[jonathanstrange]

Are you a Mexican? If not, would you also consider it okay if the military of your country conducted drone strikes and used thermobaric bombs with "acceptable level of collateral damage" for extrajudicial killings of fellow citizens in your own country?

I would find this totally unacceptable. I also find extrajudicial killings by drone strikes in other countries totally unacceptable but in my own country I'd consider such practices even worse.

[peteretep]

> If not, would you also consider it okay if the military of your country conducted drone strikes and used thermobaric bombs with "acceptable level of collateral damage" for extrajudicial killings of fellow citizens in your own country

It would entirely depend on the situation, but without doubt there are levels of crime and depravity I could find myself surrounded by where I'd welcome it. Duterte's extra-judicial killings are far from unpopular. Also: did occupied Western Europe want to be liberated, despite the inevitable collateral damage? I'd expect largely the answer was yes.

[jpmoral]

Anyone who thinks the extra-judicial killings are actually solving any problems in the Philippines is naive.

[peteretep]

Citation?

[jpmoral]

The burden of proof that problems are being solved is on you.

Police assertions that most violent crime in the Philippines is drug-induced/related wasn't even supported by their own data in 2016! Where's the data that shows illegal drug flows are actually being reduced and that such reductions are affecting crime rates? Where are the 'big fish' (ranking police officers, big businessmen and politicians) that were promised to be arrested/imprisoned/otherwise neutralised in 2016? Those who have been killed are either small-fry, cases of mistaken identity, or innocent bystanders.

[jonathanstrange]

Any introductory textbook on moral philosophy or philosophy of law should do.

[peteretep]

Ah, there I was thinking someone had data and not simply their opinion.

[jonathanstrange]

What do you know? I've studied this. The fact that you believe that moral insight can somehow be produced from data about the status quo tells me that you haven't.

[yetihehe]

If it was bombs against someone who is subverting whole justice system of a country - yes.

[lawlessone]

Turns out they live in the house next to you, oops..

[yetihehe]

I wouldn't want to live next to El Chapo and I didn't talk about typical neighbourhood drug dealer. It's about scale. There are many people I don't like, some of them even politicians but I wouldn't suggest harming them in any way.

[lawlessone]

I'm sorry ,it's just so damn easy for you to volunteer other peoples lives to be collateral damage in an extra judicial killing when you know statistically it won't be you.

[yetihehe]

If I had no other chance but to live near such criminals, I would try to suicide-bomb them, but that would probably be too hard and counter-productive because of layers of security with which those people surround. What would YOU do if you had to live near such criminals?

[comboy]

You many want to research a bit how these cartels work. Kids grow around down, they are part of the society around them and a central point of it. They couldn't survive any other way.

You have a kid that grew up thinking (not without a reason) that there's no better way than that do what the boss says. It will die to protect him. "Oh that kid is just a criminal, kill him!". In many cases, places where these cartels thrive are places where they locally can do better job than the government does.

I don't think that taking out the highest figure simply solves the problem. It wouldn't change much on the long run and on the short run highly increase the violence.

But more importantly, it seems extremely rare, that you could make a world a better place simply by killing somebody or a bunch of people. It's easy to think that, and a HN comment is too short to dive into that, but when you take time to think everything through, it seems far from obvious.

[pulisse]

> If I had no other chance but to live near such criminals, I would try to suicide-bomb them

Your confidence that you'd sacrifice yourself heroically in circumstances it's utterly certain you'll never find yourself in is admirable.

[lawlessone]

>What would YOU do if you had to live near such criminals?

Well not kill myself for a start...

[peteretep]

What makes my life special such that I should be allowed to not accidentally lose my life to save my country?

[unixhero]

Subverting the whole justice system... Hmm. That sounds comically familiar :)

[yetihehe]

Not to everyone, sadly. Could you tell us more?

[sakarisson]

I think humor comes from the fact that governments bombing people they don't like is subverting the justice system.

[yetihehe]

Or maybe it's a way to take someone out without risking lives of many of your own people. Bringing them to court could just be too hard. But yeah, it's subverting of justice process. We should just send them notices about court cases and they will come if they're respecting law...

[unixhero]

Sure I'll elaborate.

From the standpoint of words, about "subverting the whole justice system".

So here is why this is comical to me. On the one hand, the original commenter is right. An agent who can destabilize the entire justice and legal system of a country deserve be eliminated by extreme force - at least it would be nice to see that in Mexico, a country so decimated institutionally by the drug cartels. The country has an active insurgency and is not far off from a failed state.

Where does the comedy come in? Well the other side of this coin. What is is going on in the US? There is an active agent trying to undermine the justice system and the judiciary. For different reasons, but the result can be said to be comparable. It is the very president of the united states, Donald Trump!

That is precisely what the President Of The United States Donald Trump is doing. He is actively trying to undermine the FBI, firing James Comey, bullying the Secretary General in a weird way, manipulating evidence of the Muller investigation. Trump has even gone so far as to say that he will probably do what he can to manipulate and restrain the justice department. I guess also by - by proxy - appointing someone such as Kavenaugh as a judge for the court of supreme justice.

Maybe it's not comical...It's tragicomic. I don't know. Maybe we don't even have a word for this. Reddit calls it the "Witnessing events occurring in the Darkest Timeline." I tend to agree, this must be the darkest timeline.

For more information on the creation of the justice system and the FBI, I recommend watching the movie Hoover. Although probably brief, biased and Hollywood'ised - I like the way it presents the creation of the FBI. For more information about the charades of the sitting government in the US, watch the entirety of season 04 to season 05 of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

These are my views. I am not american, and beyond a degree in Political Science, I probably don't know enough to make an informed statement about this. One thing is certain, we set on the other side of the pond, gasping while watching th e events unfolding each and every week of the Trump administration.

[kolderman]

So how's the current approach working out for you?

[3131s]

Your idea is just to magnify the current approach, not change it.