Rex Kerr
2 min readMar 1, 2024

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(1) I don't think the technological capabilities exist to do this at the scale needed, but I would like to hear why you think otherwise. Assume that I can handle any level of technical detail that is relevant to making a compelling case. You've mentioned heat-sensing technology, but not the confusion matrix for detecting people, nor whether it can distinguish male noncombatants from combatants, nor how it operates in a chaotic battleground situation, nor how it operates when there are a lot of people around, nor whether it's available in large enough numbers at low enough cost so it could be the standard for what is being used, nor how that could be used to reduce casualties of Israeli soldiers who might not want to get within firing range of a Hamas stronghold until it's been hit by air support first. And so on.

I could easily imagine that Israel could be making better use of such technology and isn't because the government places a low value on avoiding Palestinian casualties. However, I don' see how it could possibly change the character of the war on its own. It could be part of a comprehensive more-humane strategy, but "just use the technology!" seems implausible. Again, willing to hear otherwise.

(2) You volunteered it immediately? You wrote your first article on the topic on November 2, and do not mention there that you believe that Israel can and should eliminate Hamas with advanced weaponry. Your second article on November 11 also fails to mention either the advanced weaponry or that you think it's reasonable for Israel to use it this way. You wrote more on November 12, 13, 14, 16, and 19--no mention of this even in the November 19 post which is specifically on how the Israeli government lies and would have been an absolutely perfect place to document how they could be effectively targeting Hamas alone but aren't.

You finally mentioned it on January 30 and got one thoughtful comment disputing the claims of what the technology can do from which spawned a long thoughtful discussion, and one angry trollish comment whose author didn't reply. You referred to it in less detail a couple other times and got no replies.

So in terms of how you present on Medium, this is simply wrong: you did not "volunteer it immediately"; it took you two and a half months. Secondly, on Medium, the only evidence of anyone ignoring it is one post.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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