Comment on Chop Chop Motherfuckers
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 1 day agoI think only active combatants should be killed.
You want the morality of in the moment life or death decisions being morally justifiable and clean cut good guy/bad guy. That’s not how death dealing works. Start the slaughter and the innocent are going to get caught in the crossfire. It’s not just middle aged white men you’re going to face, you’re going to face women and brainwashed children making a desperate last stand where it’s their ideals or yours. Hesitate and they’ll win. Disarm them but hope they’ll swallow the loss and change and they’ll fester until they have the opportunity to stage a comeback. Demand that everyone fight solely for your personal values and you fight alone. I despise tankies and libertarians almost as much as I do fascists, but if I gotta use their help to eradicate the fascists, I’ll take the help I can get and sort their value out later. And if they go down fighting, great, problem solved, hopefully they took out a good ratio before they were eliminated. It’s like watching Christians, Zionists, and jihadists fight- by all means, kill each other. But there’s no clean war, we all suffer the fallout. If you truly have a capacity for interpersonal violence and want go down that path, go for it. Anyone can talk big online anonymously, you know where the haters in your community live, work, and hang-out. Make ‘em suffer. But don’t delude yourself into thinking your actions are going to be ideal, that you’ll always get a ideal enemy, or that your allies are on the same spectrum. Dead Nazis are dead Nazis. Legit question: you and I agree on the idea of death as an option but have some ethical differences on when/where/how. If push comes to shove are you really going to fight me if we’ve got some captured Nazis in cuffs and I want to be done with them?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 1 day ago
Depends on the circumstances. I’m fine with killing prisoners during a war, when battle is actively happening and could be here soon. But if we roll into town with a few tanks and they all put their hands up and there are no signs of any other danger, I say no killing. We gotta treat our POWs nicely.
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Then you’re not “I think only active combatants should be killed” like you previously mentioned. You’re a step closer to “we’re gonna do some shit to make sure our vision of future humanity becomes the baseline”. You can recognize a Nazi when they reveal themselves. You’re a better person for trying to appeal to their humanity. At some point you just say “fuck you, c’mon and try”. And that effort is not a guarantee of success. A lot of us are going to lose if we do.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 1 day ago
Maybe I have a bit of a different definition of active than you do, I dunno. I mean, I’m fine with dropping a big bomb on a base full of sleeping IDF soldiers. Cause when they wake up, they’re gonna go murder children like they’ve been ordered to. I’m talking about making a determination of whether there’s a state of warfare imminent to the situation. How much risk is there, that they’re gonna start taking innocent lives if left to go about their business? That’s what I’m worried about.
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I can’t predict where it’s going to fit my moral convictions any better than you can. I’d like to think I have a good baseline when it comes to recognizing human value and potential ability for harm vs potential to change. I’d like to fight our fights in a clean “good vs evil” framework. I don’t like I’d be okay with “fuck ‘em all, they’re irredeemable bastards”. They are still people, and even if they’re fully committed to their cause, however wrong i might think they are, they’re still human.
That hesitation you have, that recognition that they have a choice over their actions when they wake up and kill kids because they chose to follow orders for whatever reason they do, even if they as an individual question it? Yeah, that’s real, you can spend the rest of your life debating in your head “were they brainwashed” vs “were they redeemable” vs “maybe”’ vs “I halted harm” vs “why did I chose to prevent it with the level of prevention I did” vs “you gave me know choice but to end your existence”. If you end up living and they don’t because of your actions, that will be your burden to bear.
The idea you could drop a big bomb is pleasant. It’s impersonal and wipes a threat without the nitty gritty. Sometimes that happens, a lot of times it doesn’t. If you want to commit to the cause you say you believe in, to put yourself between the most vulnerable and those who would eradicate them, it’s going to get ugly. You don’t get to pick your enemies, they aren’t always who you’d like them to be. Nobody who cares emerges “clean” nor walks out feeling justified.