It was definitely Creech. I remember the spate of articles discussing how the officers (the USAF requires drones to be piloted by officers) were both struggling with the close up nature of drone strikes combined with fewer or even non-existent flight hours affecting promotions.

So far about 3,000 of them, including 160 children (the 3.00 includes more children than 160 but I'm singling that out).. in this war alone.

I promise you that you didn't kill 3,000+ IRGC members.

Did I ever claim they only killed innocent people?

Some searching led me to this report from an NGO called "AirWars" [1] which, in connection with The Guardian, reports that "at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes".

You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.

I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.

[1] https://airwars.org/tens-of-thousands-of-civilians-likely-ki...

Obama's department of defense classified every male between 16-65 hit by drone attacks as enemy combatant until proven otherwise...

So the war crimes are bipartisan.

And I write this as someone who likes Obama.

In Afghanistan, and presumably Iran as well, the US military defined all "military-aged males" (12-65 years) as "combatants". This makes children and old men killable. You could drone strike pretty much any guy you wanted and all you were doing was eliminating combatants.

An addition, again from Afghanistan, only 2% of drone strikes were against identified targets. The rest were targets of opportunity. So you make most of the male population of a country killable through the use of appropriate language, and then hit 98% of them because you think they might be thinking about doing something bad in the future.

I can see why this would mess with people's mental health when what they're doing to random civilians sinks in.

US military standard for "did we kill civilians" with drone attacks is "do these appear to be combat aged males, based on satellite photos".

It's monstrous.

Let's see. They were part of the US military, right? In just this war alone, they started by triple tapping an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, murdering nearly 200 little children.

And on the same day, they attacked a SPORTS STADIUM, completely vapourising a women's volleyball team who were in the midst of a game.

And that was just ... DAY ONE.

By now, we should be asking - if you're a member of the US military on active duty in an active war - prove that YOU DIDN'T kill a child, mother, handicapped person in a wheelchair, or a grandpa.

Truth hurts, doesn't it?

Yes, the US government is literally everywhere.

We sure do. They mostly work in federal government and government contracting corporations. There are multiple clearly documented repeated drone strikes on US citizens, even US citizen minors, who never were even indicted with a crime, that ended in assassination. Like the two intentional strikes it took to kill 16 year old US citizen from colorado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... . See also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix executive program in general.

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I admire Aaron Bushnell, but that page unironically uses phrases like "Satanic Talmudic supremacy"

Were all US soldiers in the Revolutionary War war criminals? What about the North in the Civil War? Or WWI/WWII?

Nearly every soldier in any war will have directly or indirectly killed an innocent civilian. Which ones are war crimes and which aren’t?

How do you decide and who gives you the authority to do so?

The author of that page appears to be a Holocaust denier[1]. Not exactly the example I would put forwards, especially if I want to make an unannealed appeal against Israeli war crimes.

[1]: A search for that name mostly brings up links to pages for SS apologia.

>someone defending their country

Can be used to justify anything.

"War crimes" is something of a shorthand for being involved in an aggressive war; they are a surprisingly minor influence on the discourse because they are small in comparison to the decision to go to war at all.

I think the more baby-steps approach to western cognitive dissonance is to at least get them to be consistent about when it is a good idea to go to war. I'm more than happy to get downvoted pointing out that killing 100s of thousands of Russians and welding them strategically to China was a terrible policy, uniting Asian manufacturing and resource giants is catastrophic for western power. But people were grumpy and didn't want to talk about realpolitik because the Russians are so evil.

Now we have the US attacking Persians in Persia for trying to govern Persia because the US sphere of influence covers the whole world and doing serious damage to the West's access to global oil markets and we have this muted and philosophical response from the powers that be. It isn't just immoral, it is also actively stupid - if we can tolerate this behaviour from the US, why can't we also tolerate Russia on a far smaller and easier to understand scale? How are all the sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine actually justified in the minds of the people making the decisions? It clearly isn't a moral calculation and it seems to be stupid strategy.

If we got some thoughtful and transparent thinkers in power there'd probably just be less wars, they seem to be the fast path to poverty and the upside is hard to spot. There are serious questions about why any of the major conflicts right now looked like a good idea to the people in Washington and wherever NATO is in Europe. Brussels I suppose. Can we try peace and prosperity as a strategy?

Hey is friendly fire a war crime?

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The US hasn't fought a just war since WW2 and even that is actually somewhat questionable

That's a well studied topic in military history/science called unit cohesion. The saying goes that morale gets the soldiers to the battlefield, cohesion is what keeps them there. In order to withstand the psychological horrors of combat, soldiers need that comradery otherwise they'll run off at the first chance they get. There needs to be some anchor keeping the soldier in the way of danger, whether that's social pressure or years of intense training together.

