Human Rights Watch says drone strikes in Haiti have killed nearly 1,250 people
haitiantimes.com
haitiantimes.com
[0] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/haiti
Another example: Feminism? Only happened with women in the workforce. Women in the workforce? Only when the Industrial Revolution happened and the economy could support the roles. Industrial Revolution? Only happened when farming and trading got good enough that 90% of the population didn’t need to be farmers first. Very few moral enlightenments have ever actually happened absent economic preconditions, or would not be reversed if the conditions degraded.
That is not how it was. First, women were actually working and producing the whole time - but with much more limited options. It is not like they would twiddle thumbs bored prior industrial revolution.
And second, the politically succesfull feminism happened mostly with women who were middle class, not allowed to work and wanted more ambitious jobs.
They are a necessity to achieve freedom and stability.
The anti-freedom crowd always finds an excuse to disregard others' rights, liberty, and welfare, to impose what they want to do on others. They do it in the US too.
Plenty of places like Haiti just put civilians in the battleground between two equal and equally bad sides, the military and the insurgents. Both sides give the same excuse why they maim and murder civilians, which doesn't begin to address the damage to property and welfare.
In Iraq, for example, the US finally stabilized things when they adopted an effective and acceptable anti-insurgent strategy (led by David Petraeus): Protect the population.
Exactly the words used by the enemies of freedom: 'It's naive!' It's predictable.
Nobody said anything about easy. Murdering civilians is easy, I suppose, but not a route to a solution nor an acceptable means.
It's strange because the dominant religion in the west has as a fundamental tenet that people are inherently bad. But I digress...
Unless one is some form of deist who believes there is a top-tier authority who is active in bending the fate of the world, there is no reason to believe rights are natural or exist in any way absent the will of the powerful. It's a sad conclusion but the only one I can come up with after 50 trips around the sun.
And now that universal rights have been weakened, the freedom, prosperity, and safety of those countries is weakening.
> Some form of "people are inherently good, governments will spontaneously form and will be altruistic unless a bad minority does otherwise."
That is a strawperson. Certainly nobody says 'spontaneously', and democratic goverments are constructed carefully to prevent abuses of power.
Naivete is swallowing the bait of fascists, hook, line and sinker: That freedom is somehow impossible, that people are only evil (instead of a mix of good and bad, either of which we can embrace and strengthen), and we must have a strongman. How convenient for the wannabe dictator.
And it is 'natural' in the sense that it is valued ~~ universally. I can't establish objectively that it is valued everywhere, of course; I can establish that people en masse have valued it and fought for it all over the world, from Europe to South Asia to SE Asia to East Asia; in Africa, to all of the Americas.
And if you say, who are you or am I to tell them what they value? Who are the dictators? If we can't morally, then you agree they have a right to self-determination, or freedom.
Certainly I think all people should have say over how they are governed. Whether they use that say to give themselves freedom is another question.
> 'People here don't value freedom'
No one is saying this. The claim is that some people are willing to sacrifice one thing they value a little (freedom) for something they value more (safety).
I havent spent much time looking into the popular opinion about that trade off in Haiti, but to claim that they should never make it as you claim takes away their self determination. If your claim was that Haitans are by and large unhappy with the drone program that would be a different story, but to just say handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive
You're assuming what they value more. Also, without freedom there is little safety. Without freedom of speech, etc., you can't have a free election where people can have self-determination.
And without universal rights, if some voters can take rights from other voters, nobody is safe or has self-determination.
> handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive
You are naive to the age-old excuses of state murder and oppression. It's not only criminals (how do you even know who is a criminal?) and it's not going to stop. Do you think the mercenaries and others running the drones care? Do you think they won't murder people for their own benefit or through sheer recklessness and contempt for human life? There's a reason we have limited government and courts. That's why Haiti is in this current state - prior murderers who did the same. Murder is how they seized power and murder is how they kept it.
You'll notice that stable governments are not founded on extrajudicial state murder. That's not what Washington, Jefferson, etc. did.
In warfare, combatants are killed without trial but within the laws of warfare. Even there, extralegal killing is murder.
> Launched by Haitian law enforcement forces and private contractors working for Vectus Global between March 1, 2025, and Jan. 21, 2026, the strikes also injured at least 738 people, according to the organization’s report. At least 49 of the injured appeared to have no ties to gangs or other criminal groups.
The first paragraph made it sound like the majority were bystanders, while the second made it sound like it was 5%.
Maybe that is still unacceptable collateral damage, but it'd be nice if the article was more specific than "many" so we know what we are actually talking about here.
Mercenaries with drones, just great.
They deserve recognition for maintaining the standards of good journalism in what is, by any measure, a difficult era.
wow, such an insight, how didn't they think about that before?
yeah, complaining about 1200 killings, without considering the rape/killings/displacement that would happen in their absence by Viv Ansamn
to clarify: Erik Prince founded Blackwater, of the Nisour Square Massacre infamy in the GW Bush administration. He is deeply tied to Republican politics, mercenary work, and particularly the Trump administration. He is IPOing an autonomous lethal drone company, Swarmer, and his other company, Vectrus, is behind the events of this article.
