Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

> Israel unilaterally disengaged from GAZA in 2005

There were over a thousand gazans held without charges by the israeli military on oct 7th. That is not what disengagement looks like.

Israel has military bases in cities.

> No, protecting your people from terrorist is not apartheid

I’m quite sure a white south african could have said this same sentence pre-1994.

It's been possible for a long time.

For antipersonnel use, guns are perfectly adequate and guns on tracking turrets have been widely deployed (for example, CIWS). The underlying technology is a ballistic calculator and a fast panning turret. Modern ballistic calculators, weather stations (a small device about the size of a cellphone), and good quality ammunition allows for incredible precision with small arms -- hitting something 25cm in diameter at 1000m is something people can do with these tools.

A weapon like this can't really "mass kill" -- it is for point targets -- but we have long had tools that can automatically track and kill. Why don't we employ them to shoot at people? We have the tagging technology, &c, as you mention.

One reason is that positive identification really does matter a lot when designing and developing weapon systems that automatically attack something.

The anti-missile use case is one of the most widespread uses for automatically targeted weapons in part because a missile is easily distinguished from other things that should not be killed: it is small, extremely hot, moves extremely fast, generally up in the air and moves towards the defense system. It is not a bird, a person, or even a friendly aircraft. The worst mistake the targeting system can make is shooting down a friendly missile. If a friendly missile is coming at you, maybe you need to shoot it down anyways...

Drones have a different signature from a missile and recognizing them in a way that doesn't confuse them with a bird, a balloon, &c, is different from recognizing missiles -- but here again, the worse thing that happens is you shoot down a friendly drone.

What are you implying? That the civilians of Germany too were involved in the Holocaust under Nazism? Sure, they hated the 'other' groups. But the Nazis had to suspend the earlier Aktion T4 after it attracted a severe revolt from the public. Learning from that experience, the Nazis took enormous efforts to keep the Holocaust out of public sight. If the German civilians had known well about it, would the allied armies have been so surprised and shocked when they discovered the concentration camps?

Don't get me wrong. The Nazis were evil to the core. What they did to the victims is unforgivable. But grouping the civilians with them is a convenient and nefarious justification for their massacre. How many of the thousands of kids among them were Nazis according to you?

Now talking about targeting the German civilians, check out the massive allied firebombings of largely undefended Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah) and Dresden. The attacks claimed the lives of 34K and 25K civilians respectively in a dreadful sequence of events. Horrific accounts and photos of the incidents exist to this day. The incidents were so controversial that even Churchill challenged it in the Parliament. See if you can stomach those accounts.

War is inherently immoral. You just don't fight one if you can. But if that's not an option, then both sides may end up committing horrible war atrocities. All you can hope for is the least bad outcome. And once it's over, you should be introspecting about what went wrong and how to avoid that in the future. For that, an honest acceptance of the barbarity of such atrocities is needed. If you glorify them instead, you aren't all that better than your enemies and you're just setting up the stage for a repeat of that horrible past. So yes, all civilians should be protected.

> as captured by their slogan, "from the river to the sea Palestinians will be free"

The mental gymnastics required to make a call for freedom into a call for war are astounding. If i say “free tibet” does that mean i want war with china? What part of “free” is a threat to the people of israel?

> despite that they launched the war first every single time

This is such weird playground-like defense - “They started it!!!”. The actions and stated intentions of israel leading up to the 1948 war are pretty easy to see as a declaration of war - claiming other people’s land as part of your state. And then later Oct 7th is often portrayed as hamas “starting it”. But there were over a thousand gazans held by israel without charges on oct 6th. If israel is justified in murdering 80,000 for the hostages taken in oct 7th - is hamas’ attack not justified by their people held by israel?

To be clear, i’d say in both cases the murder of civilians was unjustified, but i don’t see how one can be justified while the other isn’t.

I have no idea how this hypothesis ("guns protect from oppressive governments") is still holding people's minds captive. The current regime in the US disproves this every day, constantly eroding civil rights and not even being subtle about it.

And the people with guns mostly either cheer it on or pretend it's not so bad (until they themselves feature in /r/leopardsatemyface).