Stupidity In Many Forms

Conditions: Warm, Bright.


Defending The Undefendable

When Israel last invaded the Gaza strip there was an outcry that it was a disproportionate response, and that Israelis were killing too many civilians in their efforts to get the terrorists who lived among them. Recently, a series of accusations have come out in the media from Israeli soldiers telling of soldiers firing directly at civilians, with no regard for their safety. Other officers are now responding to these claims.

Officers are stepping forward, some at the urging of the top command, others on their own, offering numerous accounts of having held their fire out of concern for civilians, helping Palestinians in need and punishing improper soldier behavior.

“I’m not saying that nothing bad happened,” Bentzi Gruber, a colonel in the reserves and deputy commander of the armored division, said in an interview. “I heard about cases where people shot where they shouldn’t have shot and destroyed houses where they shouldn’t have destroyed houses. But the proportion and effort and directions we gave to our soldiers were entirely in the opposite direction.”

The accusations caused a furor here and abroad because they came on top of others that the civilian death toll was high and that soldiers took an unusually aggressive approach in Gaza.

A Colonel Herzl Halevy reported in a newspaper in January that:

“We saw a woman coming toward us,” he said then. “We shouted at her. We warned her a number of times not to get closer. We made hand motions. She did not stop. We shot her. When we examined her body we did not find a bomb belt.”

Israeli commanders defend such actions because they say they confronted armed women in Gaza as well as Hamas gunmen dressed as women and in other guises, like doctors.

“We had a woman run at us with a grenade in one hand and the Koran in the other,” Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister, head of the military’s education corps, said in an interview in which he displayed ethics kits distributed to all commanders. “What we know till now is that there was no systematic moral failure. There were not more than a few — a very few — events still being investigated.”

Col. Roi Elkabets, commander of an armored brigade told of occasions where fire was held. His troops saw “a woman, about 60 years old, walking with a white flag and six to eight children behind her and behind them was a Hamas fighter with his gun. We did not shoot him.”

- nytimes.com/

You know, it seems to me that for every story of people doing something bad there's another story of people doing something not-bad to try and back it up. Are we supposed to add them all up to get some kind of tally?

I think the overall question here is not about whether or not some soldier shot some people they should have, but rather whether an armed force was unleashed onto a population without proper justification or authority. Are we asking that question? No, instead we're quibbling over whether or not a dead person might have been smuggling a bomb under her dress. The disregard for life in general that leads to the creation of a battlefield is more important that the individual mistakes made by people on that battlefield. We end up arguing over details and we forget the more important theme.



Inevitableness

I've written about this before, but experts now believe fully-autonomous robot soldiers will be deployed onto battlefields in the next few years. These are distinguished from the current killer robots in that at the moment a killer robot requires a human to give the OK to shoot. But that delay is annoying future military planners, who want death delivered up as quick as computer processors can make it.

"The trend is clear: Warfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct," Ronald Arkin , a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta , wrote in a study commissioned by the Army .

"The pressure of an increasing battlefield tempo is forcing autonomy further and further toward the point of robots making that final, lethal decision," he predicted. "The time available to make the decision to shoot or not to shoot is becoming too short for remote humans to make intelligent informed decisions."

Autonomous armed robotic systems probably will be operating by 2020, according to John Pike , an expert on defense and intelligence matters and the director of the security Web site GlobalSecurity.org in Washington .

The obvious questions crowd in to be asked

At Georgia Tech, Arkin is finishing a three-year Army contract to find ways to ensure that robots are used in appropriate ways. His idea is an "ethical governor" computer system that would require robots to obey the internationally recognized laws of war and the U.S. military's rules of engagement.

"Robots must be constrained to adhere to the same laws as humans or they should not be permitted on the battlefield," Arkin wrote.

For example, a robot's computer "brain" would block it from aiming a missile at a hospital, church, cemetery or cultural landmark, even if enemy forces were clustered nearby. The presence of women or children also would spark a robotic no-no.

Arkin contends that a properly designed robot could behave with greater restraint than human soldiers in the heat of battle and cause fewer casualties.

"Robots can be built that do not exhibit fear, anger, frustration or revenge, and that ultimately behave in a more humane manner than even human beings in these harsh circumstances," he wrote.

- truthout.org/

And again we wonder at the spectacle of smart people being so stupid. I wonder if we can get Arkin to be the guinea pig in the first 'friend or foe' experiment. There's a scene from Robocop I've always wanted to see re-enacted.



An Hour For The Earth.

Well-intentioned idiots are gearing up their self-righteous cloaks today for the event designated as 'Earth Hour' where at 20:30 all around the world, for one hour, people turn their lights off and burn their houses down with dropped candles in an effort to save the planet. I really hate to link to FoxNews, but needs must, sometimes.

But Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and director of the Denmark-based think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre, said the event could actually increase emissions.

"When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight," Lomborg wrote in an op-ed in The Australian. "Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you're essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you'll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production."

- foxnews.com/

Of course the hour itself isn't really important, it's the message that's being sent out to the world. And what is that message? That if we don't turn off all our entertainment in the middle of prime time and sit in the dark, risking setting fire to the couch while we pollute our own homes, then the environment is doomed. I'm sorry, but this seems like a really stupid message. In fact, it seems more like a moment of hip trendiness than the dose of hard-edged practicality we really need if we're going to clean up the environment. You can sit in the dark if you want, but personally I'm going to turn on every light I have.


- Peace out