[carlosrg]

> runs contrary to Google's ethos -- the mantra "don't be evil" has long been at the heart of Google's principles

Thinking that the military of your own country is "evil" seems a bit puerile to me. Watching too many movies and TV shows can have that effect.

[peterwwillis]

For years we have known that US drone strikes can very accurately kill anonymous people - often civilians (such as women and children):

"Every independent investigation of the strikes has found far more civilian casualties than administration officials admit. Gradually, it has become clear that when operators in Nevada fire missiles into remote tribal territories on the other side of the world, they often do not know who they are killing, but are making an imperfect best guess." [1]

"Leaked military documents reveal that the vast majority of people killed have not been the intended targets, with approximately 13% of deaths being the intended targets, 81% being other "militants", and 6% being civilians." [2]

"strikes have killed 3,852 people, 476 of them civilians. But those counts, based on news accounts and some on-the-ground interviews, are considered very rough estimates" [1]

Not only that, we bomb inside of countries that are (sort of?) our allies, without informing them and without their consent:

"Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, has repeatedly demanded an end to the strikes, stating: "The use of drones is not only a continual violation of our territorial integrity but also detrimental to our resolve and efforts at eliminating terrorism from our country" [2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan

Yeah, I have no problem calling our military evil.

[wilsonnb]

Well, you should have a problem with calling them evil based on a few actions that you consider evil without taking all of the other things the US has done into account.

Doing one evil thing doesn't necessarily make someone evil. Doing a few evil things doesn't necessarily make someone evil either.

If a doctor who has saved thousands kills one person, are they evil? What if that person was a convicted child rapist? What if it was in self defense? What if killing them would save a thousand more? What if killing them would save 10,000 more but the doctor doesn't care about that and would have killed them anyways?

Deciding whether a single person is good or evil is a very complex process. Deciding whether a country or a military is good or evil is enormously more complex and needs to take a lot more into account that you just did.

[istjohn]

You seem to be suggesting that the fact of one's residency in a country should influence one's moral evaluation of that country, that there should be a different set of standards applied to one's own country than a foreign country. I believe that standards of good and evil should be applied uniformly to all nation states. If anything, one should hold one's own country to a higher standard since you have the most hope of influencing your own nation's behavior.

Arguably, it is precisely the inability to consider international conflict from a vantage point outside a nationalist worldview that is the root cause of all external wars.

[ggg9990]

It would be puerile for a Swedish person, far from it for an American. The fact that it’s the military of my own country has little to do with how evil it is or isn’t.

[vkou]

Watching too many movies and too much TV has the converse effect - for the most part, visual media is full of nationalistic ra-ra nonsense.

The US military (As have all other militaries that have done anything of note) has done some ridiculously evil things. The drone strike program isn't the worst of them by any means, but it's not its brightest moment, either.

[option_greek]

Because F16s are developed in USA and used only by US military ? /s

[briffle]

F16's are used in many countries. They were developed in the US, but many, many countries use them (some of our NATO partners since the beginning)

Since they were first developed, NATO partners: Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway Other European countries as soon as the mid-80's: Croatia, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania Middle east since the mid/late 80's: Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, UAE Africa: Morocco, Indonesia, Asia: Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand South America: Chile, Venezuela.

[option_greek]

My point exactly :) (check the /s = satire tag)

[astrodust]

/s = Sarcasm

[sincerely]

Why does the "evil"ness of a military have to do with whether it's your country or someone else's?

[dragonwriter]

> Thinking that the military of your own country is "evil" seems a bit puerile to me.

How true this is in a specific case depends on what that country’s military is doing at the time; categorically dismissing the idea that a nation's military can reasonably be seen as evil by a citizen seems more than a bit naive to me.