Discussion

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

ognav: The Guardian carrying water for the AI industry. The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile. We get that Maven is Palantir, but it integrates Claude:https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-...Going into a generic rant about anti-AI people after missing sources and believing the Department of War is just extremely poor journalism from the newspaper that destroyed evidence after a command from GCHQ.I hope this is a single "journalist" and that the Guardian has not been bought.

jameskilton: Something that a lot of tech people, especially in Silicon Valley, seem to want to forget, is that at every level you still have people making decisions. AI is suggesting but someone, somewhere, still has to make the decision to act on that suggestion.It's still people doing people things.

idle_zealot: The immediate concern isn't really fully autonomous systems, it's that the nature and design of recommender/suggestion systems prompt humans to sleepwalk through their responsibilities.

phillipcarter: I assume you actually read the article and didn't just post this after a quick skim, yes? Because saying this:> The distinction between Maven and Claude is futileDoesn't make any sense at all when you read the article and understand what Claude actually does in this equation. From the article:> Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English. But the language model was never what mattered about this system.The whole point here is that whether an LLM is involved or not is immaterial to the system as a whole, and it's a disservice to the public to focus on LLMs here.

ck2: You know how that was done with a TomahawkThey've now burnt though almost ONE THOUSAND of thoseThey cost $4 million each, so that's another $4 BILLION that has to be replaced tooImagine several more months of that or even through 2029

shykes: 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 verify first-hand. Everything from the number of explosions, the extent of the physical damage, the number of wounded and dead, the number of civilians wounded and dead - these are all unverified claims and should be treated as such. Not only is the IRGC obviously biased and incentivized to maximize media pressure on the US and Israel: they are known for information warfare of exactly this nature. To take their statements at face value, and present them as established facts in the opening paragraph, as this article does, is journalistic malpractice.Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known, yes all parties are projecting narratives with a certainty that we should all be suspicious of.Without this stable foundation of knowing what actually happened, and why, the very premise of this article collapses on itself.

embedding-shape: > To this day we don't know what actually happened.I feel like we know enough already. A school was bombed, the ones who did it sucks big time and should be held responsible. Currently, the US and Israel is waging a war against Iran, and one of them dropped the bomb(s), unless suddenly Iran got their hands on American weapons, then that needs to be investigated too, because someone surely dropped the ball at that point.The basics remain the same, investigations have to be launched to figure out where exactly in the chain of command, someone made a mistake, and then hold that person(s) responsible for their fuck up.Have those investigations been launched?

tomasphan: It’s a tale as old as time: start a war to support the military industrial complex. Imagine a $4 billion investment into public transportation or parks. Every 10 years we can invest into a new city instead of bombing some kids overseas (whose siblings, fueled by hatred, then commit terror attacks on the west).

gowld: A portion of a military base was converted to a school.This was a tragic disaster waiting to happen from the very start.This isn't an "AI or not" issue at all.This was a choice to use children as human shields, and a choice to make war on a foreign sovereign nation.Let's suppose the US accurately bombed the center of the military base, and the explosion destroyed the adjacent school and killed the children inside. Would that change anything of import? I don't think so.

nahuel0x: Israel and the US are bombing lots of schools and hospitals and civilian infrastructure, this is not the only case. This is intentional genocide, not a software/organizational/human error.

lukifer: Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.This is not to say that this administration is definitely not targeting civilians or infrastructure on purpose; just that the end result, and the moral culpability, are the same in either case.

Lerc: "the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target."This article is the first I have seen mention of Claude in relation to this specific incident. There's been plenty of talk about AI use in warfare in general but in the case of this school most of the coverage I have seen suggested outdated information and procedures not properly followed.

FartyMcFarter: It's definitely been reported before that Claude was used for Iran attacks, at the beginning of March or earlier:https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/01/claude-an...

ElevenLathe: I think its fair to treat things that the Trump administration and the Iranian military agree on as facts. If they were distortions that favored one side, we would see pushback from the other. Maybe there are distortions that somehow benefit both of these parties, but it seems unlikely. At minimum, then, this was a school, the Americans bombed it, and children died as a result.

dede2026: Holy gaslighting bootlicking

beloch: "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 ranked options, and the system, depending on who is using it, either sends the target package to an officer for approval or moves it to execution."----------------Maven is a tool for use in the middle of a war. When both sides are firing, minutes saved can mean lives saved for your side. Those lives, at least partly, balance the risks of hitting a bad target.This was not a strike made in the middle of a war. If Maven was used in the strike that took out a school, it was being used as part of a sneak attack. Nobody was shooting back while this was being planned. Minutes saved were not lives saved. There should have been a priority placed on getting the targets right. Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. This clearly didn't happen. The school was obviously a school that even had its own website. Humans would have spotted this if they had done more than make their three clicks and move on to the next target.Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it. Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse, they are directly responsible for the deaths of those little girls. I sincerely hope there are (although I doubt there will be) consequences for this person beyond taking that guilt to their grave.

oceansky: Which is already happening

amarant: >The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.Would it be poor taste to make joke about gradle being superior here? The dad in me really wants to make that joke...

