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AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

theguardian.com

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Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#151

Post by zmmmmm »

jvanderbot wrote: post #121
dbt00 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years? How many Iranian schoolchildren have America killed? Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?

Please ask yourself if there is true evil in the world. People who are willing to kill children on purpose , or maim them, or burn them with acid, or commit other bad things I wont get into. Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them. Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B. And ask if we were trying to target people…

> Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.

false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality

There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.

Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#152

Post by sebastiennight »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #134
Forgeties79 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime. It most absolutely is not and I struggle to believe you can build a valid argument that links bombing school children as necessary for the fall of Iran’s government. How you win a war, especially one as lopsided as this invasion is, is as important as winning. I cannot so easily sleep…

Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Do you agree with the statement "No war has ever been worth the results."? If yes, then okay end of conversation. But if not then we need to talk about acceptable mistake rates and where this falls, because zero mistakes is not possible. Note that I am not defending the strike here, I'm saying that the criticism needs more depth.

Would you mind sharing a handful of examples where, from your perspective, a war was worth its results?

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#153

Post by burkaman »

jvanderbot wrote: post #115
Denzel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it. > there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Abse…

I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once. > . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. > The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during t…

> If you do - how can you? Why would they?

I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#154

Post by mlsu »

WarmWash wrote: post #137
mlsu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I understand that the officer killed your unarmed teen son. But you have to understand, in the dark, he appeared to be reaching for a weapon, and the officer feared for his life." "It's a tragedy that she was raped. But you have to understand, the way she was dressed, she clearly wanted it, she was sending mixed signals, you see." Anyway. Here's a preschool right next to a military base, it took me about 3 minutes o…

And it's clearly labeled as such, right on google maps. The Navy even provides a map for people potentially targeting to know what is and isn't on base. https://www.nepa.navy.mil/portals/20/Figure%201%20Letter.png I'm sure you'll link to where Iran publicly shares the information about the base that was struck, right?

[dead]

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#155

Post by mikeyouse »

hackerstuff wrote: post #145
jmye wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that make it not a school, somehow? Or are we cool with killing kids just because their parents might be in the military? I'm not clear what the excuse being made actually is.

It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base. Not saying this specific attack was justified, but whoever allowed this, let alone if it was done intentionally as a strategy, also has blood on their hands.

Where do you think the children of our armed forces go to school? There are hundreds of schools on or adjacent to military installations in the US. The only people with blood on their hands for bombing a school are the people who bombed the school. It’s really not more complicated than that.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#156

Post by antinomicus »

jvanderbot wrote: post #36
beloch wrote: post #23

"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the…

I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a l…

You seem to be ignoring the fact that the US should not be in this war at all. How people have already moved on from that to making monstrous posts like this makes me sick.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#157

Post by torginus »

beloch wrote: post #23

"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the…

I'm not sure how true that is. Enemy factories and command centers don't grow out of the ground overnight.

Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.

In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.

While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.

I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#158

Post by TaupeRanger »

20k wrote: post #21
shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

Everyone acknowledges that the US killed a whole bunch of kids, including the US

I'm not sure why the other reply here was flagged and killed. The US absolutely has NOT acknowledged that they killed school children. The DoW and other government officials have only publicly stated that an investigation is taking place.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#159

Post by torginus »

jvanderbot wrote: post #36
beloch wrote: post #23

"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the…

I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a l…

And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building.

I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.

Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.

There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.

One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.

The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#160

Post by lovich »

jvanderbot wrote: post #115
Denzel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it. > there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Abse…

I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once. > . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. > The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during t…

> I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?

Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?

And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.

I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?

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