This feels like moving the goalposts. The OP and the preceding comments are pretty clearly talking about the targeting mistake aspect of this incident, not the war itself. You're moving the discussion from the former to the latter to it easier to argue that US is in the wrong, but if the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands. Even if there's no deaths, you could still make the macroeconomic argument that any economic losses are impoverishing the Iranian people.
No, I am fine with parent's take. We treat children as absolutely innocent (which they are, regardless of the way anybody tries to spin this or ie Gaza), and killing children is extra heinous crime compared to killing adult, same with rape etc. Children rapist get extra special treatment in jails, often from other murderers and society is largely fine with that.
As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
>I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:
Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"
Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"
Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"
Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage. Otherwise every discussion about some aspect of [thing] just turns into a plebiscite about [thing].
The only reason Iranian bombs aren’t hitting America is because their range isn’t long enough. Iran-commanded forces (located in Iran, Lebanon, Yemen) have been targeting civilians for many years.
You believe that anyone who lives on stolen land is not a citizen and deserves to be bombed? Americans live on stolen land too, as does much of the rest of the world population.
If it was 1570, it would absolutely be valid to remove settlers from the Americas. If fact the Pueblo Revolt is considered to be one of the more successful and justified acts of indigenous resistance.
Ok, it sounds the principle here is if any land was stolen in the 20th century the people who live there now aren’t citizens (regardless if they are children or not) and deserve to be bombed? I hope nobody tells the balkans.
Crazy that saying 'all Israeli's and Israel supporters are fair targets to kill' (and later stated this includes children) is not just not dead, but not even downvoted here.
This is just your opinion. The tragedy here is that there are people with similar opinion and bombs at their disposal that feel complete impunity and go around murdering in the world
Also, remembe the CIA co-staged a coup in Iran in 1953. That's one fact, nor just opinion.
I suspect if the IRGC accidentally blew up a school next to a military base in Oklahoma, they would find it in them to condemn those who made such an innocent mistake.
That's all speculation. What we know is that the US agressed Iran without provocation and in the midst of negotiations and started by blowing up a school and not owning up to it. And now they have threatened multiple times with destroying the civilian energy infrastructure, which is a war crime.
Please ask yourself if there is true evil in the world. People who are willing to kill children on purpose, or maim them, or burn them with acid, or commit other bad things I wont get into.
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
> Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality
There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.
Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.
We (US) are definitely in Group A. We killed and are continuing to kill more innocent people (including children) than everyone else combined but are always hiding under “oh, we really good guys here, just shit happens while we are bombing around the world for decades for no particular reason until we eventually lose and leave”)
Evil is commiting atrocious acts for self-interest. This is a description of US foreign policy (not exclusively, of course). Killing 150 schoolchildren is unfortunately but a fraction of a drop in the bucket of atrocities committed by either the US or Israel.
No it isn't. You're assuming perfect information, when the reality is nowhere near as clear. I certainly believe that Iran killed a lot of protesters recently. Undoubtedly some of them were innocent. Some others were collaborators; Israel is well known to be engaged in a shadow war with Iran and to have infiltrated a large number of people within the Iranian security apparatus. I'm thus extremely skeptical of any specific claims around numbers for the foreseeable future.
The problem with this simplistic utilitarianism is that assumes a degree of omniscience that doesn't exist. You can excuse any atrocity by claiming it's an unavoidable by product of a high-minded end. Life rarely presents neat classic trolley problems, and even if it did there are many unknowns; for example, are you sacrificing the life of one saint to save five serial killers? Absent this information I'd opt to save one person, but would be doing so with the awareness that I might be making a very bad decision for which I'll have to take responsibility.
In this case, the trolley is in a whole other country. Unilaterally attacking it (while negotiations were ongoing) is regarded by most experts as a blatant violation of international law and that's the primary reason nominally allied countries are refusing to assist.
You're giving the regime far more of the benefit of the doubt than they deserve. Their crimes are well documented.
Aside from that, the risk of accidentally bombing a school is also an unknown quantity. So we're looking at "risk of leaving the regime in place" vs "risk of accidentally bombing kids". Feels plenty trolly-ish to me.
No matter how inept or corrupt the process, the fact is some bombs fell out of the sky and killed a bunch of unelected dictators who just weeks ago murdered thousands of their own countrymen. In my eye, this is an excellent precedent. If it means paying a few more dollars for gas, so be it.
The us has over 150 elementary schools on military bases. If you use a more colloquial definition of military base, many many national guard armories are on the same block as elementary schools or even right next to them.
Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school.
No. No childs life is worth some hypothetical regime change. There is no greater evil in this scenario than a hypothetical greater good attempts at justifying this.
The people that run hospitals, build safety devices, approve drugs, issue insurance, etc etc all do. I certainly hope the people that drop bombs do too.
Look up Value of a Statistical Life, Value of a Statistical Life Year, and Age Weighting.
> Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime.