20after4: Replacing one java tool with another doesn't solve anyone's problems. If they'd only used Rust then lives would have been saved.

csmpltn: West and white people = bad.Extremist Islam = good, eternal victims, oppressed underdogs, never responsible for anything, resistance fighters.Got it.

embedding-shape: I agree with your overall sentiment, but how realistic is it? Israel/US says they've been hitting thousands of targets (so reality might mean ~hundreds, still a lot), how are they supposed to verify this at all?> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.

ok_dad: In this case, they would have discovered it was a school with a Google search, basically. There’s no excuse.

jdross: I'm pretty sure this is the school that was on the corner of a military base, and the school building hit was previously part of the military base.

paganel: They (the Americans) should have also marked the schools on said military maps of theirs, and hence they could have made a value judgment of "is it worth killing some IRGC men in the middle of nowhere vs. the international backslash of killing school-going children?". It looks like they most probably didn't do that, probably because their "advanced" AI systems didn't bother with marking schools on their military maps.

Tostino: Or the vast satellite network we run. Pretty easy to see it's school children going in and out of the area.

netsharc: The WTC complex had defense department offices: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/2001/09/federal-agencie...

kace91: I have heard the claim everywhere.

shykes: I think it's likely that the explosion was caused by a US strike. But we don't actually know for sure that that's what happened - the US government has not confirmed it.We also don't know anything about casualties - we only have the IRGC statements, and they are not reliable.> Have those investigations been launched?Yes, according to the US government, an investigation is underway. But its starting point is determining what caused the explosion.

rnab147: WaPO writes that Claude selected targets:https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...This unknown Guardian contributor writes a missive against "Luddites" while using the typical AI booster arguments that always turn around anti AI arguments.Just like two five year olds: "You have a big nose." "No, you have a big nose."We learn from this clown that anti AI people suffer from AI psychosis because they are reading WaPo and Reuters.

simonw: Both the Washington Post and the Guardian articles agree that the system used here was Maven.The key sentence in that Washington Post article appears to be:> The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements.As far as I can tell this is the public announcement - a press release from November 2024: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241107699415/en/Ant...> Anthropic and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS. This partnership allows for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) while leveraging the security, agility, flexibility, and sustainability benefits provided by AWS.

491827-17182: We know that Palantir used AI for target selection in Gaza:https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/We know that it integrated Claude and Claude was deemed to be a supply chain risk just before the Iran war. So it is not a huge mental leap to assume what it is being used for.You won't get an answer from Hegseth. This Guardian "article" is by a Substack blogger who also does not have answers.

simonw: That article you are quoting there is from April 2024. The Claude + Palantir deal was announced in November 2024.The "supply chain risk" claims came from a deeply non-serious executive team who don't like "woke AI". They're not credible.

jmye: 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.

YZF: I couldn't find a web site for the school when I searched for one and I also noticed that while schools are generally marked on Google Maps in Iran this school was not. Both are IMO not really relevant or reliable sources of targeting data anyways. I found very little evidence searching online for the school but I did find something that looked like a blog about a school trip. Again though the Internet is not a reliable source of data for targeting - should be obvious.The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.

keiferski: Before it was the gods, then God, then Nature, and now AI. Human beings really have a fundamental issue with accepting responsibility for their actions.From a certain angle, the entire industrial and computer age looks like a massive effort to remove all responsibility for our actions, permanently.

gambutin: How is this a helpful comment?

jvanderbot: 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 low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same.I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground. However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.

dbt00: 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"?

jazz9k: If we had all military bases next to elementary schools, things might be different.

fragmede: Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlh...

gambutin: Don’t worry. The Saudis and UAE will happily pay all costs of the war.

YZF: Check out this example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw4egp7lwno"As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters." "On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: "Down with Israel" and "Down with the USA".It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as "highly sensitive"."This is a BBC reporter reporting from Syria after the fall of Assad.It is strategy for the IRGC and Hamas to operate from civilian infrastructure like schools to gain immunity. That's what's "not a human error".

gruez: This feels like moving the goalposts. If the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands.

applfanboysbgon: You are the one engaging in "information warfare", intentionally trying to spread doubt about an event that was confirmed by both Iran and US. What does it feel like to deny the murder of 150+ children out of nationalistic pride? Do you simply have no conscience? No sense of guilt, no concept of morality?

