President Obama: Do you really love America?

[Anomalocaris]

Isn't it interesting how we make semantic demarcations between types of killing. Terrorism morally wrong, collateral damage, morally acceptable.

Intent is key to an analysis of morality. Unintended casualties in war is deeply unfortunate. Deliberately setting out to kill civilians just for the sake of stoking fear is evil.

That is an impracticable theory.

Intent is not such a key to any practical moral analysis because 1. intent is subject to interested interpretation as well as outright dissemination, and 2. The difference between objective outcome and supposed intent can not be trivially dismissed.

What the britain and us did in WWII was to FREQUENTLY deliberately set scale of bombing at such size as to cause supposedly unintended casualty IN THE NAME of harming some relatively trivial military target because the scope of the casualty, as well as the fear and demoralization such casualties is believed to generate, are believes to have greater war winning effect than destruction of the trivial target in question.

In fact, the U.S. was so open about it that it dropped leaflets over Japan urging japanese civilian to fear death in American bombings, and go as far as listing names of cities already destroyed in those leaflets, and suggesting japanese civilians reading these leaflets to contact any survivors from these cities, in order to prove such fears of dying in American bombings are well founded.


In the final analysis, what we choose to consider unacceptable terrorism seems largely governed by the fact that we wish to be able to fully, freely and guiltlessly leverage our massive proponderance is conventional military power and reach, our overwhelming wealth, out global connections amongst nation states, and our considerable power to shape perception and opinion to achieve our ends without being inconvenienced in any way by those with very limited means who do not share our goals trying to thwart us with what whatever means available to them.