>none of them would be advanced by bombing a girls school.

no shit... this is not proof of a mistake.

I don't think it was an intentional decision to target a school. If targetting schools was a goal, there would likely have been many more targetted.

It certainly seems that there was an intentional decision to disband departments in the military last year that were intended to confirm targets are appropriate before a strike (although I can't find a reference now). There's also a lot of reporting that they used AI to do the targetting selection; if so that was an intentional decision to allow for poor selection; especially since it doesn't appear there was validation of targets. There's a lot of intentional decisions to make comments declaring 'no stupid rules of engagement' and such.

I think it's most likely that the intentional decisions led to the situation where the targetting of a school would not be noticed until after the school was hit and international outcry was made, but that doesn't mean it was not a targetting mistake. You can certainly hold people accountable for the decisions that lead to the targetting of a school, at least in the court of public opinion since there's an accountability vacuum in washington DC lately.

There are many examples of targetting mistakes that are excusable. I don't think this is one of them; but that it is inexcusable and was the result of intentional decisions doesn't make it necessarily an intentional act and not a mistake.

	▲	vharuck 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>It certainly seems that there was an intentional decision to disband departments in the military last year that were intended to confirm targets are appropriate before a strike (although I can't find a reference now). On the Media recently interviewed somebody involved with that effort, and they discuss the bombing of the school. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/hegseths-p...

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gruez 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>this is not proof of a mistake.

The "proof" of the mistake is Hanlon's razor and the fact that the school was adjacent a military facility and the building itself used to be for military purposes.

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10xDev 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Too consistent, too frequent, too precise to be explained away as "stupid": https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/ce9mz0gl8z7o

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gruez 10 hours ago | parent [-]

From the description:

>Footage from Russian state broadcaster RT has captured the moment a missile lands just a few feet from where its reporter was broadcasting in southern Lebanon.

What's this supposed to be proof of? That because a bombing happened near a journalist, that he must have been intentionally targeted? Does the US even have capabilities to track journalists in Iran, of all places? Given that journalists are specifically going into war zones, what even is the expected amount of journalists to get bombed, from pure chance alone?

	▲	squibonpig 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Israel has a track record with the coincidentally anti-journalist ordinance. At some point you land a coin on heads twenty times and have to think maybe the coin is weighted.
	▲	fmajid 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That was a missile attack by Israeli forces, not US ones.

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watwut 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Hanlon's razor

At this point, Hanlon's razor should be considered a fallacy.

In fact, quite a lot of what looked like incompetence was malice. Intentional and proud malice. It does not mean there is no incompetence, but Hanlon's razor is no longer valid.

Second, army working group meant to ensure these mistakes wont happen was dismantled by Hegseth. All the while he framed such efforts as woke nonsense and praised lethality only. He was sending clear message about what matters to troops

The system was changed to allow and facilite errors like that.

	▲	scarecrowbob 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder if there is some kind of new law that we should be looking at drafting, in which we hold accountable folks who attribute bad actions to incompetence instead of malice despite the actors being explicitly malicious? I think that covers a lot of western media in all the wars the US has waged in my lifetime: it's always "a regrettable (but worthwhile) mistake" until it's a "horrific but unique war crime"... it's never "who the fuck said these vicious idiots could kill whoever they want and never face just and material consequences for their crimes". This shit certainly seems intentional. Maybe the folks who are attributing things to "incompetence" are just projecting their own incompetencies in interpreting the world, but at this point I suspect that they to are complicit in this malice.