Brett Devereaux has talked about it multiple times on his blog in various different contexts (most recently two weeks ago)[1][2][3]:

[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/07/24/collections-pre-modern-armies-...

[2] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-...

[3] https://acoup.blog/tag/cohesion/

I was in the military and in my experience people that chose to go into war zones, it's optional, are fucked in the head and literally enjoy killing people, I've seen it a dozen times. They want to kill.

No one runs into machine gun fire to bring democracy to someone else I can assure you of that.

Not sure why you would construe this as rage bait. I am merely pointing out that by subtracting the actual theatre of war, the "act" of "being in war" is being divorced from actually "being in war". This is no less true than suggesting someone who lost weight by being knocked out cold, going into a coma, and being put on drip fluids for months only to wake up more svelte than when they got beaten up lost weight but wasn't on a weight loss program. Just because it is not pleasant to admit does not negate the fact that it is true.

As to the rest of your comment, everyone who signs up chooses their MOS, and those lacking the choice they want are totally allowed to not enlist in the first place in the U.S.; if there ever is a draft, this likely would not be one of the things those people would be drafted for first, either. If I recall, there is even a rather high signon "bonus" for this MOS, compared to most of the others (that may have changed in the years and years since I last looked though).

In short, noone should enter a military contract thinking you should "feel good" with the idea of killing, though let's be real, noone should be suggesting you should think you won't be expected to; anything but.

My point was, the U.S. and a number of other countries have gamified killing. Adding distance adds dehumanization. That is partly why it is done.

Avoiding any current affairs talk because I am disgusted by how crazy people sound; this stuff has been true though for decades.

The whole cyber thing in the post isn't even about drone careers it is about exploitation careers. But it is related, in a roundabout way. And both "careers" aim to put a remove between real life and the "job". Of course, I could make the argument that they have more in common than people think, but that would be a book not a comment on a thread.

If you haven't checked out Sisela Bok's book on violence and gaming it is a good read, incidentally.

You supplant your lack of knowledge in statistics with unfounded assumptions and overt bias.

The relevant metric here is number of deaths per size of the specified group and per time.

You compare to completely different numbers and confabulate entirely unconnected "explanations".

These deaths are most likely due to "housecleaning", as I said.

Has a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist ever evaluated you for paranoid schizophrenia?

The US intelligence community engaging in murdering suspected "weak links" in order to "send a message", "clean the house" etc. is a regularly recurring phenomenon.

The fiction, that intelligence community (among many other places in US government) was some harbor of angelic superior morality, capable of restraining themselves in spite of total lack of effective oversight is certainly "simple". That doesn't make it true.

Narrator: They could not.

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Can you think of a single person who has cured their mental health problem?

At the He-Man club of course. We all face our challenges with stoicism like Odysseus when his sailors got eaten.

rephrased for ease of interpretation - venting about a problem is nice just as stretching a muscle is nice. stretching doesn't fix the root cause of muscle soreness though, just as venting does nothing to fix the issue. emotionally re-reacting is likely to result in strengthening of existing associations, which is more likely to cause repetition of a problem scenario, as opposed to leading to scenario avoidance.

Nothing ever happens unless there's a paper to back it up

You can’t know that.

His life isn’t a double-blind randomised placebo controlled study.

There is no second instance of him to falsify your claim.

> “Women belong in the kitchen”

They never said anything remotely like that in their comment. You're actively lying about their words in addition to badly breaking the HN guidelines. You should re-read them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In all of my years messing with computers, I have met very few people who are as fluent with the technology and the terminology. There is virtually no one I know that I can talk to about the things I do. I do not work in IT. I do not know people in IT. I also do not go out of my way to find IT folks. For a while this bothered me a little.

On pondering this, I suppose everyone with a hobby has this same lacking. For that matter, anyone with a mind that contains unique thoughts has the the same lacking. A desire for comradery seems pretty universal.

That said, not being able to talk about it and not being allowed to talk about it is quite different!

> What people say about the US government being ahead of the commercially available technology curve is certainly true.

Is that what they say?

Thanks

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When you know you can't kill the message, kill the messenger.

This is the tactic used when journalist Gary Webb started reporting on the USA involvement with selling crack to Americans so they could fund Contra insurgents in Nicaragua.

They did this so well that other news organizations turned on the journalist.

I could easily imagine the USA not wanting to patch holes so they have access to the systems and these experts know this.

if you had TS/SCI and an interesting SAP you would not be saying this

Facts.

Source: me - TS/SCI, several interesting SAPs, contractually bound to not say a word about the details til death.

Thou shalt not kill is pretty straightforward.

Are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack?wprov...

