Are you a Mexican? If not, would you also consider it okay if the military of your country conducted drone strikes and used thermobaric bombs with "acceptable level of collateral damage" for extrajudicial killings of fellow citizens in your own country?

I would find this totally unacceptable. I also find extrajudicial killings by drone strikes in other countries totally unacceptable but in my own country I'd consider such practices even worse.

> If not, would you also consider it okay if the military of your country conducted drone strikes and used thermobaric bombs with "acceptable level of collateral damage" for extrajudicial killings of fellow citizens in your own country

It would entirely depend on the situation, but without doubt there are levels of crime and depravity I could find myself surrounded by where I'd welcome it. Duterte's extra-judicial killings are far from unpopular. Also: did occupied Western Europe want to be liberated, despite the inevitable collateral damage? I'd expect largely the answer was yes.

Anyone who thinks the extra-judicial killings are actually solving any problems in the Philippines is naive.

Citation?

The burden of proof that problems are being solved is on you.

Police assertions that most violent crime in the Philippines is drug-induced/related wasn't even supported by their own data in 2016! Where's the data that shows illegal drug flows are actually being reduced and that such reductions are affecting crime rates? Where are the 'big fish' (ranking police officers, big businessmen and politicians) that were promised to be arrested/imprisoned/otherwise neutralised in 2016? Those who have been killed are either small-fry, cases of mistaken identity, or innocent bystanders.

Any introductory textbook on moral philosophy or philosophy of law should do.

Ah, there I was thinking someone had data and not simply their opinion.

What do you know? I've studied this. The fact that you believe that moral insight can somehow be produced from data about the status quo tells me that you haven't.

If it was bombs against someone who is subverting whole justice system of a country - yes.

Turns out they live in the house next to you, oops..

I wouldn't want to live next to El Chapo and I didn't talk about typical neighbourhood drug dealer. It's about scale. There are many people I don't like, some of them even politicians but I wouldn't suggest harming them in any way.

I'm sorry ,it's just so damn easy for you to volunteer other peoples lives to be collateral damage in an extra judicial killing when you know statistically it won't be you.

If I had no other chance but to live near such criminals, I would try to suicide-bomb them, but that would probably be too hard and counter-productive because of layers of security with which those people surround. What would YOU do if you had to live near such criminals?

You many want to research a bit how these cartels work. Kids grow around down, they are part of the society around them and a central point of it. They couldn't survive any other way.

You have a kid that grew up thinking (not without a reason) that there's no better way than that do what the boss says. It will die to protect him. "Oh that kid is just a criminal, kill him!". In many cases, places where these cartels thrive are places where they locally can do better job than the government does.

I don't think that taking out the highest figure simply solves the problem. It wouldn't change much on the long run and on the short run highly increase the violence.

But more importantly, it seems extremely rare, that you could make a world a better place simply by killing somebody or a bunch of people. It's easy to think that, and a HN comment is too short to dive into that, but when you take time to think everything through, it seems far from obvious.

> If I had no other chance but to live near such criminals, I would try to suicide-bomb them

Your confidence that you'd sacrifice yourself heroically in circumstances it's utterly certain you'll never find yourself in is admirable.

>What would YOU do if you had to live near such criminals?

Well not kill myself for a start...

What makes my life special such that I should be allowed to not accidentally lose my life to save my country?

Subverting the whole justice system... Hmm. That sounds comically familiar :)

Not to everyone, sadly. Could you tell us more?

I think humor comes from the fact that governments bombing people they don't like is subverting the justice system.

Or maybe it's a way to take someone out without risking lives of many of your own people. Bringing them to court could just be too hard. But yeah, it's subverting of justice process. We should just send them notices about court cases and they will come if they're respecting law...

Sure I'll elaborate.

From the standpoint of words, about "subverting the whole justice system".

So here is why this is comical to me. On the one hand, the original commenter is right. An agent who can destabilize the entire justice and legal system of a country deserve be eliminated by extreme force - at least it would be nice to see that in Mexico, a country so decimated institutionally by the drug cartels. The country has an active insurgency and is not far off from a failed state.

Where does the comedy come in? Well the other side of this coin. What is is going on in the US? There is an active agent trying to undermine the justice system and the judiciary. For different reasons, but the result can be said to be comparable. It is the very president of the united states, Donald Trump!

That is precisely what the President Of The United States Donald Trump is doing. He is actively trying to undermine the FBI, firing James Comey, bullying the Secretary General in a weird way, manipulating evidence of the Muller investigation. Trump has even gone so far as to say that he will probably do what he can to manipulate and restrain the justice department. I guess also by - by proxy - appointing someone such as Kavenaugh as a judge for the court of supreme justice.

Maybe it's not comical...It's tragicomic. I don't know. Maybe we don't even have a word for this. Reddit calls it the "Witnessing events occurring in the Darkest Timeline." I tend to agree, this must be the darkest timeline.

