operated the drones know that what they are doing is wrong, otherwise the room would not have gone silent when the two civilians and their child got killed. Then when it comes to write the report the two civilians becomes combatants and the killing get internally justified.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#86
post #57
post #37

> accidental killing of children On purpose is a war crime now, so it has to be accidental. Starting/continuing a war is not accidental though. It sure can be baseless (imho most if not all recent US wars were baseless).

The war on ISIS? I heard Raqqa was lovely under their control.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but this might (obvi, wild speculation) just be a premature version of: "I heard kabul was great under the taliban"

That said - yeah, I'm glad ISIS's great swoop was thwarted.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#87

Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

We need to seriously examine our own morality for allowing these ghouls to basically genocide brown people.

We are absolutely the baddies; between Iraq, Afghanistan and our air strikes on Syria, Libya, and Yemen during the same period killed 1 million civilians. We’re within an order of magnitude of the Holocaust, and we all just pretend everything is ok. I really don’t know why there aren’t more discussions of how this is basically the Islamic Holocaust.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#88
post #59

This reads like an AI-generated translation. It looks like the source that they're plagiarizing is this Daily Mail article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9924567/US-drone-pi... The points of difference have a strong smell of machine translation. E.g. "Killing for the sake of killing" turns into "I’ll kill you for the killing"; "Connecting Vets" becomes "Veterinary connection". @dang This article should pro…

From another comment chain (credit to @belter), this seems like the original source: https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-fa... Comment chain (along with archive link for EU access): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299929

I've edited my comment above to clarify an ambiguity. The Daily Mail article isn't the original source of the news story, but it's the textual source that the submitted URL is plagiarizing off of.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from delusional Trump loyalists that have now flip-flopped and are praising the Taliban, most Americans overwhelmingly supported withdrawing years ago.

Firstly, any goal you support could be achieved wrongly by terrible means. I support stimulatinf the economy, but not by bringing back child labour Secondly, there has been a complete failure of leadership in rebuilding afganistan and in communicating to the public that you can't just pack up and leave. I just listened to the podcast with an afgan vet, he was there for 10 years. On the first year they shipped a hydro…

Another 10 years would not have installed the turbine.

> complete failure of leadership in rebuilding Afghanistan

Agree. It's been a bipartisan failure with the aid of the media for two decades. But it's also an extremely hard problem, and it ties into an area that America is particularly bad at: state capacity. You can't build a government by being anti-government.

> and in communicating to the public that you can't just pack up and leave

Well, you can and they have. This is going to get a bunch of people killed, but that doesn't stop it happening this way, because that has basically zero traction with US voters.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#90
post #70
post #55

When we often look at drones and the advent of AI and the fear of automated killing drones but lets take another perspective. AI that assists in preventing innocents being killed. Still manually controlled but an AI to override hostile action when it deems it wrong. We all focus upon AI to identify and select targets, but an AI to help identify and prevent innocents being impacted - surely that approach would be a wo…

I rather avoid an Oblivion like future.

Yes, many do seem to worry about AI more than nuclear weapons - more so if they even cross streams so too speak.

But I do wonder how much of things are driven by worst case hoilloywood visualsations of things. Certainly the whole cold war and peoples mentalities, was very much media driven from the fear aspect. Will AI share the same and will we get to the stage that we see anti AI groups form and the term and history of Luddite gets revised!

Certainly many worry's, but also opportunities. Certainly don't want any AI working out a way to game Asimov's rules of robotics.

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