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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

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Comparing a run-of-the-mill defense contractor to a serial rapist and murderer is certainly up there in the most unhinged justifications that I've seen on HN.

Yeah, one of them kills school kids for money. The other does it for the love of the game.

I don’t think the parent comment was trying to equate the two, but rather pushing the argument to its logical extreme to test show that the reasoning doesn’t hold consistently across cases. Whether they made a convincing argument is separate.

I literally was trying to equate the two.

Except pushing it to the logical extreme is what makes it wrong.

Nevermind that he literally was equating the two and explicitly says so.

Taking it to a logical extreme is good practice for thinking from first principles, but always pair it up with going to the logical extreme in the other direction. That might look something like: "would you really eat at a restaurant owned by a habitual jaywalker?".

Run-of-the-mill. Ya know, a normal perpetuator of war profiteering. I mean he's your standard enabler of civilian bombing. Simply an average propagandist. Just a regular guy!

I'm getting very tired of the redditification of HN. This place used to not be like this.

There is explicitly a rule against complaining about the redditification of HN.

your account is 5 months old, also that's not a rule.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

if you were around long enough, you would know that: A) thats not a rule B) that was added to the guidelines because people were complaining about article choices.

It's funny how retail versus wholesale death is seen so differently.

Kill a few dozen people with your own hands and people are (rightfully) horrified.

Run a business that enables the killing of orders of magnitude more people, and you can be a respected pillar of society.

Killing instantly becomes respectable if it's done legally and for profit.

I suggest you look into the perception of self defense. Saving yourself and others via killing compared to killing to commit a crime are perceived very differently.

That’s not it. There are plenty of industrialists who have killed far more than any serial killer just for profit and they don’t get anything like the opprobrium given to serial killers.

Wait, Ted Bundy was a defense contractor? I didn't know that.

He meant Anduril as the defense contractor.

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