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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   36910 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Put it this way: if you run over a gaggle of schoolchildren because you’re late for an important meeting and braking would slow you down, you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.

In practice, how much badness people put on such death varies wildly depending on their sympathies with the overall goal. Gaza, nuking Japan, bombing Dresden all have their sympathisers and their critics but they were deliberate killings.

Put it this way: if you run over a gaggle of schoolchildren because you’re late for an important meeting and braking would slow you down, you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.

This would more closely mirror the reality of the Israel-Palestine situation if the driver needed to be somewhere as a matter of life and death (disarming a missile aimed at their house/rescuing a kidnapped relative/make up your own), there was only a single route there, they'd loudly announced beforehand they would be taking this road, and yet Hamas members were hiding behind blind corners throwing children in front of the car as it approached.

In practice, how much badness people put on such death varies wildly depending on their sympathies with the overall goal.

This is true of anything.

Gaza, nuking Japan, bombing Dresden all have their sympathisers and their critics but they were deliberate killings.

Why are the civilian deaths in Gaza closer to the bombing of Dresden in your view than the rest of the civilian deaths caused by the Allied powers in WW2? And returning to your first point:

you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.

The implication of which seems to be some version of "this is close to as bad as intending to kill them" (otherwise I'm not sure what point you were making), why would accepting the deaths of German civilians in WW2 be meaningfully less deliberate than the bombing of Dresden? What would even morally distinguish the Allied and Axis forces?

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