

Response: Call of Apathy: Advanced Warfighter - deedub
http://www.mediumdifficulty.com/2012/03/09/response-call-of-apathy-advanced-warfighter/

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mladenkovacevic
It's not just video games that desensitize us to the horrors of war. Turn to
any major network around 8-9pm on a weekday and you will see one of those CSI
shows where murder investigators walk around a terribly mangled body, crack
jokes and focus on some suspicious looking powder on the victim's collar
almost as if the burned, dismembered or scarred corpse shown in full view is
not even there. My 4 year old nephew is still awake at that time and I have to
be conscious of what channel is on TV.

I'm almost semi-convinced that they are training us all to become apathetic to
those images so we can go to war one day.

Ironically the networks then go and blur out Kate Winslet's nipples in
Leonardo Dicaprio's DRAWING when they screen Titanic. I guess murder is more
natural than sexuality :S

~~~
nuttendorfer
It's the complete opposite here in Austria, you can show body parts all you
want but violence will land you an 18+ rating very quickly.

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roc
> _"If we ever return to peacetime, will this technology be used against
> American citizens?"_

The follow-on to this line of thought is: for how long will the operators even
reasonably _know_ who they are actually using the technology against? Would a
drone pilot from, say, the US gulf coast have any ability to distinguish
between North Korea or Northern China? Or Iran and Afghanistan? Or a Taliban
compound in Afghanistan and a somewhat-remote domestic compound a la Ruby
Ridge?

To say nothing of what is possible when augmented reality overlays can turn
real-time video feeds into essentially fully-CG interpretations of the
battlefield and targets.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I guess I don't see where you're going with this. Let's say the government
wanted to trick a soldier into thinking he was killing a North Korean but he
was really killing a Chinese soldier. What goal would that serve? Presumably,
China would let the world know pretty fast what happened. Let's say the
soldier thinks it's Afghanistan but it's really Scottsdale, AZ ... It seems
like it would be hard to keep that a secret so why bother?

~~~
hrktb
the gp might be alluding to operations where it would be pretty hard to find
someone staff for. You'd need very motivated people to kill a journalist in
Scottsdale, but you could rely on any operator if you could make it look like
a terrorist in Afghanistan.

~~~
roc
Yeah, that was the gist of it.

Not that you could wage a full-scale war with deceived pilots never finding
out. But that you could quite likely staff an operation that would otherwise
be illegal/unconscionable, with soldiers who wouldn't even realize they were
party to it.

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dhx
Previous NH discussion of the original article:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3657026>

