naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
I don't fully agree with it, but there's an argument that society has physical limits to how moral it 'can' be at maximum: slavery went from common-place world-wide to detestable with automation and wage manpower (and having literally any other option with war slaves), lowering infant mortality and mass-production of household necessities made it possible for women to have a place outside of the home, so on. At the extreme end, sufficient outside stressors can drive people to cannibalism surprisingly quickly. That doesn't mean that these limits make people more moral, just that they can't be better.
One of the commonly-cited examples is that mass bombing campaigns could only fall out of military necessity with the development of computerized guided missiles. And this is pretty applicable for Gazans: their artillery not only can't be more precise, it's often not even precise enough to distinguish its own launcher site from its 'target'. Leaving that weapon aside requires leaving a tremendous tactical and strategic space.
There are equivalents examples for other laws of war, including some relevant for these attacks. There are a lot of indiscriminate Biblical atrocities, after all. But they fell out of favor before the New Testament; the technology that obviated them wasn't microchips, but roads. The closest I've seen to a tactical or strategic argument is this one (cw: advocacy of outright evil, absolutely not condoned), and that's damning with faint praise: it's the logic of a tantrum, not a military plan.
In this framework, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is ambivalent in the sense that you're accepting the risk to civilian lives as part of a military plan that has not other comparable options; less ambivalent, and more accepting the costs. Maybe there's something that required the baby-murdering rapists, or Hamas was so low on armed adults that they couldn't pick and choose (but it's not like America's dabbling with baby-murdering rapists found them able to turn it off when they went home!), but it looks more like -- at best! -- absolute indifference.
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Notes -
I don't fully agree with it, but there's an argument that society has physical limits to how moral it 'can' be at maximum: slavery went from common-place world-wide to detestable with automation and wage manpower (and having literally any other option with war slaves), lowering infant mortality and mass-production of household necessities made it possible for women to have a place outside of the home, so on. At the extreme end, sufficient outside stressors can drive people to cannibalism surprisingly quickly. That doesn't mean that these limits make people more moral, just that they can't be better.
One of the commonly-cited examples is that mass bombing campaigns could only fall out of military necessity with the development of computerized guided missiles. And this is pretty applicable for Gazans: their artillery not only can't be more precise, it's often not even precise enough to distinguish its own launcher site from its 'target'. Leaving that weapon aside requires leaving a tremendous tactical and strategic space.
There are equivalents examples for other laws of war, including some relevant for these attacks. There are a lot of indiscriminate Biblical atrocities, after all. But they fell out of favor before the New Testament; the technology that obviated them wasn't microchips, but roads. The closest I've seen to a tactical or strategic argument is this one (cw: advocacy of outright evil, absolutely not condoned), and that's damning with faint praise: it's the logic of a tantrum, not a military plan.
In this framework, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is ambivalent in the sense that you're accepting the risk to civilian lives as part of a military plan that has not other comparable options; less ambivalent, and more accepting the costs. Maybe there's something that required the baby-murdering rapists, or Hamas was so low on armed adults that they couldn't pick and choose (but it's not like America's dabbling with baby-murdering rapists found them able to turn it off when they went home!), but it looks more like -- at best! -- absolute indifference.
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