|
|
|
|
|
|
by meritt
2943 days ago
|
|
|
You didn't really provide an answer to why the USA keeps killing innocent people other than asserting the US military is designed to kill people (which is absolutely true) but I'm not seeing the reasoning why innocents are killed. Nearly everyone in the world agrees that innocents should not be killed, and I think it's fairly safe to assume the US military does not pride itself on the deaths of innocent civilians. Obama's administration misrepresented the drone program for its "surgical precision" and "ability with laser-like focus to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaida terrorist, while limiting damage to the tissue around it" [1]. Seems to me like a targeting issue. So I guess my question to you is: If the drone program was somehow 100% precise and it only affected people the US government deemed as "bad people", would you still be against it? If so there's no real point in our sub-discussion, as you're wanting Google to somehow shut down the drone program and I want Google to help reduce their false positive rate to zero. As you've said, neither of us (nor Google) has the power to shut down the program, so I'd rather at least try and support doing good by reducing the deaths of the innocent until some sort of miraculous shift in US politics can result in a more permanent shuttering of the program. And I don't see that happening as even Bernie Sanders supports the drone program [2]. It's here to stay whether people like it or not, so why not focus on making it more accurate. [1] https://www.npr.org/2012/05/01/151778804/john-brennan-delive... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/11/bernie-sande... |
|
|
Yes! Obviously! Goodness.
Look, civilised societies have many, many checks and balances to prevent government officials arbitrarily killing people they happen to dislike. This extends to forbidding the death penalty in all the countries where I've lived. This is very important, critical in fact.
The USA routinely classifies people as "bad" without any idea of who they are, what exactly they've done (if anything) and certainly without ever thinking about why those people might have gone "bad". And it never can whilst there are people whose salary is linked to killing people.
The basic disconnect here appears to be your belief that there is a finite supply of terrorists/bad people/whatever, generated via some natural process, and the USA needs to be able to take them out with lethal force and no trials, in foreign countries. If it spends enough time, money and skill on this problem it will eventually be done, and thus the goal is to avoid killing "not bad" people whilst ensuring the "bad" people are taken out.
Whereas my view, and the view of most people in the world according to opinion polls, is that the USA arbitrarily reclassifies people as "bad" in order to keep the drone strike programme filled with targets. The more budget the various drone controlling agencies have, the more targets there will be. The supply of "bad" people is therefore infinite and drone strikes will never end, until the day the budgets for them are zeroed out.