I’ve said this before and no doubt will have to say it again - you drop a 500lb bomb on a civilian compound in the middle of an Afghan village and you fully intend to kill every man, woman and child in the blast radius.
You don’t get to cry ‘oops’ on every dead person apart from the ‘intended’ target.
That’s not a comment on the morality - I can envisage many situations where I’d give the order - but let’s call a spade a spade and not pretend these deaths are some sort of accident. They are not.
In these situations we care more about killing the target than not killing the rest but once that order to drop/fire is given, in the absence of magic weapons, we ‘intend’ to kill all of them.
Just like a suicide truck bomb aimed at a police station in Iraq intends to kill anyone in the area. No ‘oops’ there either.
I might phrase that a little differently and say you’re responsible for the deaths, because you knew they were going to be a consequence of the bombing, even if it was not your intent to kill everyone in the area. But it’s not an accident. It’s a tradeoff someone has decided is acceptable.
Ah, OK. Yeah, that happened to me once, and led to a somewhat unexpected level of scrutiny of my opinion, which hadn’t actually been written to be a cogent argument. I therefore have a bit more sympathy for monavis here (while still disagreeing to an extent with his/her opinion).
I don’t agree. This may be merely a theoretical argument, but the results of it, and the argument itself, is actually quite important. If we’re too slipshod with the terms we throw around, then it can lead people to think we’re slipshod with our other terms. If we call an evil person a coward when they might not be, then people who realise we might be wrong to call them a coward are going to start questioning whether we’re also wrong to call them evil. By showing that our judgement is flawed, people might think our judgement is flawed across the board.
So do heads of government, in general. And bin Laden’s at considerably more risk of being killed than many heads of government.
If a government has been attacked, or is helping a smaller government that has been attacked it is a whole different story. They are trying to save lives as much as possible. bin Laden is having people kill for his ideals, not his government, who he doesn’t seem to really care about. He isn’t trying to do any thing to his own government that wants the USA in there.
It seems to be the consenses that most people do not think of bin Laden as a coward and I would give them the right to think that way…to me any one who murders some one, or is responsible for a murder is a coward,(just as if one hired a hitman). bin Laden’s killings are not going to remove the USA from Saudi Arabia.
If we were as inhumane as bin Laden and other despots etc. We could drop an atomic bomb and wipe out the whole country…Our aim is to stop the killings. He may think he can thumb his nose at us, but it is only because we are a humane nation that have no intent to rule the world.
What the bloody fuck does Bin Laden’s relationship with his government have to do with this?
In any case, you’re wrong, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was just mounting raids or the like into Saudi this past month that ended up provoking Saudi airstrikes into Yemen.
American press may not cover that, but other English lang press does.
This leaves aside the bizarre assertion Allied forces are “save lives as much as possible.” I submit if you were on the end of those bombs such pious formulations and excuse making would feel rather less convincing.
“'e chopped of me leg he did, but ‘e didn’t mean it, was swingin’ 'is mighty great sword at the black night, nice bloke eh?”
Well, you’re using coward only as an empty term of abuse and not in any sense related to its fundamental English language meaning. That’s mere name calling.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa… Oh that is rich. Really.
Um, no. We couldn’t wipe out a whole country with one bomb. Nor could we kill Bin Laden with one because we don’t know where he is. And even trying would make us quite a bit worse than him. In fact, we’ve already killed far more innocent people than he did. So wrong on all counts.
Well, you’ve just dismissed the American revolution there too, so i’d tend to suggest you’d want to try again.
That seems like an odd definition to me, and far too much of a loose one.
Well, I believe the intent is to stop the killings of U.S. or allied people. There’s plenty of places in the world where killings occur that haven’t been dealt with in some way. It’s more “stop the killings, and also ensure the system in place is friendly to us”. Nevertheless, while I don’t deny that you could certainly call bin Laden many bad things, cowardice isn’t necessarily one of them.
If waging war in Irak was good (or even if it wasn’t), why weren’t Bush or Cheney there, gun in hand, instead of in Washington DC?
Leaders are rarely found on the front line, nowadays.
So, it’s not incoherent to tell others to blow themselves up, or charge into gunfire while not doing so yourself (or at least it hasn’t been perceived that way since the middle ages)
The way some have to call “cowards” people who willingly face death (certain death, even) for a purpose is just weird. :dubious: Actually non sentical given the meaning of the word “coward”
Sorry, but the intent of the bombing of Dresden (and other similar bombings) was precisely to kill as many as possible, and cause as much destruction as possible, organized in such a way as to maximize the damages (creation of a firestorm, second raid to kill firemen in action, etc…) and with the goal of terrorizing the population and so breaking its morale.
They were deliberate attacks against the civilian population, nothing to do with what is called nowadays “collateral damage”.
Hasan was troubled and a bit nuts. The army was well aware of it and they discussed ways to get rid of him. They shipped him to Ft. Hood because it has the largest program dealing with mental health and they were understaffed. They were hoping it would work out. Apparently it did not. Many organizations move their troubles rather than deal with them. The Catholic Church paid billions because of it.
Imagine for a moment someone who is 100% courageous and also wants to kill a lot of people. With me so far? Hypothesize someone who (a) isn’t cowardly, and (b) would like to kill lots of people.
Now figure he thinks he can kill a lot of unarmed people before he gets stopped, and thinks he’d probably kill fewer people before getting caught if he starts with, y’know, armed people. Let’s say he’s not afraid of getting shot; he simply wants to kill a lot of people. What would he do?
Yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing I want you to build your hypothesis around: figure he intends to kill lots and lots of people, and also figure that cowardice simply doesn’t enter into his calculations; he merely wants to kill a lot of people. In what ways can he improve the odds?
Like that, say. A shooter who’s somewhat cowardly might do likewise to improve his odds of avoiding stuff he fears, but never mind that now; given someone who (a) is not at all cowardly, but (b) wants to kill a lot of people, wouldn’t he pick unarmed targets and try to maximize his chances of escape solely to further his goal of killing lots of people?