Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkkm | Hacker News Reader

Everyone already knows what the words "bombing" and "shooting" mean, and it would be hard to find someone who considers war to be a good thing. The entire question is which dead children and whose misery we pay attention to.

This article doesn't help answer it. It's just a journalist trying to justify a more emotionally powerful and eye-catching form of journalism in a world where a huge number of people are already addicted to doomscrolling. If anything, we need mutual disarmament in the area of giving people an endless stream of depressing and enraging news in ever more optimized ways. I would treat this piece similarly to an oil industry worker explaining the benefits of using more fossil fuels, or an alcohol industry executive expounding on the positives of drinking.

View on HN

"it would be hard to find someone who considers war to be a good thing"

In the general population, yes.

However, Hamas certainly didn't believe so. Extremists of all kinds, the same, even in the US.

Putin didn't either, though, I guess, he must've changed his mind on that one since the whole thing didn't really go according to his plan.

Yevgeny Prigozhin certainly didn't believe war was bad, nor does Erik Prince.

I also have my doubts about the "defense" industry. There are certainly people in the (illegal) arms business who very much believe war is a good thing.

> The entire question is which dead children and whose misery we pay attention to.

It does.

> Images of dead children have great emotional and political power because most people in the world rightfully agree that their deaths are intolerable.

All of them. How is this not obvious?

> All of them. How is this not obvious?

Not sure if you are in agreement with the comment you are replying to or challenging it. If the latter - your stance does not address the question. All unjust deaths are tragic, we could have thick magazines published daily listing details of unjust deaths of children just in the US. So the question is what do we pay attention to? (Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.)

Not all deaths are unjust, and ergo, not all deaths are tragic.

We collectively believe child murder to be beyond the pale. I don’t think it’s rhetorical but I also don’t think it’s debatable. So, the essence of my comment is this, to be clear: if a child dies due to some consequence of society we’re capable of changing, we should be forced to look upon those images.

I agree with you in principle: if a person (don't think it's reasonable to limit this to children only) dies due to some consequence of society we can change, there is a shared responsibility on all of us to face this injustice. But this is wildly impractical, attention is a valuable and limited commodity. This whole thread is dedicated to that specific notion: neither the media, nor individually we can't collect, process and raise awareness of all unjust deaths. So then the question is, what is the process for choosing and reporting these injustices?

> if a child dies due to some consequence of society we’re capable of changing, we should be forced to look upon those images

Just to reiterate: this is impossible due to various unresolvable constraints.

> > most people in the world rightfully agree that their deaths are intolerable.

> All of them. How is this not obvious?

Counter-examples are staring in your face in real time. Some are using kids as human shields as we speak, because as far as they're concerned those kids go to heaven anyway (whereas they themselves go to heaven if they kill people of other faith, so why not give kids a favor too?)

I wish I could upvote you a hundred times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com