Comment by JumpCrisscross

> Look at the person who selects the target. What do they believe is at that point?

We rarely have access to or even knowledge of who this person is, let alone their mens rea.

Any metric based solely on intent is (a) impossible to objectively adjudicate and (b) corrupted by the crazy, who will legitimately believe in fantasies if it serves their ends.

I don’t think you’re wrong. Just that this metric is inadequate. (For what it’s worth, I don’t have a good alternative. My takeaways from the last couple years is that the civilian-military boundary has been irretrievably blurred by hybrid war and non-state actors; the term genocide irreversibly blurred by activists; and the term warm crime rendered irrelevant by the world’s great and regions powers—without exception— explicitly rejecting it as a constraint on themselves. All of this means that the vocabulary we once relied on to make sense of the moral aspect of geopolitics no longer works, which makes discussion a bit confusing.