Comment by AnarchismIsCool

Comment by AnarchismIsCool 10 months ago

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There are old stories of the Russians planting mines inside children's toys during some of the later cold war conflicts. This is starting to feel a bit like that. Nobody had any way of knowing who was holding those pagers when they sent that packet but they still distributed thousands of munitions throughout the populace and pressed the red button. Now there are probably at least a hundred or so still out there that haven't exploded and are just live UXO sitting in people's desk drawers.

I'd say it's pretty fucked.

WillPostForFood 10 months ago

It is morally fucked to compare trapping children's toys with trapping the communications devices of soldiers in a war.

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  • primroot 10 months ago

    Yes. Except there are credible reports of Israel also doing this in the past. "Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others." https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/ https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/227779/Mariam%252C_res...

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  • hypeatei 10 months ago

    So you can guarantee every single pager went to a solider of war? By that logic, soldiers in the Ukraine war also use cellphones and drones so it's A-OKAY to implant bombs in those products too?

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    • shmatt 10 months ago

      These weren’t sold at a Best Buy.

      They were purchased by a known terrorist organizations that any westerner would go to jail for having a financial relationship with .

      The types of people they deal with to buy anything at all - including black market weapons and machinery - are dubious

      The US does these exact same things to infiltrate Mexican cartels

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    • jojobas 10 months ago

      There are acceptable levels of collateral damage.

      You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it).

      They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play.

      And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.

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      • loceng 10 months ago

        You've been victim of what's called manufactured consent.

        Why hasn't Israel allowed any investigations in Gaza, not showing evidence they're using to obliterate practically all of Palestine now, not allowing foreign journalists in either to document things?

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    • golol 10 months ago

      Even if up to 30% of casualties were civilian this would still be quite a surgical strike in my opinion. At 50% I would not say so anymore. Nobody knows yet anyways.

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    • walrushunter 10 months ago

      How could I possibly personally guarantee that?

      If your standard for engaging in military action is that they must be able to prove to you personally that their target is really a militant, you are completely delusional.

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primroot 10 months ago

"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others." https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/

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EGreg 10 months ago

[flagged]

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  • Aeolun 10 months ago

    It's a bit silly to think the Ukrainians would do something like this, because any such thing would instantly lose them the war as all western support is withdrawn.

    Russia meanwhile... they just seem like they want to see the world burn. Given the fact they're fighting using convicted criminals, it doesn't seem all that far fetched.

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    • anavat 10 months ago

      Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know.

      There were multiple cases of Ukrainians doing something evil or borderline evil that were swept under the rug. One of the recent examples is the cassette munition explosion over a beach in Sevastopol, which killed few children and wounded a hundred of people. I stopped following the war closely but it got my attention because that's my home town. And in this case I even agree that the rocket wasn't specifically targeting the beach (that would be stupid), it was likely targeting the nearby airbase; but that's not the point.The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.

      There are multiple high-quality videos of the explosion recorded from different angles. On Reddit, a high-quality video of an even like this, surreal and frightening, would otherwise have been upvoted to skies. But not when it puts Ukrainians in bad light! One the next day, as a random Reddit user, you'd never even know about this event (I wonder how many people know about this at all).

      And again, this is just one example. I can probably collect few hundreds of cases likes this over the first two years of the war, where as a Western media consumer you would never know about something that could potentially change your opinion on the conflict. And just like this, you're being manipulated. Of course, so are the Russians who solely rely on Russian news sources. The only way to know the truth is to follow both sides closely, especially to what each side hides and silences. You'd be surprised.

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      • DecoySalamander 10 months ago

        Why would that specific video be up-voted into the skies? It's just another piece of misery porn and we had at least 2 years of that on almost daily basis at that point.

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      • aguaviva 10 months ago

        The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.

        Except it doesn't. Stuff like this gets reported all the time (for exactly what it is), also when Ukrainians do it. Like the EW-intercepted drone that hit that apartment outside Moscow, killing (according to local reports) someone inside. Even RFE/RL reported it.

        Not every single incident of course -- but they do get reported, very frequently.

        People tend not to dwell on it, of course -- because they know these things are bound to happen to some degree (and anyone with more than a completely casual understanding of WW II knows that inadvertent civilian casualties, even in allied countries, were extremely high). And that there are far too many perfectly deliberate atrocities happening, and at far greater scale (and except for a few isolated cases, all coming not so coincidentally from one side). And because they understand the far bigger point, which is that at the end of the day, the war (and all the suffering that will be required to end it) is Putin's fault anyway.

        But that's very different from the simple matter of these events being "silenced". Because plainly they're not. The reason they don't get more column inches or newsroom chatter is because, by any level-headed analysis -- they just don't deserve any.

        And attempting to describe the state of affairs that way, when clearly it isn't, is well -- manipulative.

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      • Aeolun 10 months ago

        > Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know

        I'm not inclined to believe that, but even so Russia would scream it off the rooftops if there were the slightest chance that it would affect anything. Unfortunately it'd be lost in the flood of lies that they spout daily. At least western media seems to be mostly silent on things they can't be at least marginally truthful on (presumably because they have no need to be, I guess media in Ukraine is a bit more biased).

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    • yonaguska 10 months ago

      [flagged]

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      • Aeolun 10 months ago

        I think the one thing that I think completely turns me off this logic is that it’s only proponents seem to be the ones that feel like it’s fine for Russia to keep what it’s unlawfully taken.

        Sure, there’s a bunch of drone footage of Ukraine dropping shit on barely moving Russian soldiers, but I’m not sure if that’s an indictment of Russia or Ukraine.

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    • EGreg 10 months ago

      [flagged]

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      • aguaviva 10 months ago

        which has now escalated into 1 million dead in Ukraine

        So mere hours after appearing in the WSJ, "1M are now dead or injured (but actually about 80k Ukrainian, 200k Russian dead)"[0] is being misquoted as simply "1M dead", and not so coincidentally in tandem with another misconception (that gets repeated on HN almost daily it seems):

        when it could have been resolved w Minsk Accords or anything negotiated in Normandy or Turkey since then.

        "Could have been resolved", that is, by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time, if not then some, and other non-viable concessions (with no guarantees that they would even work to stop him from simply grabbing more land and/or just keep bombing Ukrainian cities whenever it might suit his fancy):

        [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41568861

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      • Aeolun 10 months ago

        I never thought I’d say this, but there is a distinction between neo-nazis and criminals/murderers.

        The first have the potential to do bad, the second have proven beyond a doubt that they’re evil.

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