As I wrote before, a drone strike in a Hollywood script is 100% certain/accurate. In real life it is not 100% certain/accurate. I don't know why you don't understand this. Oni asks, what do you do when the missile murders a dozen children but misses the target? (Rahvin, as much as you are shaking your head about my responses, I am shaking my head about your mindset. We agree so broadly on so many issues, I remain incredulous that we are so far apart on this)
What's the alternative?
I don't claim that a drone strike is a
good option. I say that I see this as a hypothetical circumstance where it may provide the
least bad option.
Remember, my one and only goal is the net reduction of death and suffering. It doesn't matter what that entails. I want to choose the course of action that results in the absolute least death and suffering that is practically available. If that means a drone strike, then I would support a drone strike. If it means something else, then I would choose something else.
But all actions have a chance to fail, dronester, not just drone strikes. What has the
best chance to succeed with the
fewest deaths?
I tried to group war criminals justifications to show how morally bankrupt their actions were in taking lives to reach their goals. You thought a dozen childen lives were expendable, Eisenhower thought 100,000(?) children were expandable, Albright thought 500,000 children were expendable, Hitler thought millions of children were expendable. As Oni's post mocked, what criteria do you use to justify X number of children murdered and what happens when things don't work out as hoped?
I don't consider anyone expendable. Not even the killers themselves. Even terrorists have friends and families to miss them, even murderers are people.
But a consistent valuation of human life means that we must choose our actions based on causing the least amount of death and suffering. I agree that "diabolical choices" rarely occur in real life, but sometimes we do have to choose to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many. We do it with disease quarantine procedures, for an example - if there were an outbreak of Ebola, those afflicted would immediately be quarantined; the few would be sacrificed to save the many...even if some were children, because Ebola cannot currently be cured. Sometimes a soldier will throw himself on a grenade, sacrificing himself to save his compatriots.
It's terrible and awful, but sometimes the path of
least death and suffering still includes
some death and suffering. We shouldn;t be happy to make such choices, but outrage against the reality of a situation isn't helpful and doesn't save a single life.
I use a very simple criteria, dronester, in deciding what actions (drone attacks or otherwise) that I do or do not support: which feasible option is most likely to result in the best net reduction in death and suffering among all alternatives?
To be convinced
not to support a given course of action (including a drone strike) all that is required is to show a feasible alternative that has a high probability of resulting in less death and suffering.
The above is really the key of all of my argument regarding military actions of all sorts, including drone strikes. If I see it as a net reduction in death and suffering as compared to feasible alternatives, I support it. If feasible alternatives exist that cause
less death and suffering, I support those alternatives.
Here is your answer: Because with hindsight we would be "certain of the results", of course yes. But you agree that time-traveling assassination is Hollywood fiction, right?
Certainly; but given that
no action we can possibly take will be absolutely certain to have the results we imagine, why would a drone assassination be different in that regard than anything else?
Pointing out that certainty is impossible is not a useful aruemtn, because nothing is ever certain. We
can, however, establish varyin degrees of probability - some predictions are more likely to be accurate than others, even though we can't be absolutely sure.
If you want to debate the probability of success, then we need to discuss the
reasons that a given option may succeed or fail, and judge the relative likelihood of each. A mission with a 20% chance of failure is different from a mission with a 70% chance of failure.
Yes, I remain outraged that you would consider the senseless murder of innocent lives.
It's not senseless if there is, in fact a purpose. It's not murder if those innocent lives are not intended to be killed. Civilians die in military actions - it's a fact of warfare. The fact that it's terrible and regrettable doesn't make it any less a fact...and sometimes
many can be saved by sacrificing
few.
In a long and detailed response that very well addressed MANY of your wrong points, I clearly indicated TWO MAJOR POINTS of my argument. TWICE. You've never responded to MY two major points. Even after Mod and Caffeine both intervened you still clung to your wrongheaded response. What ticks me off is when someone hypocritically claims I am doing the very thing they just done. Which leads me to . . .
