You had me until race war but yes. This is true in my exp.
It all comes down to training and experience. Police training budgets are tight, officers roll in single squad cars (little safety), sometimes physical fitness standards aren't upheld (fat cops can't scrap with someone they have to use a device to subdue them), and mental health issues abound (the job can be quite stressful and boring at the same time).
I've watched a lot of body cam footage of (legitimate) police shootings. I wonder how many of these one on one situations would have turned violent if the perp knew there were two officers bearing down on him instead of one?
But yeah, maybe a marine on the ground has more discretion than I realize. The other cases, though, I think are valid.
Thank you for serving your country. Thank you for lending your voice to this discussion.
Even though you can't downvote such comments (when they are a direct reply to you), you can flag them (if you have enough karma, like 50 pts iirc). That's probably the best thing to do as the HN guidelines indicate we shouldn't reply to bad comments, it just deepens the problem.
I probably defend you more than anyone else on Hacker News because it sticks in my craw to see you targeted for the crime of being high on the leaderboard. But your position on the leaderboard in no way makes these comments pass muster for the HN guidelines.
It's an ugly personal attack.
Maybe take your political opinions to your well trafficked blog and vent there. But it isn't acceptable here. The guidelines do not say "Unless you are on the leaderboard, and then feel free to do whatever you want."
For the record, I have a lot of respect you. I don't care if you believe that or not. From what I gather, someone has your ear and is filling it with lies about me. I've given you a lot of latitude in part because of my high personal regard for you, but I'm not attacking you here and I'm not obligated to tippy toe around you or something and defer to your opinion or something because of whatever your personal issue with me is.
I will make a note that you aren't interested in me defending you and try to restrain myself in the future when I see people behaving inappropriately towards you. I'm not the moderator here. It's not my job to moderate the space. But I am a member and folks do make "meta" comments at times.
I'm done here. I don't intend to reply further. This is not productive.
You don't own this entire thread because you spoke in it. I'm quite open about my background. It should hardly come as a shock to you that I don't agree with the idea of personally vilifying military members because you personally disagree with the politics of their country.
Anyway, I'm done, regardless of whatever else you want to say here.
If I believed that you, in all seriousness, wondered if they ever thought deeply about such things, I wouldn't have said anything. The only thing "have you heard of 9/11" says to me is that the individual feels attacked by you. Given all the words you have written here, I think it is reasonable for them to interpret your question as an attack and not some good faith attempt to start some deeply philosophical discussion.
And it's an ugly thing to do, regardless of the justification you want to come up with after the fact while clearly signaling your belief that being a soldier makes you de facto evil. I don't agree with that position and I don't think it is appropriate for anyone to go around picking fights with soldiers on HN because they hold such beliefs.
You are required to follow legal orders. Illegal orders, not so much because "you will end up holding the bag" as "I was just following orders" isn't a valid defense.
As for net positive/negative that really up to the politicians since (in the US at least) the military is commanded by the civilian government. One hopes one is engaging in a net positive but, as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
Have a read:
I'm curious if you would say the same hostile things to a Dutch soldier who was only serving his or her own country as they were asked to do.
[1] https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2018/06/15/netherlands...
Count on it.
But being sucked into Iraq was the bigger error.
The major reason NL has been so safe is because the EEG and later the EU came into being, not because of any action by enlisted military. The NATO 'an attack on one is an attack on all' combined with the nukes of France and the UK are the bigger part of the balance there, with some help from the US, where there arguably is room to point out that this was mostly to serve US interests rather than the interests of Europe, any kind of fuck-up there would have likely turned the EU into a smoldering pile of ashes.
NL has very little to be proud of when it comes to the deployment of the military, both historically and in the present.
Discretion is everything. Any time we'd hit a compound, we would pore over the intelligence, assess whether this was a likely badguy, whether they were a key player or just a low level radical, etc.
Equally important, are the people around said badguy likely also bad or innocent bystanders? If they're probably bad we want to capture them all together. If they're probably innocent we want to wait until the dude wanders off to minimize the risk to civilian life and property, even if that means greater risk to us.
Once you actually get to the target location, it starts all over again, only with less time and information. Is that a shovel or an RPG? I can't quite tell from here. Looks like an RPG -- what if I'm wrong? There's a house behind him, what's the risk if I wait 30 seconds...?
It's a real profession that takes real expertise by people with real emotions.