Comment by mmastrac

I don't find it very persuasive to simply assume that the casualties are "excessive." Whether they are actually excessive is really the whole issue. As of right now, there is no strong evidence that I'm aware of that the injuries from today's attack are "excessive" much less those of a different purely hypothetical attack.

And even then: to judge whether casualties are excessive requires an understanding of the goal to be achieved, which is almost completely absent from this discussion.

Why isn't it better to cause fewer civilian casualties &/or those of lesser severity than a shooting fight or missile attack?[1] Given the situation has already degenerated to its current state where fighting is the status quo and all options lead to innocent casualties then minimizing those is the horrible "OK" option. Not okay in the sense of desirable, not okay in the sense that things should never have degenerate to this level to begin with, only okay as the less horrible option.

[1] Videos show the explosions highly limited in their ability to cause injuries as bad as a bullet to anyone ever a foot or two away from the explosions, much less than I would expect from anything more conventional.

Israel isn't causing any civilian casualties in South Lebanon. Hezbollah declaring war on Israel by firing rockets onto civilian areas since the 8th of October caused them.

People keep bringing up the same argument about dropping nukes on Japanese cities, and it seems like the world just accepted it.

my family was evacuated due to incessant rocket fire in the golan heights, hezzbollah has been firing indiscriminately since 10/8 do you have any alternative?

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Israel is definitely at war with Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is of course not a country (though they're a proxy for Iran), but they occupy parts of Lebanon, so you can't attack them without attacking Lebanon.

Eh, the history isn't a secret and the reason is that they are religious fundamentalists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah

> According to Hezbollah's Deputy-General, Naim Qassem, the struggle against Israel is a core belief of Hezbollah and the central rationale of Hezbollah's existence.

I tend to believe their own statement on this matter. Where do you see wiggle room for another argument? Or even to find the argument "curious"? What is curious about it?

Only on HN, “This is curious. Why would people do an irrational thing similar to the irrational things that people have done for the entirety of human existence?”

A mystery indeed.

The unfortunate thing is that regardless of politics, this will be seen as further escalation that ratchets up the risk of greater regional conflict. All wars eventually end, its just a question of how long, and how much death (both militarily and civilian) will be endured by everyone in the region. I hope there are diplomatic possibilities to de-escalate, but it seems those windows are closing.

Let's just say, I don't believe war is a cover for terrorism against any peoples, be it in the West or East, Arab or Caucasian.

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do you realize that nurses in hospital, civil servants workers are among people carrying this device? That not all, not even majority of Hizbollah personnel have no military responsibility whatsoever?

Terrorism definition is independent of whether there is ongoing war or not, lets not divert the subject with simple whataboutism.

We all know what happened, on both sides, including deaths of tens of thousands of civilians including thousands of palestinian children who did fuck nothing to anybody, just were born at bad place at bad time.

What would be enough kill ratio israeli : palestinian civilian, or even better israeli civilian : palestinian kid/baby that would satiate Israeli government to stop the war? Very conservative estimates put deaths of direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to around 500k, meaning its 500:3 ratio and factual defeat of US army to withdraw and cut losses. So thats the threshold of civilized western world? Israel already surpassed that long time ago.

They can't and won't win with Hamas and they know it, its exactly same situation as Taliban, ISIS etc. Regroup, strike back, stronger, smarter, better equipped, more motivated. Spiral of death can go on and on till there is nobody standing on neither side.

If I had to choose where the next nuclear detonation happens it would be for me 50:50 Ukraine : Israel, and this is how you get there.

Which they would probably agree to. Purists do not care for practical matters such arbitrating what would be the best course of action in order to have the less casualties because for them the only acceptable number of casualties is zero because any war and casualty is immoral.

I have sympathy for this kind of reasoning because it's been mine for a long time. There is something important for the preservation of the self in refusing all kinds of wrong in the world. The problem is that by refusing to engage with the world, they can affect nothing (and probably accept that, everybody should just stop being immoral, that's easy in their mind)

If you include his treatment of subjects of the British Raj, there’s plenty of folks that will agree with that labeling.

Pagers just simply have an address (called a Cap Code) to receive messages. It's like a mailbox number. A pager can be programmed with usually up to 4 Cap Codes at a time.

If I was speculating on what happened, I would bet that the pager had 3 Cap Code addresses programmed, the mailbox cap code the owner of the pager expected to have for receiving messages, a cap code that was the same programmed in all the pagers to that functioned normally to received messages, and then the 3rd cap code programmed in all the pagers that when receiving a specific message triggered the explosive.

The folks responsible simply sent a message to the 2nd cap code to get all the pagers to go off, presumably to get the targets to get the pagers out and look at them, and then immediately the trigger message next to the 3rd cap code to detonate the explosive.

I'd imagine a backup timer, with the ability to trigger early if required for strategic or tactical purposes.

I almost surprised this wasn't coordinated with (or saved for) an incursion into Libanon. That seems to be something Israel wants to do, and this would be a great way to disrupt the defense at the most critical moment.

It could be, but it would be very risky. These pagers would have been distributed months in advance. How could you possibly know the perfect time to set them off?

And since pagers are already receiving remote messages, it doesn't make sense to do it any other way.

Well, I'm asking again, what is your best idea then?

Face it - you'd just sit there and get slaughtered, right? Contemplating your morals and war conventions until every last citizen of your country has been butchered? Waiting for some imaginary court and international peacekeeping forces to come and help you, only to die waiting?

Those were thousands of targeted explosions, by the way. There are videos of bystanders, standing in close proximity to the explosions themselves and not getting hurt. Why are you being so flippant?