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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Ex-Marine whose actions led to Mr. Neely's untimely demise should be charged to the full extent of the law?

If the Marine was in Afghanistan and blew up an entire family (ironically targeting a man working for a US-based aid company) including 7 children because he mistook buckets of water in their car for bombs - that's not a problem, nobody gets punished. US generals tried to lie about it until the media moved on, concealing their error.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/13/us-will-not-punish-military-over-afghanistan-drone-killing-of-civilians.html

People broadly recognize that there are errors made in wartime, especially when the US wants to look tough. On the macro scale, that's why the US was there for so long, because it was so embarrassing to admit they had no clue what was going on and no hope of achieving their nebulous, ill-defined goals. On the micro scale, they wanted to minimize the embarassment of getting attacked by ISIS during their ignominious withdrawal, so there would've been a lot of pressure to bomb some ISIS related target.

But our ex-Marine instead kills some useless homeless insane person who's a blight on everyone around him and this is a major problem? This is bizarro world where insane violent criminals get treated with 1000x the dignity of innocent families. If we can accept collateral damage in wasteful wars, we should accept collateral damage in maintaining basic standards of behaviour.

Alternately, some bleeding heart liberal would say 'stop bombing innocent families, don't kill unhoused people on the subway'

But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'

But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'

I can actually defend Neely in the context of your analogy from a right-wing perspective. Bombing Afghan aid workers and not giving a shit but handling Neely with kid gloves is right and proper because he's American and the Afghan aid worker isn't. One of our guys is worth a hundred foreigners, that's the whole point of being a nation with national in-group preference.

And all the people on the subway aren't Americans? What about the 7-year-old girl he tried to abduct? Or the 67 year old woman he punched?

Precisely because he's threatening Americans, he should be a higher priority target than some random Afghans (a country that is almost as far from the US as it is possible to get). A nationalist, in-group focused USA would sort out its problems at home before going out to wreak havoc in the Middle East and North Africa.

That's fair. I don't dispute that Neely should have been in jail already for his previous crimes against Americans.

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