Iran launched unsuccessful attack on UK's Diego Garcia

What will be interesting is what happens on HN tomorrow - Sunday is the equivalent of Monday in MENA.

Additionally, tne fact it took hours for this to get flagged is worrisome for me. I have also noticed increased usage of HackerSmacker.

HN needs a hard ban on politics and much stricter off-topic controls to reduce the risk of misuse of HN. It will make HN significantly harder to use and for diamonds in the rough to arise, but will help ensure good faith discourse amongst users

Also, this isn't meant to be a slight at the HN moderating team - they are doing commendable work, but there is a deluge that is very difficult to manage (so I can only imagine how much hard work they are putting into moderating already).

The original reporting was carefully phrased to make it sound like IDF soldiers were "sniping" little children, taking careful aim and deliberately shooting them in the head, which is... monstrous.

Where this narrative starts to breaks down is that snipers don't aim for the head, because it's too small a target. Additionally, most of the reports mentioned that the children were shot "in the street" in scuffles with ordinary army grunts, so where were these mysterious "child-murdering snipers"? How were they so reliably hitting small moving targets in the head?

It turns out that this phenomenon was a product of Gaza's demographics combined with survivorship bias.

Half of Gaza's population is under 18! Teenagers are technically "children", but they're out in the streets throwing rocks or whatever at IDF troops, and get shot at in return. The ones that get hit by half a dozen rounds to the chest die on the spot and aren't taken to hospital because obviously, hospitals are for people that can be saved, not the dead. All of the reports of "children getting shot in the head" were coming from surgeons in hospitals, but they were seeing a biased sample: victims that only got hit once had a chance to survive. Similarly, a minor head-wound isn't instantly lethal, whereas a single round centre-mass typically is. So they were seeing victims with single shots to the head instead of multiple to the chest. They then cooked up a narrative that would explain what they were seeing, not realising that the cause wasn't "evil child murdering snipers", but simply a statistically biased view of a war that is not especially more unethical than any other armed conflict.

Israel has been assassinating people for decades. They’re aware that the strategy would be this one. They’ve designed an organizational structure that’s not dependent on individuals. That’s why you see a lot of the senior leaders have had very varied roles over the years - like wildly so. No one in their organization is indispensable, and the supreme ayatollah is a title not a person. They elected his son in coma as a message that the person isn’t relevant, it’s a symbolic role with invested power in the role not the person.

There’s no reason to believe assassinating individuals will achieve very much. It has not seemed to slow them down an iota so far, and I think at this point we have done enough personal damage to their leadership that there is no way to end the war. Even if we stop, it will go one through terrorism and proxy wars at a greater clip than ever before. Only an invasion will work, and I suspect that would be next to impossible to succeed at.

I do not think the US will win this. If we had had a plan, had enlisted allies, had prepared perhaps. But Trump just thought this was like Venezuela and YOLO’ed not realizing it’s not a dictatorship there.