Can you point me to the post, or repeat those "MAJOR POINTS" here? If I missed or ignored them, I'll take another look. I know I'm quite guilty of posting walls of text, yet occasionally I can become distracted and miss a portion of a post I'm responding to if it's long. Most of my posting is done at work.
You have no credibility advising ME about contentless outrage after your tantrums in the "Romney the Bully" thread.
Tells you what, you mind your Ps and Qs and I'll mind mine. As we both know, we are more often on the same side than opponents, this should encourage us to be civil. Review the fecal matter thrown at me on this thread, I think I am doing pretty good at holding my tongue, . . . errr, keyboard.
My posts in that thread, while some did in fact become far more emotionally heated than I would have liked,
did contain content and argument, not simply outrage.
What I'm seeing in this thread, dronester, is a lot of "but that's murder!" and not very much actual discussion of what the options actually are or reasoning behind which is the best or at least the least bad.
For example, when you said this a few paragraphs ago:
quote:
As I wrote before, a drone strike in a Hollywood script is 100% certain/accurate. In real life it is not 100% certain/accurate. I don't know why you don't understand this. Oni asks, what do you do when the missile murders a dozen children but misses the target?
What you have communicated is essentially "your moral reasoning confuses me, real life is not certain, what about murdering children?"
What you're
responding to is a hypothetical situation involving tryin to choose a course of action that would cause the absilute least death and suffering, given that an armed surveillance drone has actually found Joseph Kony. Your response did not propose any alternatives. Your response ignored the fact that inaction is, itself, an action that murders children in even greater numbers. Your response conveyed your outrage, but did not actual form a rebuttal or argument of any kind.
That's what I'd
like to see. Don't just tell me that killing kids is bad - we
agree on that, there's no reason to rehash it a dozen times. Instead, help me find the option that results in the fewest dead kids. I don't care what it is - it's not like I'm emotionally invested in supporting drone strikes. I'm emotionally invested in saving as many lives as possible, and I'm willing to
consider a drone strike in that equation.
C'mon Rahvin. Where do I begin, this is just dumb verbal acrobatics.
No, it's really not. In the real world, military force is sometimes not merely justified, but necessary. Whenever military force is used, innocents suffer and die. Most of your position on this matter revolves around the absolute unacceptability of innocent deaths, such as children...but the lives of innocent people and children were sacrificed to invade Germany in WWII, to stop the Nazis from continuing to kill more. Not every battle or bombing was morally justified, but the effort in general was, and for that effort to succeed required that some innocents would die.
The point is that it is
acceptable morally to take a course of action that will require the deaths of innocents if that action will serve to save even more innocents. If it were not, then it would never be morally acceptable to use military force, ever, even to defend one's own nation from invasion by Nazis.
The existence of people who make immoral choices forces others to occasionally take actions they themselves would otherwise find immoral.
I'm making a serious point dronester. Calling it "dumb verbal acrobatics" does not make it so.
Why do you think the point is invalid? What logical fallacy am I committing? What incorrect evidence is guiding my argument?
Yes, in theory and in a Hollywood script they can be. But as you partly alluded, what is the criteria that Bush Jr. and Dick Chaney and Obama uses? And why in the world would you want someone like Bush Jr. to have such power?
I didn't want Bush or Cheney to have
any power. I'd much rather if the only "drones" either of them had ever seen had been remote controlled hobby planes.
I don;t know what criteria Obama actually uses when making those drone decisions he personally makes. I do know that the intelligence services that give him the information he bases the decision on count all "military age males" as combatants, which I think poisons the well for the entire decision. I don't know of every drone attack that's been made on Obama's watch, but I know enough to
not like them in general.
