Zompist Bboard Again

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2024 5:11 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 6:21 pmPerhaps it’s selfish, but the viewpoint from which I tend to think about this is: ‘what is the chance that a family member of mine gets murdered in a terrorist attack?’ At this point, they’re still more likely to be murdered by an invasion from Gaza than by an invasion from the West Bank.

Is that really the case though? Gaza is under complete siege. Moreover, the complacency and attempted cooptation which enabled the October 7th attacks is gone for at least a generation. The West Bank is larger in both population and size and has more connexions to Israel. It seems to me that if you're worried about another terrorist attack, that's where it's most likely to come from.

But isn't that the official justification for the current raid on Nasser Hospital? From the WaPo:

I don’t recall this… although, note that your quotes imply the hostages had been taken away by the time the IDF got there.

Where does it do that exactly?

Refusing to compromise or refusing to negotiate? These are two very different stances.

There’s a point at which they sort of blend into the same thing.

Perhaps, but I'd say it's begging the question to say that that point has been reached already.

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Feb 23, 2024 11:58 am Getting back to the main topic of this thread - I just read the latest blog post on a German-language Israeli blog which I used to occasionally visit to get some idea of what Israelis think, and I'm still kind of dumbstruck by the lack of self-awareness.

The blogger spends some time claiming that everything bad reported about Israel is a collection of lies that has nothing to do with reality. And then, she goes on to talk about how the Palestinians are all bad people who support Hamas, and strongly implies that this means that the world is wrong to worry about Palestinian civilians.

She doesn't seem to realize, at all, that the very fact that she talks in that way about Palestinian civilians kind of confirms the international narrative about Israel, Israeli attitudes, and Israeli goals which she herself dismisses as a collection of lies. She doesn't realize how much her own words sound like "It's a complete lie to claim that I killed that man - and if you research his life, you'll see that he clearly deserved to get killed!"

keenir wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 4:11 pm I forget if it was in the scrolling bar of the news yesterday or the day before, but it read that Israel's plan - once this matter with Hamas is closed (my words, not the scroll) - the plan is for the West Bank and Gaza to be de-militarized.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 4:48 pm

keenir wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 4:11 pm I forget if it was in the scrolling bar of the news yesterday or the day before, but it read that Israel's plan - once this matter with Hamas is closed (my words, not the scroll) - the plan is for the West Bank and Gaza to be de-militarized.

I think this is confusing a couple of things. What I saw is that Israel wants any potential Palestinian state to be de-militarised when formed, in much the same way that e.g. Japan’s military is strictly for self-defense only.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2024 4:06 pm I really don't know what to say at this point. Seven workers from an NGO trying desperately to save the Gazans from starvation are dead after their three vehicles were individually targeted and struck by the IDF and the best defence the latter can come up with is "Our bad, we thought that maybe one of them might be a member of Hamas." So, basically, better any number of innocent civilians killed rather than risk that one possible enemy combatant gets away. That explains a helluva lot about the current body count. "We do everything we can to minimise civilian casualties" my ass. Even the POTUS can't swallow those lies publicly any more.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2024 4:06 pm I really don't know what to say at this point. Seven workers from an NGO trying desperately to save the Gazans from starvation are dead after their three vehicles were individually targeted and struck by the IDF and the best defence the latter can come up with is "Our bad, we thought that maybe one of them might be a member of Hamas." So, basically, better any number of innocent civilians killed rather than risk that one possible enemy combatant gets away. That explains a helluva lot about the current body count. "We do everything we can to minimise civilian casualties" my ass. Even the POTUS can't swallow those lies publicly any more.

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.

“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.” One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.

The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2024 4:12 pm If you want to see some truly horrifying consequences of relying on AI to make decisions that humans should be forced to make, +972 Magazine has some amazing reporting about "Lavender", the system being used by the IDF to decide which Palestinians should be targeted for assassination: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2024 7:43 pm
About this, what’s quite interesting (from a dispassionate point of view) is that, even in those corners of the Internet which are normally violently pro-Israel, absolutely no-one is even trying to defend Israel’s actions. Everyone is disgusted. Will this be the event which finally gets Israelis to realise the horror that has been civilian casualties in this war? One can only hope.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 11:03 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2024 7:43 pm
About this, what’s quite interesting (from a dispassionate point of view) is that, even in those corners of the Internet which are normally violently pro-Israel, absolutely no-one is even trying to defend Israel’s actions. Everyone is disgusted. Will this be the event which finally gets Israelis to realise the horror that has been civilian casualties in this war? One can only hope.

I hope you're right. (Though if the comment box on ToI articles is any indication, there's still a long way to go.)

Though Israel has withdrawn troops, which might mean international reactions (especially the US) have had some effect which is somewhat better than I expected.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 12:58 pmApparently, intelligence suggests that targeted strikes are more effective in stopping Hamas, and I really do hope that that’s correct.

Torco wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2024 3:36 pm when I hear us-allies saying "targeted strikes" i'm imagining like bombing a wedding with six tons of napalm cause there's a chance a priority target might be there tbh. I remember when I was a kid and everyone was like "the soldier is obsolete, wars will be fought by remote operators, blabla". and like, yeah, bots do some shooting, but the first of the 21st century wars make it clear that no, wars are still fought by dudes with rifles reacting to conditions on the ground, shooting other dudes with rifles. I can't help but think that the 'targeted strikes' doctrine is a way to insist in making the bad prediction become reality.

Torco wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2024 3:36 pm when I hear us-allies saying "targeted strikes" i'm imagining like bombing a wedding with six tons of napalm cause there's a chance a priority target might be there tbh.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 2:58 am A sort-of-one-state federal solution: https://eretz-ard.org.il/

I don't know how realistic this is (I'm guessing not very much) but that's certainly well-thought out.