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Originally Posted by Orruar
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That's my point though. They are all horrible and yet Americans seem pretty apathetic
to conventional bombing. I think it's just a matter of shrapnel deaths being around for centuries and we've gotten used to the idea. In addition, the bomb concussion only kills those who are very close (within a few tens of feet). Shrapnel gets those farther away. So in a rather twisted irony, the people we're targeting (bad guys hopefully) die immediately while the collateral damage gets to live in agony for minutes or hours before dying. And I'm really not sure if living in agony for an hour is any better than living in horror for a minute. I'd imagine it's worse.
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The smart weapons America is using today have reduced shrapnel. The casings on the bomb itself are designed to be vaporized in the explosion. I think we can agree to disagree here, though - you can feel free to die by nerve gas, and I'll take a bomb blast to the face
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To me, intent isn't anywhere near as important as outcomes. A ruthless dictator is horrible, but a dictator who thinks their intentions are pure... watch out. And while we're trying to advance technology to reduce collateral damage, and I'd hope we could fight a war without a single civilian death, we're nowhere near that point. We can't pretend like Assad's killing of civilians is somehow worse than our killing of civilians. Keep in mind that just in the past decade, we've killed many times what Assad has. And I haven't even brought up the use of white phosphorus or depleted uranium. Those are the low hanging fruit when discussing America's moral superiority, and I thought I'd take a shot at some less obvious points. Nothing anyone has said has really convinced me that these points are not valid.
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So.... we should just never act against atrocities and horrible people? War should just disappear and we should all hold hands and kiss and love each other?
Dude, we are totally in the same boat here. I agree 100%. I truly wish we could never drop a single bomb again, disarm our entire arsenal, and use our m4's and 16's as coat hangers, but that's never going to happen. Not anytime soon, anyway. We're going to have to drop bombs, and we're going to have to shoot missiles, and you had better believe the INTENT to only kill the bad guys makes a helluva fucking difference when you compare it to someone dropping a low yield nuke or chemical weapon and wasting an entire city. Outcome is NOT the only thing that matters, it's only part of the equation. Even if it was, the outcome of using a chemical weapon
will always be FAR worse than a conventional explosive tipped warhead. Period.