If the activities were truly cool and impactful, and not illegal or unlawful as you suggest, wouldn’t it be possible that the suicide could be due to a culture of not speaking out and then left to deal with the after effect of guilt? A slanderous retort vs a different lens to review the events isn’t helpful

So we're to trust an anon supposed ex officer saying they're doing good things there despite all the clear evidence to the contrary?

I don't think these did. They'd also quit because they felt it was too much work, now that the cybersecurity situation had gone mad.

It’s definitely happening.

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories?f%...

Don’t mistake prepositioning for “not happening.” As you said: “cyber cold war” means there are a lot of incentives not to reveal capabilities or trigger escalation from your adversaries. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...

Although, that is changing as we continue to escalate. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/cisa-fbi-epa-and-us-go...

If you’re not convinced the threat is real and the cyber warfare is happening, I highly recommend checking out Nocole Perleoth’s To Catch a Thief. S1E7 is especially relevent: Everything Everywhere All at Once. https://www.rubrik.com/lp/to-catch-a-thief-podcast

Neither Norway nor the UK are in the EU.

And Russia is constantly attacking europe (EU and non-EU), in addition to its invasion of a European country.

Of the three adversaries you mention, and the additional one being the US technocratic administration, China is the least threatening to Europe.

This is essentially one article about criminals recruiting young people. Is Russia FSB (or even Russia)even mentioned?

I also believe the premise is true (why would it not, it's the logical thing for every nation state to do), but your research could be a bit deeper.

Just think how many ordinary people they have to randomly kill to keep it that way.

Yes, they only kill random fishermen in the Caribbean, foreign leaders get kidnapped and tried in kangaroo courts. Except Iranian leaders, those do get killed. But that's just the last 6 months.

Surely you've reached the conclusion by now that "resulting scandal" no longer steers policy, or even any noteworthy degree of public outrage.

> The US doesn't even kill foreign leaders. Our intelligence service doesn't have the skills or appetite

Did Pinochet knew that?

Some people really have the memory of a goldfish. Between 1982 and 2019, US has been involved in 350 coup attempts, of which 150 were successful. Some foreign leaders where killed by US proxies later.

And the cherry on top is the "petrol company" (of course, linked with Trump) that started to accumulate people and logistics to operate without license in Greenland, just yesterday.

Attempting the "Little Green Men take Crimea" trick twice.

And this is how NATO is backstabbed and killed, in the most 'Game of Thrones' style possible. Putin has educated Trump really well.

US does not seem to understand still how in danger is their former hegemonic position by the acts of this government. And those acts look more and more deliberated (even carefully designed) to hit USA in every possible vital organ.

Quick, someone tell Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It's a systemic issue, not due to one man.

What gets overlooked here is the US IC itself being a probable cause: the habit of "housecleaning" by killing individuals suspected to be possible (even only prospective) leaks of inconvenient information is very real.

The recent cluster of weird deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research has a similar pattern to it: a statistically highly unlikely density of "suicides, accidents & mishaps".

The assumption, those actions were "justified" somehow is entirely baseless: there is no transparency and no effective oversight. What is supposedly being kept secret there might simply be illegal corruption or embarrassing and inconvenient to those in power.

So have many others before him.

The only difference is, is that before him we had "Iraq has weapons for mass destruction! we must attack them, before they attack us, we're in danger!", and now there's "we're going in and we're taking the oil!".

So from "we can do whatever we want if we lie" turned into "we can do whatever we want", not really relevant to all the people killed.

But hey, some americans would say that "It's worth it" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP_VnVlFhXU

Especially in Russia...

All of the above, plus death threats.

Trump isn't the weakness. The weakness is the almost complete collapse of the checks and balances around the president. If those were in place Trump would have been in prison by the end of 2021 at the very latest.

The DOJ, the military, both houses, the AIPAC wing of the Democrats, and corporate media are all fully captured. So are "independent" organisations like the NRA.

The Supreme Court is mostly captured. The lower levels of the judiciary are still holding out, but have limited enforcement ability without the DOJ.

It's almost certainly just that Trump is a fundamentally fragile, insecure man. He has proven over and over that he will happily fellate (proverbially speaking) any man who says nice things about him, and at least refrain from assaulting most women who say nice things too.

Putin (and everyone else) knows this.

Idk maybe there is something nefarious but afaik Putin's always been cordial with Trump as well as let him do various investments in Russia. I'm not sure there's much reason for Trump to alienate his friend; if you've ever see Trump's staff meetings you'll know how much cordiality is important to him.

None. No vulnerability. The population and the RNC just voted for a known Russian asset for some reason.

I think Trump is just that naturally that stupid and always has been.

Epstein files?

He's just doing his best to make everybody switch to renewables!

Well yeah, probably -- during this self made crisis oil prices in the US are some of the most well controlled.