Please see my earlier response to Onifre. All that matters to me is the maximum reduction of death and suffering. If a drone strike serves that purpose, then I support that individual drone strike. If it does not, then I do not. I have insufficient information to really make the call, I only have enough to strongly suspect that the drones, as they're used currently, are likely causing more harm than good.
quote:
Rahvin writes:
I don't think that "winning in Afghanistan," whatever that would actually entail, is among the goals of the drone program. I don't think that question is particularly relevant to the situation, as I think the arguments for and against the use of drones would remain the same regardless of whether the US continue to occupy Afghanistan or not, regardless of whether the US "declares victory" in Afghanistan or not.
Rahvin, looked at the way you bumbled your responses to my questions. You have NO idea what "winning in Afghanistan," whatever that would actually entail," is. And yet you would justify the use of drones to achieve this non-expressable goal? Are you kidding me?
You misunderstand, dronester. I don't know what "winning in Afghanistan" means, because I think at this point the continued occupation is more about saving political face than actually serving much of a useful purpose.
But I don't think that's the purpose of drone strikes. I think they have a different purpose.
I think the purpose of drone strikes is to kill members of Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. Full stop. The intent of this purpose is to prevent future terrorist attacks on Americans...and while that's a good goal, it's not quite the same goal as mine.
I want to reduce death and suffering, for Americans and everyone else. Usually those two goals go hand in hand, but in the case of military force, they often do not. Drones are used so casually (or so it appears to me) that they are creating more terrorists than they kill. The battle itself is a tool of the enemy; the more casually we strike at them, the more recruits flock to their cause.
You took my response to mean "I don't know what the goal is, but I trust the government to be using the drones toward that goal." That wasn't at all what I was trying to say. I was trying to say "I don't know what "winning" would mean in Afghanistan because this isn't a real war any more, but I don't think the drones are being used to "win" anyway. I think the drones are just being used to kill "known terrorists," full stop."
Here are some more points you probably won't address:
1. America does not provide any official information on local reports of civilian deaths or even identities. The drone user doesn't care who they murder. How does that sit with you?
No death sits well with me. Transparency is one of those things we were promised in Obama's campaign but which was never really delivered. This is another of those cases where you and I agree.
2. The UN questions the legality "Outside the context of armed conflict, "the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal".
I've stated that I don't approve of the use of drones or any other military force in foreign territory unless war has been declared or permission has been granted from the nation in question. If a nation intentionally harbors enemies of other states, then diplomatic pressure can be exercised, and if it persists an actual war may result, but I'm not a fan of casual invasion of sovereign airspace. I certainly wouldn't like a hostile power flying a drone in our borders.
3. International law experts condemn drones "Outside of war, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning." "It is a violation of fundamental human rights principles". Duh.
Whether warning has been given can be debatable in a great many cases. For instance, I'm sure that Joseph Kony is well aware that he's wanted dead or alive; as he continues to not turn himself in, I wouldn't have a problem with a sniper killing him without
additional warning.
4. How many friends or families of victims become moved to violent extremism in reaction to innocent lives lost via drone strikes? Drones have become successful recruiting device for "terrorists". How will America kill more "terrorists" than we create?
On this we fully agree. I think the problem here is not with the use of drones in general, but with the casual disregard for their victims. I think individual drone strikes
can be justified, but that many (most?) are
not justifiable. I think the officials in charge count American lives as far, far more valuable than others, and actually don't particularly care if a whole family was wiped out.
5. What happens when other countries presidents decide they can also have full authorization? Luis Posada Carrilles, an American living in Miami, is a known terrorist convicted of masterminding a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner. Who would like to authorize Cuba to launch drone strikes against the USA? So what if the drone murders a few dozen American children as long as the drone kills Carrilles, right?
Mr Carrilles is not precisely a current and immediate threat to the state of Cuba. Joseph Kony
is an immanent threat to all those around him. In contrast to Mr Carrilles, Kony did not merely commit a heinous crime almost 40 years ao - he's currently committing heinous crimes today, right now.
This is a simple argument for the use of any lethal force, ever: lethal force is justified when used as the last defense against an immanent threat to the life of another.
