In the US, mass child killings are tragedies. In Pakistan, mere bug splats

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Asguard, Dec 21, 2012.

  1. Asguard

    Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    I would love to see a response from Tiassa and other Americans here to this artical

     
    Asguard, Dec 21, 2012
    #1

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  3. Asguard

    Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    I'm a little surprised no one has a response to this, it's not from a wacky paper but rather from what I understand one of England's most respected papers
     
    Asguard, Dec 28, 2012
    #2

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  5. Tiassa

    Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Fish on Joe on Blood

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    Mr. Fish, December 21, 2012    ​

    It's a delicate issue. You're referring to a cognitive dissonance so buried in the American psyche that most people will have to be forcibly directed to look at the question.

    (Oh, wait ... are you a Muslim from India? Then how dare you post such anti-American bullshit! Oh, wait ... you're not. Carry on, then.)

    Seriously, though, it's not an easy question. The obvious first thought to mind is to point out that there is a difference of expectations between a tacit war zone and a place that is tacitly at peace.

    Dissecting that point, of course, is among the messiest of vivisections. Mind the splatter.
     
    Tiassa, Dec 28, 2012
    #3

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  7. Crunchy Cat

    Crunchy Cat F-in' *meow* baby!!! Valued Senior Member

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    It's likely that the lives of people in foreign countries aren't important to Americans.
     
    Crunchy Cat, Dec 28, 2012
    #4
  8. Beryl

    Beryl WWAD What Would Athelwulf Do? Registered Senior Member

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    My first thought when I read Obama's comments was of the drone attacks in Pakistan - especially with his "I react a parent" bit. I didn't know whether to laugh or scream.

    So, here's a big problem with America. There was all this stuff Bush did, including drone attacks, which a certain facet of society is/was against. Then along came Obama, and at first he seemed like a step in a completely different direction, and that same facet of society got all hopeful and a-twitter about him. And then he kept doing most of that stuff that they hated so much when Bush did it, but they're still all hopeful and a-twitter, because apparently admitting you're wrong is worse than keeping on supporting wrong. So basically, the folks who never cared still don't care, and the folks who used to care are too busy maintaining their fantasy world to do anything about the real one.

    There are plenty of exceptions of course - even Americans are individuals - but that's the basic state of things as far as I can see it.

    (Also, lets keep in mind that even the deaths of American children is apparently only a problem if it's a bunch in one place at one time.)
     
    Beryl, Jan 14, 2013
    #5
  9. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    It's morally acceptable to target terrorists, even if children are theoretically present, because those terrorists will kill many people, including children, and there is no other way to stop them. In the US, there was no threat from schoolchildren or anyone around them, so it's more of a tragedy that they were killed.
     
    spidergoat, Jan 14, 2013
    #6
  10. Beryl

    Beryl WWAD What Would Athelwulf Do? Registered Senior Member

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    The children killed in drone attacks were not just theoretically present. And they were probably nowhere near any terrorists.

    Terrorizing a populace does not stop terrorists. In fact, it tends to create them.
     
    Beryl, Jan 14, 2013
    #7
  11. billvon

    billvon Valued Senior Member

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    So if they had been next to a military base, their deaths would have been just fine?

    It is a tragedy any time innocent children (innocent people, actually) are killed, and we are doing a piss-poor job of preventing that where we can (i.e. in the course of our military actions.) It is not OK just because they have a different skin color, or they have bad guys down the block, or they don't have as much money, or they are farther away. They still have parents and sisters and brothers and friends, and their loss is no less important than the loss of children here due to violence.
     
    billvon, Jan 14, 2013
    #8
  12. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    It does stop the ones in charge. As long as we keep doing that, we limit the power of these organizations to carry out effective attacks. How do you know that we aren't teaching people not to fuck with the USA?

    Secondarily, the areas in which drone attacks occur in Pakistan tend to share their values. The children of terrorists tend to share their values. So a side effect of killing the children of terrorists may be less terrorists.



    Yes, in a sense. I would still object to it, but attacks on non-civilian targets are not terrorism.

    How do you know we are doing a poor job? Maybe this is the best job possible with present technology.
     
    spidergoat, Jan 14, 2013
    #9
  13. Beryl

    Beryl WWAD What Would Athelwulf Do? Registered Senior Member

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    And there we have it. A perfect justification for terrorism.
     
    Beryl, Jan 14, 2013
    #10
  14. billvon

    billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Terrorism is the use of terror to intimidate or coerce to achieve political objectives; it has nothing to do with military vs. civilian targets.

