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The Drone Papers

theintercept.com

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Re: The Drone Papers

#51

Post by korisnik »

rhino369 wrote: post #26
gortok wrote: post #5

There are lots of important points in this set of articles, but a few stand point: - Congress has not defined what "assassination" means; and since they haven't defined it, the Executive Order 12333 is effectively meaningless. https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-comp... - IMEIs are used to track targets. Can IMEIs be spoofed? - Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that…

>Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that means all males ages 18-49 are considered enemy combatants. Since you're guilty by association, your age makes you a target. You are conflating what the US considers enemies before targeting and after a strike. The US doesn't just bomb any random male 18-49. But when the US does target what it thinks is a legitimate target, it counts any unknown m…

>it counts any unknown males killed in the strike as enemy. It doesn't use that assumption to do the strike.

Imagine for a moment that someone (be it some foreign agency, US police, army or whoever) did the same in America, to American citizens. Would you be outraged by your explanation?

"Hey, it's not like they're targetting them specifically. They're just deciding that they were all enemy combatants post-factum."

Re: The Drone Papers

#53

Post by xixi77 »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #47
rayiner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What information do you think is missing? If you look at the poll, half of Americans are "very concerned" about civilian casualties from drone strikes, another 30% are "somewhat" concerned about them. Yet, 60% still support them. That doesn't strike me as ignorance, it strikes me as a broadly-shared value judgment.

The optimist in me likes to at least entertain the notion that the large scale effort to justify, sanitize and in some cases morbidly celebrate the failing of the long term US foreign policy has some part to play in shaping public opinion. But if you are absolutely correct that those numbers represent the general values of the American people then can it be argued that once rewarded with enough material gain, an enti…

How do you define "positively evil"? If there are people whose objective is to destroy our quality of life (material or otherwise), is it immoral to make an effort to eliminate them? Now, I do have serious doubts whether the drone program actually serves that purpose, but are you suggesting that we should ignore legitimate threats to our well-being, or perhaps that there are no such threats?

Re: The Drone Papers

#54

Post by vezzy-fnord »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #32
DasIch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument that democracy doesn't work because Nazis is a really bad one. The only thing that argument shows is that you have a embarrassingly superficial knowledge of German history.

Democracy doesn't work because it's obvious that it doesn't work. It takes like five minutes of concentrated thinking to figure out its basic problems. The best thing you can say about democracy is that it's the system with least bloody failure modes out of the systems we know. Belief that it "works" is just a propaganda all of us are constantly exposed to since primary school.

I think representative democracy and then specifically representative democracy with FPTP has been shown not to work, primarily because of the principal-agent problem and also the spoilt vote effect which in turn ensures a two-party system (i.e. Duverger's law).

Direct democracy with smaller electoral districts and a saner voting system could be more efficient, or at least have much higher response times. Of course you're still stuck with the self-fulfilling bottleneck that voters will seldom pick anything outside their cultural zeitgeist, but then it keeps the electoral system well contained and lets people focus more easily on actual activism.

Re: The Drone Papers

#55

Post by snake_plissken »

For me the most grave offense of our current president was taking out Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. I understand he was not a good individual, by any means, but he was an American citizen which entitled him to all of the protections afforded under The Constitution.

Programs like these are what undermines any legitimacy our country has left.

Re: The Drone Papers

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

xixi77 wrote: post #53
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The optimist in me likes to at least entertain the notion that the large scale effort to justify, sanitize and in some cases morbidly celebrate the failing of the long term US foreign policy has some part to play in shaping public opinion. But if you are absolutely correct that those numbers represent the general values of the American people then can it be argued that once rewarded with enough material gain, an enti…

How do you define "positively evil"? If there are people whose objective is to destroy our quality of life (material or otherwise), is it immoral to make an effort to eliminate them? Now, I do have serious doubts whether the drone program actually serves that purpose, but are you suggesting that we should ignore legitimate threats to our well-being, or perhaps that there are no such threats?

You could argue for the right to defend yourself, but since we're making a moral argument here, you should also make sure that your defense inflicts damage to those who are a danger to you, and not to innocent bystanders. Also a defense that makes more enemies is a pretty crappy defense, both from moral and practical point of view.

(Of course we're skipping the part of the more likely real reason for drone strikes - more people pissed off == more terrorists == more need to defend == more money for military-industrial complex. You can play this game safely as long as your enemy isn't very powerful.)

Re: The Drone Papers

#57

Post by xixi77 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #46
rayiner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What information do you think is missing? If you look at the poll, half of Americans are "very concerned" about civilian casualties from drone strikes, another 30% are "somewhat" concerned about them. Yet, 60% still support them. That doesn't strike me as ignorance, it strikes me as a broadly-shared value judgment.

Well, I know that there are children starving in Africa, and can say this is sad and I am "very concerned", but otherwise it has close to zero emotional impact on me. It's an abstract issue. I actually feel about drone strike victim stronger , because I've seen the pictures, read the stories, seen the math. The point is, this issue is totally disconnected from the lives of most people. You need to get them invested e…

Well, why should people necessarily care about this issue more than about any of those? Also, just because people do not agree with you, does not always mean they do not care. Sure, there are many innocent victims of drones -- but your opponents can just as easily showcase equally innocent victims of Taliban or of Al Qaeda or of whatever group the people killed by drones belonged to.

Re: The Drone Papers

#59

Post by AngrySkillzz »

poof131 wrote: post #49
gortok wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes you a tragic accident. "We're not going to apologize for this, because you hung out with someone who was on our list, who we think was in this area, and so clearly you deserved being bombed by a drone. What? You borrowed your friend's phone? Oh well. Jackpot." > And it's not like the Taliban aren't a real threat to Afghanistan. They just took over the 5th largest city in Afghanistan two weeks ago. Why are…

> One thing that sending in ground troops would do is hopefully reignite the debate as to whether we should be in that country at all. Agree, but you're only part way. We really need to bring back the draft. On the ground in Iraq in 2008, watching ‘drone’ feeds of SF soldiers on missions on one screen and the stock market crashing on the other screen, all I could think about was “Don’t people care? There are soldiers…

Yup. No one cares until its their kid or the neighbor's kid getting shipped off to some far away warzone. While I disagree with the draft on moral terms, I think pragmatically it is the only way to properly align the incentives of the populace against wars that don't matter. Otherwise, the government can wage whatever wars they want and no one will be that bothered (as we've seen).

Re: The Drone Papers

#60

Post by xixi77 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #32
DasIch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument that democracy doesn't work because Nazis is a really bad one. The only thing that argument shows is that you have a embarrassingly superficial knowledge of German history.

Democracy doesn't work because it's obvious that it doesn't work. It takes like five minutes of concentrated thinking to figure out its basic problems. The best thing you can say about democracy is that it's the system with least bloody failure modes out of the systems we know. Belief that it "works" is just a propaganda all of us are constantly exposed to since primary school.

I agree that there are times when it fails, although I am not so sure we would agree on when exactly that happens. But it's a bit of a stretch to say that anything not perfect does not work -- particularly since there isn't that much agreement about how it should work.
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