The specifics of your example here don't hold water. However, your
general point regarding "what's good for the goose" is completely agreed. As above, I don't support illegal invasions of sovereign territory. Declare war, or get permission.
6. From your post, . . . a criteria often used to determine drone strike risks is simply count all the all military age males in a strike zone as combatants. Wow.
Yep. So when you look at the paper and it say "12 insurgents were killed in a drone strike..." what they really mean is "12 men between roughly 18 and 50 as determined from a high-definition camera several thousand feet away were killed in a drone strike." Now, they
do tend to use additional evidence, like the presence of guns, and it
is likely that noncombatants would not be mixed with combatants, but it still strikes me as frighteningly disingenuous. I'm certainly not comfortable with such classification - after all, all I have to do is walk into an area where Al Qaeda members have hung out, and
I could be labelled a "combatant."
7. The Obama administration won't release copies of legal opinions regarding the use of drones. Again, I am floored that americans would trust and allow such secretive powers of premeditative assassination by presidents like Bush Jr. or other future retarded presidents. American silence allows these presidents to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.
I'm not sure I particularly care about administration legal opinions any more, dronester - after the Bush administration, and then more from the Obama, we've seen many opinions drafted by the Justice Department that strike me as disgusting and unconstitutional. I think the actions those opinions intend to justify speak loudly enough - clearly the criteria being used for the use of drones and even other military force have shifted significantly since 9/11, and I do not at all approve of the shift.
And certainly I don't trust the government. I don't trust most of the
people. I'm fairly certain that Britney Spears and I would agree on little beyond the color of the sky, and that's assuming she's not hallucinating while high.
I'll repost what I said to Onifre:
quote:
I don't like drone strikes, particularly as they're currently used. I don't particularly like any use of military force. At best I consider it a necessary evil (see the Allies in WWII), and at worst I see it as a crime against humanity (see the Nazis in WWII). I'm somewhat happy that modern weapons of war are becoming more and more accurate and cause less collateral damage and risk to their operators than their predecessors, because it means that when the evil of military force is necessary it causes less harm, but I simultaneously cringe because that same fact seems to be making us project military force more casually.
I don't like using a drone in a foreign airspace unless we've declared war on that country or have permission from that nation's government to operate in their sovereign territory. That goes for any other military force as well - cruise missiles, SEAL teams, platoons of marines, or drones, it doesn't matter.
I don't at all approve of how casually drones seem to be used. There have been news stories to the contrary...but these are countered by the fact that the CIA and military intentionally poison the well by counting all "military-aged" males as combatants. To me, that's just flat-out lying, it means they're comfortable with "guilt by association," and I'm just not. Even terrorists have friends and family, and casual assassination is just going to create more terrorists in the end; it helps the enemy for us to behave like brazen bullies, you couldn't possibly plan a better way to play into their propaganda machine, because it makes some of that propaganda true.
But I can see a few uses for drones that I could potentially approve of. Take the Al Qaeda training camps that existed in Afghanistan back in 2011. If we imagine that the Taliban didn't control the country, but that the government simply had no way to take out those camps, I would approve of sending drones to destroy them if the Afghan government gave the US permission to destroy the mutual problem. In an open war, I'd rather use a drone than a cruise missile because of the reduced severity of collateral damage.
I don't think all drone attacks are all bad, full stop. I'm extremely suspicious of the drone attacks we've seen so far, because they appear to be too casual and don;t seem to further a reasonable goal. If a given drone strike actually does serve to save more lives than alternatives (including doing nothing), then I can tentatively support that specific drone strike. But I have insufficient knowledge to know of any strikes that meet that qualification, and I have a suspicion that the inherently biased policies of the drone operators and intelligence organizations make many or even most of the strikes so far unacceptable.
I don't think the drone program should be stopped entirely. I just think the policies that govern the use of drones need a complete rewrite, and that many of the people in charge shouldn't be. And in a war to win hearts and minds, I don't think drones are particularly helpful, especially when used so casually.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.
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