(November 22, 2014 at 9:26 am)Rhythm Wrote:(November 22, 2014 at 8:27 am)paulpablo Wrote: I'm sure there have been many instances of at least some military personnel targeting civilians.In that there are people in wars, and some people are sadists and nutballs, of course. Again, wafflehouses also have sadists and nutballs in them - and I bet at least a few of them shave their legs. I'm not defending war, I'm not defending nutballs, I'm just suggesting that war and nutballs are bad enough without extraneous and shadowy equivalence being asserted between the two. If someone wanted to make the case that both are bad form (and I definitely would) the worst way to do so, imo, is to begin with a straw effigy of what we hope to undermine. We'd be poisoning our own well.
I agree with the point you're making, Rhythm, about the difference between school shootings and military operations -- but it needs to be pointed out that attacking civilians as a measure of war has been conducted in the past, formally -- think of Imperial Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare in WWI, or the Allied bombing campaign against Germany in WWII.
I grant the obvious objection that those policies aren't the norm; but it has happened in the past, and nuclear deterence, which is still our national policy, is predicated on the mass slaughter of civilians.
This doesn't negate your objection, of course; just offering a bit of nuance for it.
