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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Murder for murder is the way that vendettas and feuds continue for decades, centuries, and even millenia. It's how one death turns into ten then a hundred then thousands then millions.

That's not how civilized people should approach violence or warfare, even when violence may be justified.

Look at the aftermath of WWII, for example, many of the most bitter enemies (such as the US and Japan) forged bonds of friendship and alliance and today live in peace with each other, contributing more towards each others' prosperity and happiness than anything else. That's how conflicts are truly ended, the chaos of the battlefield is merely a tool that allows you to get to a point where such things are possible, and if that opportunity is wasted then you have done little other than to perpetuate or create yet another vendetta.

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The difference is that the US, Japan, and Germany were civilized and had something to lose from continued war. Tribes in the mountains of Pakistan don't.

That quite a narrow definition of what it means to be civilized and what it means to understand other cultures. The tribes in mountains of Pakistan value their way of living, their religion, their ideologies, their decentralized governance, their barter economy, their local food production, their way of dressing and their way of dealing with internal feuds as much as you love your civilization. To claim that their ways are outdated or unfair to certain sections of their society is fine. But to claim that they have nothing to lose is so effing narrow sighted that I wonder if you being sarcastic.

And I say this being citizen of a country that has suffered from terrorism longer than most civilized countries and paid significantly higher costs.

So instead of continuing to fight them, we should give them more to lose.

We tried that in Egypt (just sending multi-billion checks every year). It wasn't exactly a resounding success.

So we should let Islamist terrorists continue launching missiles from schools?

This is the kind of question I would expect to see in a highschool debate club when a debater is losing the argument. It's an emotionally loaded red herring which is designed to derail discussion, not further it.

This is the kind of ad hominem attack used by middle school debaters to avoid refuting an argument.

lol. very good sir.

Is that what we're talking about? I thought we were talking about drone strikes which are targeted assassinations that, so far, have had considerable "collateral damage" (i.e. death of innocents).

The sad truth is that the American assassination campaign is little better than one that would be carried out using car bombs. Though had those methods been used it would be much easier to place in a more accurate moral context.

Do you imagine that drone strikes will stop them?

Other than that, I'd like to echo the obvious [citation needed]. Which terrorists are launching missiles from what schools at whom? And did someone actually authorize a drone strike on a school in retaliation?

I should think that it's pretty clear that if you blow up a school, you're probably evil no matter your reasoning. I'm not saying there never has been or will be a case to blow up a school, but you'd better be pretty damn sure.

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