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spwa4today at 8:37 AM1 replyview on HN

If you trust wikipedia without checking the talk page, and frankly in anything remotely involving Israel, you've lost the plot. Sorry but it just isn't remotely neutral on more and more subjects.

And this is the old trick: judging one side by absolutist morals, and then claiming SOME portion of the other side was innocent. Obviously, this is a fallacy and not a reasonable way to judge the morals of an action.

In reality, of course, nearly everyone the Iranian government attacks is totally innocent, and that's 100% intentional on their part. From toddlers in Argentina to Metro goers in Brussels. In Brussels, in an Iranian organized terror attack the guy put 5 bullets in a baby in a child carriage, waiting to shoot the mother (she survived, by the way) until she collapsed to the ground. THAT is who is being targeted here. That was not an accident.

That's one side, and the other side ... makes mistakes.

Clearly, the moral problem here is a mistake by the other side. Clearly THAT's the problem that needs to be solved.

Removing an evil actor requires, frankly, evil actions. Any real moral system will allow for that. Have you ever been to Dresden? What happened there is far worse than even Hiroshima. There's a shelter you can visit there, with a book like in Lord of the rings. It is open to a partially burnt page with the text that people were panicking when the wind drew fire into the shelter during the bombing. People caught on fire, put it out in panic, and it would immediately catch on fire again. Then those people collapsed. The text ... ends there, with spilled ink. There are 2 child carriages in that basement.

This action is considered morally justified, even by the survivors at the time, despite the fact that it didn't even achieve it's military objectives (the factories it targeted weren't destroyed, the city center was, and the aircraft factories, the main target, had stopped producing for lack of inputs months before the attack started)

Both historically and in moral source texts you will find people give enormous moral leeway to actions meant to save others. To remove an evil actor. That is even the case when they cause incredible damage.


Replies

Saline9515today at 8:56 AM

Wikipedia provides sources that you can check yourself. In this case, it's the BBC, a well known IRGC-aligned and extremist media hostile to the USA.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yqqyly9n0o

And you whataboutism is childish, on top of the basic fact that the school bombing happened in the first days of the war, after a stupid and sadistic decapitation strike that destroyed any chance of negotiated settlement.

It's not the US' job to punish the IRGC for their crimes, and now that they started this idiotic war, the situation in Iran is even worse than when it started, including for the population. Which is yet another complete, objective failure and a proof that bombing populations don't lead to regime change.

> That's one side, and the other side ... makes mistakes.

This is a widely biased interpretation absolving an army whose chief has declared "no quarters" (=war crime) and conducts double-tap strikes on civilian infrastructure. And who bombed Dresden, Gaza, Vietnam or Cambodia? Why was it wrong then, but now it's cool?

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