Always that Black prefix, like something out of a bad action movie.
In the books its not just that sauron uses it for evil, he also can use it to turn anyone else that uses it evil.
However I heard that Thiels favourite book is the rewrite of LOTR from the perspective of Sauron, where Gandalf and the elves seek to destroy humanity and technology (at least that’s how I understood the gist, haven’t read it)
Btw I always wondered why I was seeing droves of Palantir swag on Stanford campus back in early 2010s. I wouldn’t wear something that has a 50%+ chance of being interpreted as evil.
I dont know what blackrock did to be evil. Seems like a pretty generic company that sells basically every type of stock.
* People who think a cabal of reptilian globalists control the world.
* People who think that capitalism is an emergent system that is destroying our culture, social cohesion, and environment.
All the worst companies seem to all be LOTR themed.
(btw, it’s everywhere, even the kaaba)
Also worth pointing out that, due to this "contractor" relationship, they never count towards official casualty figures. For example, if Iran were to kill 50k of them (I'm of course exaggerating to make a point), they wouldn't count towards US casualty figures, so it's also a way for the government to downplay the effects of foreign intervention to the general public.
This has happened throughout history in war, before even recorded history.
Russia is doing it right now with North Koreans. Also with Wagner Group, until they had their little uprising against Putin and then their plane happened to crash.
And sadly the infamy continued into the prior Trump administration. In 2020 Trump pardoned all four employees who had been convicted in 2014.
It is not largely capable of "thinking"
We are proactively destroying human society. And many people are rallying behind it VCs investing in killing machines.
Citizen's largely don't care, they are largely passive.
It sort of reminds me of Richard Feynman who claimed he was extremely depressed. After the use of the atomic bomb.
It was something very stupid for a so called genius to say.
You work on a mass murder tool, then complain that a mass murder tool you worked on was used for mass murder.
The people doing the most to actually improve material conditions in the third world are constantly poo-pooed by people who profit off these places remaining impoverished.
I think the NRxers are right here you need to go in there and crack skulls. Few will invest in long term skills if they aren't valuable. The simple fact: In these next 10 years Haiti will see more growth than the last 40 years, thanks in large part to this partnership.
It's a much larger deterrent
There certainly weren’t a lot fewer wars back when people had to physically stab each other with swords. Quite the opposite?
Wars of the gunpowder age have been far more bloody. Far more destructive to civilian life. Far more lasting damage to the environment.
Much less total death and dying as well, though. Battles were short and small scale until the Civil War (maybe the Napoleonic Wars prior? Debatable). The largest battles of history prior to the industrial revolution were in the thousands, 10s of thousands of people. Forces were usually broken and defeated or fled after brief engagements. Brutal in experience, but smaller in scale.
It was that perception of war as personal, intimate, chivalric, by old men that let to the peak atrocity period (PAP? Did I coin a term?) of ~1850-1950. WWI was really the first modern reckoning of industrialized, globalized war, that led to the staggering scale of suffering. Incomprehensible to the men that commanded it, as they were born and acculturated in pre-modern war era culture.
But then the epoch-defining tool of the atom came along, and war has gone back to smaller scale, focused, targeted, "precision".
So here we sit, straddling two eras again. Pre-drone and post drone. We have not fully reckoned with what the new era means. But it will come quickly, like most modern tool-culture cycles.
Yes brutal, for the defenders of the castles and fortified cities they conquered.
But again, very targeted at key sites so as to assert an Imperial-vassal relationship. Not to really to metamorph the populace, and run the day to day, which was left to local leadership.
Their point was to demonstratively subjugate for the purposes of control and tribute, not to kill, replace, or even miscegenate. They were the mob-bosses of Eurasia, not the crusaders or jihadis.
So I guess FARC didn't surrender? Where do you get this idea that American imperialism can't possibly work? And can I have some of what you're smoking?
humans have only had their hands on atomic bombs for 80 years. Its very hard to imagine it not being used in the next 1000 years.
The human that launched the missile is still responsible for it. Weapons that have autonomy are still given engagement parameters (e.g. limit target to certain geo bounds, engage between two certain timestamps). The humans that set those parameters and choose to deploy the weapon are responsible for what the autonomous weapon does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
1 - Immediately share all information and intel with the public so as to spare any judicial accountability. 2 - Quit. 3 - Prepare to go to jail for the rest of your life. This is profoundly evil.
TFA mentions residents are very scared. They live in a war zone.
Edit: I get the argument that it was a war zone anyway and people are also afraid of the gangs. But that comes from the fallacy of seeing the drone strikes as the only option. There are better ways to create order than creating even more chaos and hope it hits the right people sometimes.
No, I don't. Their experimentation is constrained by many forces.
For example, I do in fact want to live in a world where only the bad guys have child soldiers, use human shields, deliberately target civilians, and abuse prisoners of war.
If the other guys have an army of killer robots and you don't, you are going to die.
Attack drones can be as easy as strapping an off the shelf grenade to an off the shelf drone.
There will only be consequences for the losing side, if even then. See WW2. Options 1/2 are valid, option 3 should be "cope being evil."