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Comment by knowaveragejoe | Hacker News Reader

Right, that's totally the intention of the program. Killing children explicitly furthers the US's political goals.

They know it happens, they refuse to change their actions. As far as I'm concerned, that is the moral equivalent of murdering children. In fact, the government itself might very well apply my logic if, say, a toy company realized there was a huge amount of lead in its baby pacifiers and didn't say anything. Certainly they didn't set out to kill babies, but their deliberate, knowing actions created the same outcome, so there is no real moral difference.

The point was brought up in context of trying to equate Russia's killing of journalists with the US's actions in some way. I'm not justifying the drone strikes in any way, instead pointing out that the comparison is totally invalid.

How is the comparison invalid? Both governments exhibit a terrible, immoral disregard for human life whenever it furthers their callous political goals. I really don't see how you can possibly say one is somehow worse than or incomparable with the other.

I can't believe this needs to be explained, but here we are. The difference is twofold: the journalists aren't potentially plotting terrorist attacks against the west, hiding among innocents because they know it will buy their cause the sort of empathy and political capital you're using as the basis of your claims here. The journalists killed in Russia were simply criticizing the power structure in Russia. Last time I checked, there is a near limitless amount of unabated criticism of the US government, both domestically and abroad.

Secondly, the collateral damage is not the goal of the drone strikes, in fact they use drones to reduce the amount of collateral damage(for reasons beyond precision munitions). If you run the numbers, the amount of collateral deaths are far lower than conventional airstrikes. The deaths of journalists is/was the explicit intent of the power structure in Russia because it furthers their political goals.

First, I don't accept that the people killed are necessarily plotting anything. If you blindly believe what the government tells you, then why not believe the Russian government when they say they don't kill anyone. Because they kill journalists of course, so they can't be trusted. Oh wait, but that's circular reasoning. How good is the intelligence? Is it as reliable as "Curveball" was (and we went to war based on that)? If so, then we are knowingly killing alot of innocent people, and not just the collateral damage, the targets themselves.

Second, terrorism is not an existential threat. In fact, there is a strong argument that the drone strikes actually increase the number of "terrorists" and make a successful strike against the US more likely, not less.

So the way I see it, Russia kills journalists who threaten the existing power structure, and the US kills more-or-less random people in order to bolster the existing power structure. Two, equally-disgusting, sides of the same coin.

...well they do do that. The intent is completely unclear, anyhow.

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