It most absolutely is not and I struggle to believe you can build a valid argument that links bombing school children as necessary for the fall of Iran’s government.
How you win a war, especially one as lopsided as this invasion is, is as important as winning. I cannot so easily sleep at night knowing we are committing horrific atrocities during an invasion we chose to launch against a country thousands of miles away with zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Do you agree with the statement "No war has ever been worth the results."? If yes, then okay end of conversation. But if not then we need to talk about acceptable mistake rates and where this falls, because zero mistakes is not possible. Note that I am not defending the strike here, I'm saying that the criticism needs more depth.
I might not know your personal background, but I have a hard time imagining you come from a lineage that has experience the cost of one of those.
The list of today's remaining colonies is short enough[0] that it is worth considering whether decolonization was "an idea that reached its time" in the late 20th century ; and given that there are examples of peaceful revolutions (eg India and West Africa) it is worth asking whether more places could have undergone peaceful transitions, and whether the cost in human lives and atrocities born within a decade of war doesn't outweigh the cost of the colonial system dying by itself within the same order of magnitude of time.
But then again, I think you're veering us somewhat off-topic as I'd consider a "colonial freedom war" to be a revolution (the people overthrowing their overlord) which is quite different from the topic at hand here, war between nation-states.
Which part do you think is a strawman? Because one of the people that replied to me does appear to think that no war has ever been worth the results. It's a legitimate point of view, and that's why I asked if it was your point of view.
For the rest of this post I'm assuming it's not your point of view.
I'm very much not trying to strawman you, I'm trying to improve your argument. If any wars are considered "worth it, morally speaking", then single mistakes can't be enough to invalidate the war. We need to talk about how many mistakes happen and how they happen. We need to say how much is too much, and "zero mistakes" is not compatible with "some wars are worth it". The idea that we could have both in the real world is self-deception.
1. This isnt an invasion, just a bombing campaign.
2. Of course it would be better to not kill any kids, but thats just not how war works. Mistakes will be made, that doesnt mean eliminating the number one funder of terror in the world isnt worth it. Even if the next regime hates the US/israel just as much they will likely spend much less supporting terror groups because they know theyll just get bombed again.
3. Of course this is all if the bombing campaign actually worked. It didnt, and thats no surprise, which is why the whole thing is pretty clearly immoral imo.
> zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
The houthis harmed the US quite a bit by destroying American ships and harming global trade. In fact their actions were arguably far more harmful to the average american than any domestic terrorist attack could possibly be because of the economic impact that effected every single american.
First, this is completely untrue. Hamas and Hezbollah have been launching missiles at Israel literally nonstop for 20 years. The houithis have and will continue to launch missiles at US assets along the Bab al-Mandab Strait. All of these missiles came directly from the iranian regime. Those groups are an arm of the Iranian government
Thats not the point though. There is no reason for either party to respond proportionally in a war. Going to war against an equal weight class as idiocy, sun tzu figured that one out forever ago.
So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents? Doesnt make sense to me. Thats before we even get to the major economic damage their terrorist network has caused. The US morally must just sit back while Iran funds and arms the group that routinely shuts down global trade and costs americans billions?
> So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents?
israel has killed even more "untold innocent children and innocents", so you should expect to continue finding no global sympathy or solidarity for them as they, an aggressor, initiate a war of choice against someone else.
By your logic, israel has greater causus belli against themselves than iran. Yet we don't see israel warring against itself. The only conclusion is that israel doesn't actually care about kids being killed, and started this war for totally different reasons.
We literally just deployed 5000 troops to Iran after weeks of bombing. We are boots on the ground and our belligerent president literally calls it a war. It is disingenuous to bicker over whether we can call our attack an invasion. If it was happening to us we certainly would call it one.
Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. Especially when discussing bombing a school.
> Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics.
I was responding to whether the "invasion" could have been accomplished without killing the kids. I dont think that's realistic.
The separate question of whether it's worth it morally to topple the regime given kids will die I think is pretty simply yes. Iran's funding of terrorism kills and will continue to kill far more kids than died in this strike. Iran's funding of Hamas has been partially responsible for the terrible conditions Gazans are subject to. Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off. Same with Yemen, if Iranian funding is cut off conditions for the 15 million children there will improve. So yea for me personally Ive got no problem with a bombing campaign that will undoubtedly accidentally kill some civilians if it means the Iranian regime is toppled.
Killing children in an unprovoked attack to stop somebody else from potentially killing children in the future doesn't seem like a moral take to me, even if "someone else" killed more in the past or will in the future. In particular, because it actually sends the message that it's ok to kill children as long as you get what you want in the end. Not a great precedent. Perhaps that is the root of where your utilitarian morals diverge from some others' morals.
Unfortunately for everyone, now the US and israel killed a bunch of kids, and reinforced that precedent for others with these sorts of flimsy justifications, *and* everything will be the same or worse in Iran, especially for civilians. So lose-lose-lose.
> Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that [conditions in the Gaza region of Palestine] I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off.
We can already see the outcome of that in the West Bank region of Palestine: no hamas, yet israel still exercises ultimate control via violence, and keeps oppressing and killing Palestinians and taking or destroying their stuff with impunity, especially as of late.
There's no indication israel would be more generous to Palestinians in the Gaza region of Palestine if hamas wasn't there. Palestinians in Gaza see what israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank, and want no part of it. Who can blame them? It's sick.
Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth. If all the million kids in gaza got to live in conditions as good as the west bank kids get the bombing would be worth it for that alone.
> Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth.
'The brutal apartheid ongoing in the West Bank isn't as bad as the brutal genocide ongoing in Gaza' isn't the best flex for israel, especially since they're perpetrating both.
obviously before the latest wave of israel's genocide in Gaza, the oppression, control, and lack of freedom in the West Bank region of Palestine were worse than Gaza. Plus the West Bank still experiences israel imprisoning and killing Palestinian civilians and taking or destroying their land and stuff with impunity
the observant reader might notice that the common factor behind the misery in both regions of Palestine is not hamas, but israel
also, consider reading the first half of the post to which you responded – we were talking about the wisdom and morality of killing kids to achieve your objectives, and then also miserably failing to achieve your objectives. Your thoughts? Still worth killing the kids when it was for nothing?
Yes. "Weird" people are somewhat rare opportunity to build certain social skills.
I enjoy the challenge of finding creative ways to guide the discussion and understand their headspace for a little while. I am not even trying to control the level of weirdness, but just keep them talking and comfortable.
Unfortunately, most of the time they're not even weird people and it was just a weird first impression. They vent for like 3 minutes and then it gets boring again.
I mean, I do talk to them and I do have this skill, but it's a skill that I only ever seem to employ in talking to Uber drivers, so I'm not sure it's of any great benefit.
If anything the fact that most of them are immigrants puts the conversation on easy mode if you're a native speaker. They're doing twice the mental work you are so it's easy to orchestrate the conversation.
Not really transferrable to native-speaking workers. Like speaking to a barista is very different. Speaking to a construction worker different again.
That's interesting. Cultural differences and language barriers aren't what I would consider weird.
I was thinking of those people who have wild stories and/or mountains of narcissism to overcome. They have a fascinating worldview like an artist would if they had those ambitions.
They get bonus points in my book the more genuinely unhinged and confused they seem to be. They got that way by questioning things into absurdity and I don't mind listening.
Well there's a virtuous cycle for immigrants whereby if you integrate, you improve the language, you get a better job, and you integrate more, thus often ironing out any weirdness wrt to the host culture. Uber driver is pretty dead-end and isolated. You work constant hours but all your interactions tend to be very surface level.
I realize it is hard to do this, but please understand that other people have different perspectives on personal safety. For example, try and image how things might be different if you were a woman alone in an Uber with a driver who starts saying weird things.
"A slack that doesn't suck" doesn't exist, and whoever thinks Anthropic of all people are going to build that has no idea how this is going to work.
Slack has massive lock in due to cross-organization connections. The only way you're going to get people off slack is to build a 10x better mode for collaboration than river of shit chat, and while such models probably exist, you also have to convince people that they are better.
Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it.
It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and others. Why can't I run my own chat client that does what I want? Oh, because you gotta lock people in. Sucks.
It is impossible to believe the self-own on Google's messaging platforms. At one point, it seemed that all of my acquaintances used Google Talk. Then years of shutting down perfectly working applications, sometimes without any real user porting. There were even identically named products existing at the same time.
However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.
If you are on Google Workspace, just use chat.google.com: it's not bad. All it takes is just a benevolent dictator (or more realistically a bean counter) at work saying they don't want the company to pay for Slack in addition to Google Workspace.
the fact nobody wants to admit is that social is the opposite dimension of productivity
that’s why slack and teams are terrible product that try to combine both
What about a more general message-passing mailbox approach? This works really well in the Erlang/gen_server/gen_fsm world. (and in plenty of other contexts, but Erlang's OTP is still some of the best, simplest incarnation of these things)
“The problem with most programming languages is that they implement concurrency as libraries on top of sequential languages. Erlang is a concurrent language at the core; everything else is just a poor imitation implemented in libraries.” -Joe Armstrong
When I was younger I was lucky enough to live somewhere rural where I got into a couple of single car accidents that I walked away from. Now my ADHD hyper focus is super attentive when driving.
Who is accountable for the actions of the bot? It's not sentient, and this author is claiming zero accountability -- I just set it up and turned it loose bro, how is what it did next my fault?
That's not surprising. The point isn't to use it to regularly drive tall adults around back there. It's for when your family of four needs to take two of your kids' friends somewhere, that kind of thing. We probably use it once every couple of months, but it's super handy at those times, and folds away out of sight and mind the rest of the time.
Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?
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