[flagged]
Ironic that it's already full of flag bombed comments (just from the opposite side of what you are complaining about).
Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
61–70 of 832 posts
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#62I actually consider the pager attack to be legal. There's obviously criticism of it, but I'm fairly sure you're allowed to do this kind of thing by laws of war. Obviously this creates a huge problem for pretty much everyone though, since we can imagine that our ordinary consumer products from all sorts countries could similarly explode if we ended up at war with the manufacturers.
All of the arguments I've seen supporting this attack focus on the idea that it's fine to kill and maim civilians including children as long as you will probably get some combatants. It's a little bit open to interpretation, I guess, and I'm not a legal expert so fine, ok. But booby trapping mundane daily objects accessible to non-combatants is a clear violation of international law. No real room for leeway or interp…
The prohibitions on booby-traps are that they're indiscriminant, not that they involve mundane objects.
I totally get the instinct to condemn the attack, since it's truly, deeply viscerally horrifying (not to mention terrifying!), but most of the rules about how you're supposed to conduct war basically boil down to 1. Make a reasonable effort to avoid disproportionately harming civilians 2. Don't go out of your way to inflict pain and suffering on your enemy beyond what's a necessary part of trying to kill or neutralize them 3. If your enemy is completely at your mercy, you have an extra duty to uphold 1 and 2.
Again, the pager attack is new, unusual, and just very upsetting. But it harmed civilians at a remarkably low rate, and the method of harm wasn't meaningfully more painful than just shooting someone. It compares very favorably with just bombing people on every metric other than maybe how scary it is if you're a combatant.
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#63This conversation already has comments on one side flagged to invisibility. If you are going to allow these conversations, but only allow one side, then Hacker News is not about discussion but about what?
If there are flagged comments which are not breaking the site guidelines, I'd like links to take a look at.
The moderation intention is for comments which break the site guidelines to be flagged, regardless of which side they are or aren't on. It's not possible to reach this state perfectly, of course.
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#64> Palantir ended up having to rent a second-floor building that housed its Tel Aviv office, to accommodate the intelligence analysts who needed tutorials Has anyone here tried using their software? It's salesforce-level fucked. They did a great job spewing lofty concepts, with their ontologies and their kinetic layers, but in the end it all ends up being a giant wormy ERP. There might be one good idea in there (artic…
Maybe they aren’t optimizing for user experience and are instead optimizing for how much data they can suck into their central db?
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#65Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#66[flagged]
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#67I actually consider the pager attack to be legal. There's obviously criticism of it, but I'm fairly sure you're allowed to do this kind of thing by laws of war. Obviously this creates a huge problem for pretty much everyone though, since we can imagine that our ordinary consumer products from all sorts countries could similarly explode if we ended up at war with the manufacturers.
Attacking a civilian population is a war crime.
The people those pagers were given to were NOT civilians. They were active members of Hezbollah.
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You cannot quarantee who is holding the pager at the moment of explosion.
You can have a reasonable expectation secure military pagers are only going to be used by soldiers. Given how few collateral deaths there were this was a reasonable assumption.
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#69I actually consider the pager attack to be legal. There's obviously criticism of it, but I'm fairly sure you're allowed to do this kind of thing by laws of war. Obviously this creates a huge problem for pretty much everyone though, since we can imagine that our ordinary consumer products from all sorts countries could similarly explode if we ended up at war with the manufacturers.
Attacking a civilian population is a war crime.
The intended targets of the exploding papers weren't civilians. Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons. It's about as targeted an attack as one can achieve from a distance.
As an act of warfare, Israel did a splendid job on this. Thoroughly impressive work.
Re: Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon
#70This conversation already has comments on one side flagged to invisibility. If you are going to allow these conversations, but only allow one side, then Hacker News is not about discussion but about what?
If there are flagged comments which are not breaking the site guidelines, I'd like links to take a look at. The moderation intention is for comments which break the site guidelines to be flagged, regardless of which side they are or aren't on. It's not possible to reach this state perfectly, of course.
Dude, your flag function is abused to no end, and you don't really do anything about it. One of the earliest comments I've made was one on semi-recent X11 history, and got flagged for it, because apparently everything is political now.