Destabilizing everywhere else is a potential step taken toward achieving continental superiority in certain regards.

( not a GOOD step, mind you)

> Is that why he bombed Iran and single-handedly caused a global energy crisis?

Yes. Oil price hurts China industrial capacity more than the US economy. Oil companies made a $93 billion profit amid the war [1]. The US is a net oil exporter, while China halved their oil imports [2].

ExxonMobil and Chevron are US-incorporated. TotalEnergies (French) BP (UK), Shell (UK) also have significant US-based ownership (~50%, ~25% and ~25% respectively), including BlackRock, Vanguard, mutual funds, and US pension funds.

> A shift of focus to “dominance of the American continent”?

1. Venezuela was under embargo and selling oil to China. The Nicolas Maduro hijack and the country's political realignment with US will have the double effect of negating oil to China and securing large nearby reserves.

2. Argentina has a Trump-aligned president, who is vocal about undermining the Mercosul agreement and is currently in diplomatic attrition with Brazil. Recently signed a $20 billion loan from FMI.

3. Paraguay signed a treaty for a US forward operation base in their territory. The Paraguay border is home to a large hydroelectric, a major power source for 3 countries: Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.

4. Colombia has a new Trump aligned president. It's a young president with no political background. The US State Department announced a $1 billion assistance upon his election for military investment.

5. Peru’s new president Keiko Fujimori is Trump-aligned.

6. Chile’s new president Jose Antonio Kast is Trump-aligned.

7. US retaliated against the prosecution of former Trump-aligned Brazil president for attempted coup by announcing an 50% emergency tariff (which didn't hold legally), then crafting a Section 301 investigation to justify a 25% tariff in July 2026.

8. US is giving asylum to the former president's son, who is vocal on social media about defending the US tariffs as retaliation, defends military intervention of the US in Brazil, as well as stating (but without proof) that Brazilian polls are rigged – not the one his father ran and won, apparently.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2026/aug...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1uxdx8p/chin...

And creating so much chaos afterwards that it becomes impossible to recover any of it

In what sense? Removing the embargo on russian oil? Inviting the gremlin from the kremlin to Alaska (of all places!) and rolling out the red carpet?

Does US know it ? Coz it certainly acts like one for most part of the war

Maybe the real reason that small sample sizes don't tell you anything is because there's tons of small samples in the world, and the particular one you're looking at has almost certainly been selected for unusualness.

It's a multiple comparison problem that you don't know is a multiple comparison problem because you yourself didn't do the comparisons. You just got the result of them.

I agree with you generally but a lot of professions that are well-paid and educated still have high rates. Dentists, for example, are 2x the general population

Yea that's why good commit logs are actually helpful for your own career lol. I always forget what I did last week so team retros I usually just pull out all my commits and summarize into a paragraph for others.

I too can't remember jack and get brain fog during work, yet it's odd because I can remember very specific things in some experiences before I started working. For example I can recall some contents from my analysis class despite not using any of it for basically all of my career. But I can't recall what my boss said yesterday if I don't write it down. I guess it comes to a personal idea of "importance" too, I can generally remember things I'm interested in. I can remember which port number my home lab server and router is plugged into my switch but I can't remember my work intranet URL and rely on bookmarks.

Well, I'm only 38 so alzheimers is unlikely. It does run in the family though

But no, my real worry is I'm going to wind up having to interview and talk about stuff I've done and I can't seem to remember any of it. That's a real problem and probably not good

Did you forget to report him, or was it squashed?

yeah, but you and i can't do much about what some institution is doing on a daily basis. we can, however, do a lot more about what we're doing on a daily basis -- i.e. not engaging with or spreading speculative bullshit / FUD.

there's enough bullshit for people to deal with in the world. why add to it?

I'm well aware of Anwar al-Awklaki. Lived in Yemen and was a recruiter for and a senior member of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group we are at war with, connected with a number of terrorist attacks against the west, as well as kidnappings and assassination plots. And thats kind of just scratching the surface.

He wasn't working at US Cyber Command in the US.

I'm assuming you understand the vast difference here. And that waging war against the US puts you on a different playing field.

Officials in the US government confirmed to reputable reporters that al-awlaki had been killed in a CIA drone strike almost immediately after it happened.[0] Speculating that the US government is secretly assassinating US citizens that are not members of a foreign terrorist organization that the government has been authorized by Congress to wage war against is a huge leap that requires justification

[0] https://abcnews.com/Blotter/anwar-al-awlaki-killed-officials...

Being that this is the internet I mistook your statement for saying that I was just calling this a conspiracy theory because I was on the opposite side of the politics of the people I was speaking ill of.

If that wasn't the case, I apologize for my misunderstanding.

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