    Due to the thousands of children killed.

    ?? If a local military base was occasionally blowing up nearby US homes and schools with new bombs they are testing, what response is more reasonable?

    "Our guidance systems aren't great; that's the best job we can do, live with it"
    "We won't test bombs near schools and homes any more"
     
    billvon, Jan 14, 2013
    #11
  15. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think it's right to kill these children deliberately, but as a side effect of killing terrorists, yes, it's acceptable and it's not terrorism itself.
     
    spidergoat, Jan 14, 2013
    #12
  16. pjdude1219

    pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    spider doesn't exactly have a whole lot of respect for the lives of muslims no matter how young and innocent they may be. your dealing with a person who has flat out said he feels conquest is moral if you think you can more with the territory than the people their.
     
    pjdude1219, Jan 14, 2013
    #13
  17. pjdude1219

    pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    its causing fear its used to coerce it terrorism. just because you like it doesn't change that.
     
    pjdude1219, Jan 14, 2013
    #14
  18. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    But if we only wanted to cause fear, we could do that much more easily. The fear is just a side effect of killing terrorists, which we have an obligation to do.
     
    spidergoat, Jan 15, 2013
    #15
  19. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sorry, I was in California for the holidays so I didn't see this thread. I'm a pacifist so in general I'm opposed to the idea of killing people as a way to resolve disagreements, because the second-order effects are usually worse than what you were trying to solve in the first place.

    In this case, A) Pakistan is a Muslim country and the USA has not cared about the fate of Muslims since right after WWII when we adopted Israel as an honorary state, and B) Pakistan is hostile to India and we have always been India's ally. So we never expected Pakistanis to love America and therefore, theoretically, we didn't have much to lose in that region.

    But no matter how bad something is, it can always be made worse. Our attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan (so Backward Baby Bush didn't have to let us figure out that the Saudis were ultimately behind 9/11, his daddy's buddies in the energy industry) upset what little stability the Middle East had since the start of the Cold War when we and the Russians used that region as a chessboard and its people as pawns. As a result, Al Qaeda was forced to move its headquarters to Pakistan: a country that A) more-or-less hates the USA, B) is poorly governed, especially in the north where Al Qaeda set up shop, and C) has nuclear weapons. A terrorist's dream come true!

    We now have "good reason" for military attacks on Pakistan: it's full of goddamn America-hating terrorists. We actually made the situation in the Middle East much worse than it was! Now we have an excuse to bomb Pakistanis. And we can do it with drones so we can kill innocent civilians, who should never be targeted in war, while protecting our own soldiers, who should be legitimate targets in war. The world has turned upside-down.

    Pakistan is the second-largest Muslim country. (#1 Indonesia, #2 Pakistan, #3 India (although they're not a majority there) #4 Bangladesh, #5 Nigeria, #6 Iran, #7 Turkey, and the largest Muslim Arab country is #8 Egypt.) If we make a botch of this conflict with Pakistan, we could turn the entire Muslim world against us, if we haven't already.

    Now what was I saying about second-order effects?

    As for the victims being children, our politicians may be content with that, but our population is not. This is why they try to keep the drone attacks out of the news.

    Everyone feels bad when children die. Even people like me who never had children, have never associated with them, and don't even know how to relate to them. We all love children, it's an instinct in a pack-social species like ours. It's everybody's job to take care of the kids. We're hard-wired for it. So when a bunch of them all die at once, we all feel guilty. It's our fault. We were supposed to protect them and we failed. I know that's how I feel.

    And yes, I feel the same way about the dead children in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and everywhere else. I'm not a good elder of this tribe.

    The mass-murder of children in a Connecticut school, even though there were only 26 victims of whom six were adults, is already regarded as one of the worst tragedies in the USA, because the other twenty were children. I predict that this will be identified as the worst mass killing since 9/11, which took 3,000 victims.

    In 1927, a man murdered 38 elementary school children in Bath, Michigan. This was the deadliest mass murder at a school in U.S. history. Newtown is #2. And the killer wasn't a Muslim.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 15, 2013
    #16
  20. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    They aren't.

    I just love how you think Afghanistan was a stable anchor for the Middle East! All we had to do was leave Osama and his Taliban friends in the loving arms of their own friendly state and everything would have been OK? By the way, the fact that some of the 9/11 attackers were FROM Saudi Arabia doesn't make Saudi Arabia responsible for shit.
     
    spidergoat, Jan 15, 2013
    #17

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