4 ms·

Russia murders journalists, the US murders civilians who happen to be walking down the wrong street in Yemen, Iraq, Afghamistan or Pakistan. I really don't unde

Russia murders journalists, the US murders civilians who happen to be walking down the wrong street in Yemen, Iraq, Afghamistan or Pakistan. I really don't understand at all how you can claim one of those is morally superior to the other. Is there some cultural convention in the US that I don't understand whereby murdering (white) journalists is really really wrong and never possibly justifiable but murdering (arab) children is a perfectly acceptable part of the rough and tumble of geopolitics? Otherwise I don't understand your narrow focus on journalists. As an aside, it's not like the US never deliberately targets journalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Death_of_Tareq_Ayyoub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Death_of_Tareq_Ayyo...

tptacek 13y ago
Yeah, that sounds exactly the same as picking out Anna Politkovskaya and having her shot to death in the lobby of her apartment building. I've got no trouble making a distinction between killing someone because of a mistake or even because of negligence and killing someone deliberately because they are writing things that are inconvenient to you. Come to think of it, neither does the law; the law has made that distinction since the middle ages. It calls one of those "murder", and the other something else.
- kutakbash 13y ago
  Politkovskaya case is attributed to her activity in Chechnya, which falls under 'provincial oligarchs' rubric I mentioned upthread. That's pretty bad, but that's not the government still.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Both Politkovskaya and Litvenenko (of "death by polonium poisoning administered in London" fame) are most notorious for promoting the theory that the Russian FSB in general and Putin particularly were responsible for a series of apartment bombings in Russia that killed hundreds of people and formed the casus belli for the Chechen War. So, attributing their death to "Chechnya" is a little like attributing a hypothetical murder of Sy Hersh to the Iraqis. Shorter: no, I think you're wrong about this.
- anon1385 13y ago
  Don't hide behind the law, it won't help you here. If you set fire to a building with people inside and they are killed that is murder because any person knows what can happen when you set fire to a building full of people. Such it is with launching drone strikes on family homes or town streets or marketplaces or restaurants. It is murder. No sane person bombs a home without the expectation that anybody inside or nearby may be killed. Calling those deaths accidental is a sick joke. The law doesn't have a specific term for people who just have a callous indifference to the lives of others, but people throughout human history have used a lot of terms to describe such people. Today I will use the term 'scum'.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    We can't even agree on the meanings of words, so I think the prospects of us productively debating politics are dubious.

tptacek 13y ago

Yeah, that sounds exactly the same as picking out Anna Politkovskaya and having her shot to death in the lobby of her apartment building. I've got no trouble making a distinction between killing someone because of a mistake or even because of negligence and killing someone deliberately because they are writing things that are inconvenient to you. Come to think of it, neither does the law; the law has made that distinction since the middle ages. It calls one of those "murder", and the other something else.

kutakbash 13y ago
Politkovskaya case is attributed to her activity in Chechnya, which falls under 'provincial oligarchs' rubric I mentioned upthread. That's pretty bad, but that's not the government still.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Both Politkovskaya and Litvenenko (of "death by polonium poisoning administered in London" fame) are most notorious for promoting the theory that the Russian FSB in general and Putin particularly were responsible for a series of apartment bombings in Russia that killed hundreds of people and formed the casus belli for the Chechen War. So, attributing their death to "Chechnya" is a little like attributing a hypothetical murder of Sy Hersh to the Iraqis. Shorter: no, I think you're wrong about this.
anon1385 13y ago
Don't hide behind the law, it won't help you here. If you set fire to a building with people inside and they are killed that is murder because any person knows what can happen when you set fire to a building full of people. Such it is with launching drone strikes on family homes or town streets or marketplaces or restaurants. It is murder. No sane person bombs a home without the expectation that anybody inside or nearby may be killed. Calling those deaths accidental is a sick joke. The law doesn't have a specific term for people who just have a callous indifference to the lives of others, but people throughout human history have used a lot of terms to describe such people. Today I will use the term 'scum'.
- tptacek 13y ago
  We can't even agree on the meanings of words, so I think the prospects of us productively debating politics are dubious.