WarmWash: I feel like an intellectual god to have been gifted the brain power to recognize that 150 kids being killed is a awful tragedy, and that converting a building on a military base to a school is recklessly stupid and borderline purposely done as a trap. It's like letting your child play in the road at night, and then being upset when a drunk driver hits them.Anyone can look at the satellite images from the bombing and see how ridiculous whatever Iran was doing was.[1][1]https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop...

AshleyGrant: There are schools on military bases all over the world. Here's one at Joint Base Andrews: https://maps.app.goo.gl/iMm4QSZJYAaLLSLh9Are the children in that school a legitimate military target? Is putting that school on Joint Base Andrews "recklessly stupid?"Why is it perfectly fine for the United States to do this but "recklessly stupid" for Iran to do it?

albatross79: Had Iran done anything to the US as heinous as this one "mistake" in the last 50 years that compares? Imagine if some country did this to us and just brushed it off as a mistake.

yosamino: I'm just gonna assume you are an American, just because this is a website who's audience is in large part American. But I might be wrong. Anyway, as such you must at least in passing be familiar with the concept of a "military base" as it is practiced by American society.> Everything that the average family needs is there; a grocery store, shopping mall, bank, post office, theatre, religious centers, outdoor activities, community center, clubs, dining facilities, gas station, quick stop markets, and, if not a full size hospital, medical clinics. The majority of bases do not have schools physically located on the installation, but the children are educated in the neighboring school systems.src: https://militarybases.com/military-housing/life-on-a-militar...I just googled that so I don't have to write the text myself.So while you might be technically correct about schools, do you think housing on a military base for personnel and their families is akin to playing on the road at night ?> I feel like an intellectual godHN rules prevent me from writing anything snarky here.

YZF: You're not wrong but what we can tell from open sources is:- The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex.- The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location.- At the time of the attack school would have been in session.- The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area.Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement.And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc.As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.

shykes: I agree with all of that. My worry is that the Guardian article is not doing any of it, and in fact is damaging the framework for even having such a conversation.. Instead they are repeating IRGC statements without attribution, and establishing them as background truth in the first paragraph. Then building an entire article on that flawed premise. Essentially, their article exists in the narrative universe create by the IRGC. I find that incredibly worrying.

YZF: My bar for present day journalists and the Guardian specifically is pretty low. The goal for the Guardian is apparently to get clicks and advance their agenda. Journalism and real news reporting is apparently dead. My commentary is more on the specifics of the incident.Agree the first paragraph is garbage journalism.

spaghetdefects: The New York Times are the same people who spread the lie about Iraq having WMDs, they are not credible, and in fact have been proven to be incredibly biased when it comes to wars in the Middle East.Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.

sva_: Turning a military building into a girl's school, and then having this school right next to other military buildings - is this something that happens often? Or were there ulterior motives behind it?

qat-1209: Yes, the US has 160 schools on military bases:https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-c...

Betelbuddy: Its not a war crime if the AI does it?

HDThoreaun: Iran's regime is directly responsible for untold war crimes and suffering through their proxies. You can say the same about the US, which is why I dont think it would be immoral for Iran to launch a bunch of rockets at the US. 1/1000 being mistargeted isnt unexpected. Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime.

Forgeties79: > 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

shykes: No. The only thing that the US government and IRGC agree on, at the moment, is that there was an explosion at the site of the school.The US did NOT confirm that they are responsible for the bombing, or that children (or anyone) died as a result. This is a verifiable fact.So, applying your own principle: the only thing you should treat as fact, is that there was an explosion at a school.

Denzel: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-m...> An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.

shykes: That article is based on anonymous sources ("according to [people] familiar with the preliminary findings").It doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not an official confirmation by the US government, and it only speaks to the responsibility of the strike.Those sources also don't say anything about casualties, or the presence of children. The NYT does its best to make it sound like they do ("responsible for a deadly strike"), but so far the only source for how deadly it is, remains the IRGC. And the NYT happily quotes their claim that the death toll was "at least 175 people".

sessionfs: Ai makes mistakes, we all know that.

gruez: >It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns.You might be overestimating how much satellite capacity there is to do this level of analysis for every target.

