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

theguardian.com

251–260 of 427 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We literally just deployed 5000 troops to Iran after weeks of bombing. We are boots on the ground and our belligerent president literally calls it a war . It is disingenuous to bicker over whether we can call our attack an invasion. If it was happening to us we certainly would call it one. Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. Especially when discussing bombing a…

> Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. I was responding to whether the "invasion" could have been accomplished without killing the kids. I dont think that's realistic. The separate question of whether it's worth it morally to topple the regime given kids will die I think is pretty simply yes. Iran's funding of terrorism kills and will continue to kill far more k…

Killing children in an unprovoked attack to stop somebody else from potentially killing children in the future doesn't seem like a moral take to me, even if "someone else" killed more in the past or will in the future. In particular, because it actually sends the message that it's ok to kill children as long as you get what you want in the end. Not a great precedent. Perhaps that is the root of where your utilitarian morals diverge from some others' morals.

Unfortunately for everyone, now the US and israel killed a bunch of kids, and reinforced that precedent for others with these sorts of flimsy justifications, *and* everything will be the same or worse in Iran, especially for civilians. So lose-lose-lose.

> Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that [conditions in the Gaza region of Palestine] I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off.

We can already see the outcome of that in the West Bank region of Palestine: no hamas, yet israel still exercises ultimate control via violence, and keeps oppressing and killing Palestinians and taking or destroying their stuff with impunity, especially as of late.

There's no indication israel would be more generous to Palestinians in the Gaza region of Palestine if hamas wasn't there. Palestinians in Gaza see what israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank, and want no part of it. Who can blame them? It's sick.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsanctioned flights between Iran and a third country is tantamount to waging a war on the US in your view?

[flagged]

Yes please, but start a bit earlier and tell me the white house version of how the US staged a coup against Mossadegh in 1953 to install the Shah regime and control oil (ring a bell?)

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

#253
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known Think for a second WHY that is! They can find and kill the Iranian leaders who will be doing the utmost to conceal their location and yet that can't tell us whose bomb blew up a specific building? Of course they can. They're waiting until people forget and they can final release the result of their 'investigation'.

That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. But I'm noticing that you are only interested in guessing the motives and actions of the US. Does the IRGC not have motives and agency of their own? Perhaps the explosion was caused by a malfunction of their own missile? Perhaps they lied about children being present? Perhaps they intentionally placed children in a location they knew would be struck? Based on their incen…

Yes, I'm more concerned with the motives and actions of the aggressors.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too. If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.

Which terrorists exactly though?

If I recall we saw two planes. We did not see any individual as such in the planes, did we? We saw some passports; not sure that this proves much at all. We also had WTC 7 going down and the strike on the other building (was it in Washington) but not much aside from this.

I am not saying the-cake-is-a-lie, everything was fabricated, mind you. What I am saying is that IF we are going to make any conclusions, we need to look at what we have, and then find explanations and projections to what is missing. For instance, any follow-up question such as damage to a building, can be calculated by a computer, so this is not a problem. The problem, though, is IF one can not trust a government, to then buy into what they show or present to the viewer. Hitler also used a fake narrative to sell the invasion of Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident

That does not mean everything else is a false flag or fake, per se, but I do not automatically trust any allegation made by any government. You can look back in history and wonder about attempts to sell explanations, such as Warren Commission and a magic bullet switching directions multiple times. Again, that can be calculated via computers, so that's not an issue per se; the issue is if they made claims that are factually incorrect and/or incomplete.

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

#255
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yes please, but start a bit earlier and tell me the white house version of how the US staged a coup against Mossadegh in 1953 to install the Shah regime and control oil (ring a bell?)

[flagged]

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

#256
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just your opinion. The tragedy here is that there are people with similar opinion and bombs at their disposal that feel complete impunity and go around murdering in the world Also, remembe the CIA co-staged a coup in Iran in 1953. That's one fact, nor just opinion.

I suspect if the IRGC accidentally blew up a school next to a military base in Oklahoma, they would find it in them to condemn those who made such an innocent mistake.

That's all speculation. What we know is that the US agressed Iran without provocation and in the midst of negotiations and started by blowing up a school and not owning up to it. And now they have threatened multiple times with destroying the civilian energy infrastructure, which is a war crime.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. O…

This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.

Ask yourself this: the 9/11 bombings damaged economically valuable targets for the US, and the Pentagon is a straightforwardly valid military target.

Can your logic be used to justify these strikes?

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason Iran would attack the US is because we back the terror colony of Israel. No Israel, no war.

So to clarify, your argument is it’s ok to target civilians with bombs as long as they are located in a nation that practices terror?

Iran has never targeted the US but if they did, I would assume they would hit military targets.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsanctioned flights between Iran and a third country is tantamount to waging a war on the US in your view?

[flagged]

Your strongest example should be good enough. So far you've got 1) flights between Venezuela and Iran 2) whitehouse.gov.

Even if Trump's Whitehouse was a good source and you took it at face value, most of the items in that list are by Iranian proxy, i.e. Iranian intelligence involvement. So by comparison you'd have to include Israel and CIA actions and then it's just a mess to figure out who's worse.

But even then, I don't see anything in there that's as evil as blowing apart dozens of school children in one blow, mistake or not.

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

#260
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…

Just pointing out that this...

> Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case.

...is a logical fallacy (false dichotomy). It presumes a level of intent that isn't necessarily present.

For an example of how these might coexist, I'd encourage The Toxoplasma of Rage, which is a long essay that frequently comes up here:

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...

The idea is that rage is its own, self-replicating emotion, and given the medium of the Internet, it's possible that some memes have no purpose other than self-perpetuation. A story about a girls' school being blown up is self-replicating: it gets people riled up enough to share it. A story about a random factory, or some dead person's house, or an empty patch of desert is not really. It's entirely possible that attacks on these happened hundreds of times in the Iran war, but if it did, I would never know about it. I probably wouldn't care about it. Those are not stories that go viral, they don't have enough emotional valence to make people care. And the media knows this, and so they don't bother to seek them out or run them.

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