Here I exercise my option not to debate the ethics of warfare with someone who thinks the mass incineration of children is less fraught than the targeted killing of individual suspected terrorists.
I feel rather the same way about anyone who's comfortable just assuming the opposite; viz, that the mass incineration of children during at least semi-procedural wartime bombing is more fraught than obscure peacetime military action carried out for reasons that are themselves highly obscure to non-specialists. Said non-specialists who are at least theoretically supposed to have some involvement in the decision process in question. So, there you are.
I'm not even opposed to the idea of military drones, really. I just think you have a bad habit of responding to people who disagree with you by telling them that they're too stupid for you to talk to. Pity.
I think your reply misses the point. The children weren't targeted (although everyone knew they would be hit), while the terrorist might be targeted by the drone, but everyone knows they regularly hit non-combatants (weddings, kids etc) and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
At least everyone agrees WW2 was a war, how many places that drones operate in have actually got a declared war in progress?
Does it make you feel morally superior to reduce warfare to such facile terms? Maybe you should become a pacifist.
You haven't answered the question on the morality of bombing Peenemunde (the V2 construction facilities), over 700 Polish civilians were killed in one bombing alone. Do you have an answer?
I refuse to shy away from the moral complexities of warfare, but that doesn't mean I refuse to acknowledge that there are moral issues in warfare. There very much are. And right now our country is installing legal and formal precedents which are sincerely disquieting in that regard.
In regards to your quip, the phrase "individual suspected terrorists" should have about 10 metric fuck-tons of asterisks after it. Because "suspected terrorists" are pretty much anyone the administration designates as such. And "individual" is pretty much defined as "anyone within the blast radius of a hellfire missile when a 'terrorist' is chosen to be executed". Not that drone attacks are even the entirety of the problem. Go read up on the war we've been fighting in Yemen and in the horn of Africa for the past several years.
> You haven't answered the question on the morality of bombing Peenemunde (the V2 construction facilities), over 700 Polish civilians were killed in one bombing alone. Do you have an answer?
Was that ever a question? He was replying to your points.
The implication that I was drawing from the line of argumentation is that if you can find it moral to carpet bomb whole cities during WWII then you should be able to find a moral justification to bomb specific aggressors in 2013, especially given the insanely higher risk of collateral damage during WWII.
The converse would then apply: If you can't find it moral to ever have collateral damage occur in 2013 then you shouldn't be able to find it moral to have been done in WWII, as the atrocities during WWII were of horrifyingly higher orders of magnitude.
So the question wasn't for him; it was for you.
Even if "suspected terrorists" had the 10 metric fuck-tons of asterisks that you say should be there, there would still have been much more accurate planning going into each military operation in 2013 than there was in 1941-1945 (and probably by an order of magnitude). I'm presuming that you found at least most of those WWII bombing attacks could be justified as the grim price of war; what is the difference now? That would help better clarify your position.
