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that is true. They would have failed after their first failed launch. The US government saved them.

yes, I think it's because HN users think that politics are comparable to systems design, and its not. Politics is very complex and a lot of non-rational things are done and rationalized later.


I also blame undeveloped theory of mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind


It's not about the Iranian government killing its own. Then we should have seen a lot more interventions. It's about oil and regional power. The US wants that the region is in hands of their allies and Iran threatens this.


Everything is about self-interest. That does not mean there is no such thing as aligning interests.


Probably the worst example, because Japan was probably going to surrender anyways.


> Japan was probably going to surrender anyways

Well yes. The question is how many more would have had to die to get it. This question doesn’t have an easy answer. To the extent there are wrong ones, it’s anyone claiming confidence.


A nonsensical false dichotomy of sorts. Between "Japan surrenders without a single further death" and "We have to nuke two cities for them to surrender" there are numerous steps of gradual escalation that could have been taken before arriving at the "nuke the cities" option. One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I have no sympathy for the Japanese who killed tens of millions of people in their WW2 atrocities, and the two bombs killed orders of magnitude fewer of their people. I also see no reason to pretend that there weren't obvious alternatives to USA dropping nukes on their cities if we are to believe that the objective was merely getting Japan to surrender (an objective most difficult to believe). No need for pretense -- they wanted to demonstrate their new weapons, AND they wanted to kill a lot of Japanese.


> One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths

There is a reason it took bombing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cause surrender. And if you telegraph that you’re going to bomb a remote place and the bomb fails, you’ve undermined your weapon’s credibility in unique ways.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that your confidence is wrong. What you’re talking about was contemporaneously and continues to be historically debated.


And it was followed by another bomb.


dont forget who is writing it and what he needs to think about it and what he wants others to think about it...


checked out your comments. Dont need to know more


edit: this was for frumple.

I dont know what murder people are referring to, but if its Alex Pretti, I would like to point you to the analysis by Bellingcat, currently posted on reddit. Its clearly a murderous execution of a man that is on his hands and feet. You will not let me choose lies above my own eyes.


Firing a gay person is still considered moral by probably most people in this world. If not for the insufferable joy they always seem to bring to the workplace! How dare they distract the workers with their fun! You are saying morality does not exist in the universe because people have different moralities. That is like saying attracting forces dont exist because you have magnetism and gravitational pull(debatable) and van der waals forces etc. Having moral frameworks for societies seems to be a recurring thing. You might even say: a prerequisite for a society. I love to philosophize about these things but trying to say it doesnt exist because you cant scientifically prove it is laying to much belief in the idea that science can prove everything. Which it demonstrably cannot.


The discussion is about universal morality, not morality in general.


I disagree, this we don't know. You treat life as if persistence is it's overarching quality, but rocks also persist and a rock that keeps persisting through time has nothing that resembles wanting. I could be a bit pedantic and say that life doesnt want to keep existing but genes do.

But what I really want to say is that wanting to live is a prerequisite to the evolutionary proces where not wanting to live is a self filtering causality. When we have this discussion the word wanting should be correctly defined or else we risk sitting on our own islands.


@margalabargala: You are correct, hence the meaninglessness of the OP. The universe could care like humans make laws to save that ant colony that makes nice nests. the ants dont know humans care about them and even made laws that protect then. But it did save them from iradication. They feel great cause they are not aware of the highway that was planned over their nest (hitchhikers reference).


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