Letters to the Editor
cardshark
Published Letters: 146 Editor's Choice: 18
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Nope, wrong again
[Read the article: Killing a nation, one airstrike at a time]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They are killing innocent people, they know they are killing innocent people, and they don't care. You are in effect saying that what they are doing is right because they could do so much worse.
Liar. I said no such thing, and implied no such thing.
You claimed civilians were being "targeted." Your words, not mine.
Please, no more rhetoric from anyone about how Israel doesn't target civilians. They do and they are.
Civilians are being hit, but not targeted. Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties, which are a byproduct of every war, and in fact were much higher before the precision weapons and morality of today.
In point of fact, it is infrastructure that is being targeted, and with advance warning to the civilians who may be caught in the crossfire.
You further say that:
Israel is knowlingly and intentionally killing civilians
Again, you state that it is Israel's intent to kill civilians, which is just a lie.
Yes, I said you have no moral compass, because you can't distinguish between targeting civilians and targeting infrastructure with advance warning to civilians.
You say:
Read this article, or any of the hundreds of others out there describing the bloodshed.
I did read the article. It made me sick to my stomach. But I put the blame where it belongs, on Hezbollah. They are the ones who continue to purposefully target civilians, and hide in civilian areas, using babies as human shields. They are the war criminals.
Even the author, who is on the ground, made no such allegation. You did. And now you're putting words in my mouth, and his.
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More dissembling
[Read the article: Killing a nation, one airstrike at a time]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Now, I would say that, considering the fact that Lebanon's civilian casualties are occuring at literally ten times that of Israel, it's rational to believe that this is intentional.
One thing doesn't follow from the other. First of all, to get a real sense of how many Jewish civilians have been killed in this war, you have to go back to 2000, when Israel pulled out of Lebanon, and the UN declared it had fulfilled it's obligation toward Lebanon entirely. After that point, any terrorist campaigns (there were several) by Hezbollah ceased having any justification whatsoever. But the article arrives at its 10/1 ratio by ignoring anything that happened until the day Israel started fighting back.
In any case the actual numbers of civilians killed proves the opposite of what you want, that Israel is taking care not to hit civilians.
And considering that everyone else has no evidence to support the notion that Hezbollah's killing of civilians is intentional but Israel's isn't, I don't see a compelling reason not believe that.
Oh, we have evidence, alright, but you continually ignore it. Israel has dropped leaflets on every area it has bombed, 24 hours in advance, to allow civilians to clear the area. This is not in dispute, it is a well known fact. That the article doesn't mention it is very revealing of the biased nature of the authorship. That you continually ignore it when people point it out to you shows that you will not listen to any contrary fact that puts the lie to your morally bankrupt claim.
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As a computer scientist
[Read the article: Taking the paper trail to Washington]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The moment I learned that electronic voting machines with no paper trail would be standard in elections was the same moment I knew that our democracy was on life support.
When I further learned that these machines would be engineered by private firms and the source code would be closed, well, I started to get just a little paranoid.
Every software engineer worth a damn knows that "security through obscurity" may as well be no security at all. This means, in layman's terms, a system cannot be made secure by merely keeping the software logic under lock and key.
In order for a system to be truly secure, it must be opened up to the public, to look for security problems. This seems illogical at first, but what we engineers understand is that the best way to achieve security is by having lots of eyes on it. It's why the most widely-used public encryption software is "open source" (meaning anyone can see the logic used to create the program that encrypts stuff).
It's also one of the many reasons that Microsoft Windows is full of security holes, and constantly must be patched patched patched for security problems, whereas many flavors of Linux are considered to be very secure. I'm oversimplifying here, but most of my colleagues would agree it's a fair characterization.
Furthermore, putting all the power of counting the votes into the hands of a few companies is just begging to be screwed, whether now, or sometime in the future.
Even further, even if the software was entirely perfect (which in many cases, is scientifically proven to be impossible to prove), unhackable, and no one is cheating by using social engineering, hardware is guaranteed to fail sometimes, leading to all sorts of problems that can't really be predicted or accounted for by anyone except NASA (they write some pretty great software, and have pulled of some amazing feats when faced with hardware failure).
If Bob Ney is telling the truth (he's not) when he says "Frankly, there wasn't a lot of discussion about the paper trail," it means they didn't ask a single competent independent scientist what they thought of the idea. And what does that say about the folks guarding our democracy?