Comment by kstrauser

It was definitely Creech. I remember the spate of articles discussing how the officers (the USAF requires drones to be piloted by officers) were both struggling with the close up nature of drone strikes combined with fewer or even non-existent flight hours affecting promotions.

So far about 3,000 of them, including 160 children (the 3.00 includes more children than 160 but I'm singling that out).. in this war alone.

I promise you that you didn't kill 3,000+ IRGC members.

Did I ever claim they only killed innocent people?

Some searching led me to this report from an NGO called "AirWars" [1] which, in connection with The Guardian, reports that "at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes".

You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.

I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.

[1] https://airwars.org/tens-of-thousands-of-civilians-likely-ki...

Obama's department of defense classified every male between 16-65 hit by drone attacks as enemy combatant until proven otherwise...

So the war crimes are bipartisan.

And I write this as someone who likes Obama.

US military standard for "did we kill civilians" with drone attacks is "do these appear to be combat aged males, based on satellite photos".

It's monstrous.

Let's see. They were part of the US military, right? In just this war alone, they started by triple tapping an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, murdering nearly 200 little children.

And on the same day, they attacked a SPORTS STADIUM, completely vapourising a women's volleyball team who were in the midst of a game.

And that was just ... DAY ONE.

By now, we should be asking - if you're a member of the US military on active duty in an active war - prove that YOU DIDN'T kill a child, mother, handicapped person in a wheelchair, or a grandpa.

Truth hurts, doesn't it?

Yes, the US government is literally everywhere.

We sure do. They mostly work in federal government and government contracting corporations. There are multiple clearly documented repeated drone strikes on US citizens, even US citizen minors, who never were even indicted with a crime, that ended in assassination. Like the two intentional strikes it took to kill 16 year old US citizen from colorado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... . See also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix executive program in general.

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I admire Aaron Bushnell, but that page unironically uses phrases like "Satanic Talmudic supremacy"

Were all US soldiers in the Revolutionary War war criminals? What about the North in the Civil War? Or WWI/WWII?

Nearly every soldier in any war will have directly or indirectly killed an innocent civilian. Which ones are war crimes and which aren’t?

How do you decide and who gives you the authority to do so?

The author of that page appears to be a Holocaust denier[1]. Not exactly the example I would put forwards, especially if I want to make an unannealed appeal against Israeli war crimes.

[1]: A search for that name mostly brings up links to pages for SS apologia.

>someone defending their country

Can be used to justify anything.

Hey is friendly fire a war crime?

"War crimes" is something of a shorthand for being involved in an aggressive war; they are a surprisingly minor influence on the discourse because they are small in comparison to the decision to go to war at all.

I think the more baby-steps approach to western cognitive dissonance is to at least get them to be consistent about when it is a good idea to go to war. I'm more than happy to get downvoted pointing out that killing 100s of thousands of Russians and welding them strategically to China was a terrible policy, uniting Asian manufacturing and resource giants is catastrophic for western power. But people were grumpy and didn't want to talk about realpolitik because the Russians are so evil.

Now we have the US attacking Persians in Persia for trying to govern Persia because the US sphere of influence covers the whole world and doing serious damage to the West's access to global oil markets and we have this muted and philosophical response from the powers that be. It isn't just immoral, it is also actively stupid - if we can tolerate this behaviour from the US, why can't we also tolerate Russia on a far smaller and easier to understand scale? How are all the sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine actually justified in the minds of the people making the decisions? It clearly isn't a moral calculation and it seems to be stupid strategy.

If we got some thoughtful and transparent thinkers in power there'd probably just be less wars, they seem to be the fast path to poverty and the upside is hard to spot. There are serious questions about why any of the major conflicts right now looked like a good idea to the people in Washington and wherever NATO is in Europe. Brussels I suppose. Can we try peace and prosperity as a strategy?

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The US hasn't fought a just war since WW2 and even that is actually somewhat questionable

That's a well studied topic in military history/science called unit cohesion. The saying goes that morale gets the soldiers to the battlefield, cohesion is what keeps them there. In order to withstand the psychological horrors of combat, soldiers need that comradery otherwise they'll run off at the first chance they get. There needs to be some anchor keeping the soldier in the way of danger, whether that's social pressure or years of intense training together.

Brett Devereaux has talked about it multiple times on his blog in various different contexts (most recently two weeks ago)[1][2][3]:

[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/07/24/collections-pre-modern-armies-...

[2] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-...

[3] https://acoup.blog/tag/cohesion/

I was in the military and in my experience people that chose to go into war zones, it's optional, are fucked in the head and literally enjoy killing people, I've seen it a dozen times. They want to kill.

No one runs into machine gun fire to bring democracy to someone else I can assure you of that.

Narrator: They could not.

I dunno man, just, like, use your preferred tools to, like, ”do your own research”.

Don’t believe me, I’m just a random stranger with an opinion. Often a contrary one.

Can you think of a single person who has cured their mental health problem?

At the He-Man club of course. We all face our challenges with stoicism like Odysseus when his sailors got eaten.

rephrased for ease of interpretation - venting about a problem is nice just as stretching a muscle is nice. stretching doesn't fix the root cause of muscle soreness though, just as venting does nothing to fix the issue. emotionally re-reacting is likely to result in strengthening of existing associations, which is more likely to cause repetition of a problem scenario, as opposed to leading to scenario avoidance.

Nothing ever happens unless there's a paper to back it up

> “Women belong in the kitchen”

They never said anything remotely like that in their comment. You're actively lying about their words in addition to badly breaking the HN guidelines. You should re-read them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Has a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist ever evaluated you for paranoid schizophrenia?

You supplant your lack of knowledge in statistics with unfounded assumptions and overt bias.

The relevant metric here is number of deaths per size of the specified group and per time.

You compare to completely different numbers and confabulate entirely unconnected "explanations".

These deaths are most likely due to "housecleaning", as I said.

The US intelligence community engaging in murdering suspected "weak links" in order to "send a message", "clean the house" etc. is a regularly recurring phenomenon.

The fiction, that intelligence community (among many other places in US government) was some harbor of angelic superior morality, capable of restraining themselves in spite of total lack of effective oversight is certainly "simple". That doesn't make it true.