HDThoreaun: 1. This isnt an invasion, just a bombing campaign.2. Of course it would be better to not kill any kids, but thats just not how war works. Mistakes will be made, that doesnt mean eliminating the number one funder of terror in the world isnt worth it. Even if the next regime hates the US/israel just as much they will likely spend much less supporting terror groups because they know theyll just get bombed again.3. Of course this is all if the bombing campaign actually worked. It didnt, and thats no surprise, which is why the whole thing is pretty clearly immoral imo.> zero military capacity to harm us here at home.The houthis harmed the US quite a bit by destroying American ships and harming global trade. In fact their actions were arguably far more harmful to the average american than any domestic terrorist attack could possibly be because of the economic impact that effected every single american.

cramsession: The US/Israel are far and away the number one terrorist organization in the world, and it's not even close.

Denzel: 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 sortiesHow 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. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.> so this already is a low error rateAs a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?

jvanderbot: 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 the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”---> Please reason through the implications now?It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.> 1000s1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. 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. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.> we targeted and killed young childrenWe killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. 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?We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.

EtienneDeLyon: Isn't it a more reasonable explanation that the IDF deliberately had this school bombed because those schoolgirls were the children of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers?The intentional murder of enemy children is a tactic of the IDF. They've done it for decades.

kakacik: kakacik's razor - Never attribute to incompetence of IDF/Mosad that which is adequately explained by laser focus intent to murder and exterminate enemy at all costs, via all avenues, all is allowed.

megous: Missing the forest for the trees, are you? Wars of aggression are against UN rules, and US is in the wrong regardless of what it hit.Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...

YZF: Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution and the US claims that there was a threat of attack on US bases and US interests and therefore the attack was in self defense. The body that decides is the UNSC and given the US has veto powers it's not going to obviously declare the US attack illegal.From Israel's perspective there's an even stronger self defense argument given the amount of missiles aimed at Israel from Iran and the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel. So the US argument that they knew Israel was planning the attack and they knew Iran would retaliate against US interests seems at least on the surface to bad valid.

gambutin: I feel very bad for the children and their relatives. What happened is really terrible.I wish there was the same level of rigour and energy applied to investigating the 40,000 deaths in early January. There are countless videos online.I simply don’t understand why 150 people receive so much attention while 40,000 don’t.This saddens me because it feels like the focus is on who was responsible rather than who lost their lives.

esseph: > I simply don’t understand why 150 people receive so much attentionIt's called motherfucking *accountability*

gambutin: You conveniently deleted the second part of that sentence.

WarmWash: Yes, you are correct. Military bases even have schools and kids!But do you know what else the US does?The locations of military and non-military buildings is public information, and even intentionally made obvious to anyone. You can get maps of the bases from their websites. You can even go on google maps and see what most of the buildings are. To avoid exactly this situation. And even beyond all that, in the event of military escalation where their is real threat of the bases being hit, the civilians would be evacuated anyway.(Legitimate) countries at war aren't trying to massacre civilians. They all agreed to that and all take agreed upon steps to stop it. Like at the most basic level issuing uniforms to soldiers so you can clearly see who is a civilian and who is a fighter.I can assure you that in a war between the US and China, there would be dramatically fewer civilian deaths, because both countries don't fuck around with "military/civilian ambiguity" as a war tactic. Because you or your enemy end up killing a bunch of innocents.

jvanderbot: 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 from group A or group B.This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.

bdangubic: We (US) are definitely in Group A. We killed and are continuing to kill more innocent people (including children) than everyone else combined but are always hiding under “oh, we really good guys here, just shit happens while we are bombing around the world for decades for no particular reason until we eventually lose and leave”)

thrawa8387336: I think more than one. One and then another 1 hour after

yabutlivnWoods: Wouldn't have been looking for targets if senile old fucks looking to deflect from their personal liabilities hadn't started shooting.AI didn't do shit here. Stupid people built the AI and the weapons and applied them. Any other argument is intentional obfuscation.You all are falling for propaganda.

jvanderbot: That is actually the point of the article, if you had read it

kakacik: No, I am fine with parent's take. We treat children as absolutely innocent (which they are, regardless of the way anybody tries to spin this or ie Gaza), and killing children is extra heinous crime compared to killing adult, same with rape etc. Children rapist get extra special treatment in jails, often from other murderers and society is largely fine with that.As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.

gruez: >I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage.

machinecontrol: Interesting article. Seems like AI-washing isn't just for layoffs anymore.

glouwbug: What AI does best is remove accountability and ownership

thrawa8387336: Makes one think why Mckinsey et. al. are doing poorly ;)

cool_dude85: >Iran has been waging war since the Islamic RevolutionOn who?

HDThoreaun: Which is why I said I dont think it would be immoral for Iran to launch a bunch of rockets at the US or israel to force regime changes.

Forgeties79: But they can’t and don’t lob missiles at the US so to act as if they are is ridiculous. This is not a fight between equal weight classes.

Forgeties79: 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 school.