[jstummbillig]

> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.

I would still say "what about a missile shield?".

If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.

If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.

[kennywinker]

> If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of

You’re imagining a world where this kind of tech is equally distributed. It’s not. Israel spends something like $30b/year in defense (in part due to ~$7b/year from the US). Gaza has something like $0.3b to spend. The consequence of that asymmetry is one of them has a missile shield, the other has more than 80,000 dead citizens, famine, and virtually no infrastructure left standing.

[FunnyUsername]

Gaza's "air defense" is hundreds of miles of tunnels, civilians just aren't allowed to shelter in them. Hamas having better technology wouldn't change the fact that they're not interested in protecting civilians.

[kennywinker]

I’m not going to defend hamas’ choices, but i think it’s disingenuous to say that they have the ability to protect the people of gaza. A few thousand fighters in tunnels is possible, but millions of civilians? And wouldn’t that be more of this “using human shields” stuff people like to point out so often?

[jstummbillig]

I am imagining a world, where cheaper access to defensive technology will make defense more viable. That's seems like it will simply be true directionally.

[wat10000]

> then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.

We get a really ripping novel from Iain M. Banks, at least.