For more information on the creation of the justice system and the FBI, I recommend watching the movie Hoover. Although probably brief, biased and Hollywood'ised - I like the way it presents the creation of the FBI. For more information about the charades of the sitting government in the US, watch the entirety of season 04 to season 05 of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

These are my views. I am not american, and beyond a degree in Political Science, I probably don't know enough to make an informed statement about this. One thing is certain, we set on the other side of the pond, gasping while watching th e events unfolding each and every week of the Trump administration.

So how's the current approach working out for you?

Your idea is just to magnify the current approach, not change it.

No, the cartels are an economic problem.

Make drugs legal, and the problem will fade away with time.

Of course, not immediately. But when the lucrative funding of drug trade is cut off, it will slowly diminish their might.

They actually made drugs legal in Mexico, then the USA put an end to that:

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...

The drug cartels were losing out on a lot of money too as a result apparently.

This is the correct answer.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...

Decriminalizing drugs also had a similar effect in Portugal. To be honest, I think that if the government really wanted to they could stomp all these cartels out of existence. The problem is that there is a lot of incentive not to.

I believe that law should be modeled after reality, not the other way around. If there is demand for drugs, then there will also be ways to satisfy this demand, legal or not. On the other hand, there is also demand for murder so obviously this problem is not as easy as it seems.

Where does a lawmaker draw the line?

Portugal doesn't treat users as criminals anymore but they still consume product that's illegally imported or produced by criminal organisations and the black economy is very much alive.

What legalisation can achieve is to reduce demand. I believe Holland has quite a low incidence of cannabis consumption.

> I think that if the government really wanted to they could stomp all these cartels out of existence

As long as there's demand (and the US has oh so much of it), someone will provide it. Trillions have been wasted on the drug war and nothing has been stomped out of existence. This has nothing to do with lack of incentive.

A side effect of pot being legalised in parts of the US is that cartels now push more heroin and meth because their profits from pot have dwindled so much.

As much as I'm pro legalise everything, I struggle to come up with a scenario where meth & heroin become legal apart from a kind of "look the other way" method Holland uses for cannabis. But this still involves illegal large scale cultivation and import of product that keeps criminal enterprises alive. Afaik most of the hash sold in Holland is smuggled in illegally from hash producing countries like Morocco, Pakistan, Nepal.

"Make drugs legal" is not actually as an easy a solution as it appears to be.

I claim (without any evidence) that increasing the palette of legal drugs would reduce the demand for the nastiest ones.

Furthermore, making drug use legal and moving law enforcement resources to addiction treatment would make more people seek help in battling their addiction.

One of the nastiest facets of war on drugs is that it creates criminals of people who harm no one and stigmatize them to the outskirts of the society.

> Make drugs legal, and the problem will fade away with time

For this to be true, organized crime would have to be largely reliant on drug money. My understanding is they're not. Prohibition fueled the creation of these organizations, but if you're suggesting they've an inability to diversify, that seems questionable.

I used to believe that, but there was a recent article on here a few days ago about cartels diversifying their sources of profit by dealing stolen fuel, so although I support legalising drugs, I no longer think this will put an end to the cartels.

While I understand your point, I don't think there's that much more money to be made from stolen fuel compared to the goldmine of drugs. A kilo of cocaine goes for around $26k in California. How much fuel would you need to sell in order to make that much? In Mexico a liter of fuel goes for about $1.

Drugs are also dense: $1mm in fuel is a huge quantity and hard to distribute.

That's why I wrote 'it will slowly diminish their might.'

Without less money they will have less power, and less appeal, reducing the pool of capable candidates for leadership roles and therefore decreasing their effectiveness as an organization.

The cartels are embedded in the local population. If you treat the cartel as a military that needs a military solution, then you end up not just with civilian casualties, but with local hostility to you (for killing friends / family by collateral damage). If there was an effective way to fight a guerilla military embedded in the local population, the US would've already won in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen would've been long defeated, and Hezbollah long forgotten.

That's a good way to keep the problem going forever. You can't lift people out of poverty and end the cycle of violence with bombs. That's the lesson the US completely failed to learn from its forever war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Your point about poverty is of course correct.

You're conflating two very different situations in regards to Iraq. It's not one Iraq forever war.

There's the Iraq war (Second Persian Gulf War), and there's the Iraq civil war. The Iraq war, versus Saddam's regime, ended very quickly. That war was won trivially. The US could have optionally left at that point if it just wanted to declare an easy victory. Civil wars can go on forever (and given Iraq was a forced together nation of three major groups that dislike each other, it's likely going to).

The US achieved its primary goal in Afghanistan very quickly as well. It wiped out nearly all the organizing and attack projection capabilities that Al Qaeda had in using Afghanistan as a haven. The primary objective was not to kill all the Taliban. The Taliban was a different, optional objective. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is now a civil war between multiple factions that all want power.

Hence "cycle of violence"; the US launched its second invasion of Iraq, starting the war. It then declared victory and eventually left, having defeated and disbanded the conventional army of Iraq - but that did not stop the fighting. Car bombs are stil regularly going off in Iraq.

> wiped out nearly all the organizing and attack projection capabilities that Al Qaeda had in using Afghanistan as a haven

It's questionable as to how much they had in the first place ... and yet, Al-Nusra, an AQ-derived splinter organisation, is now fighting alongside US-backed groups in Syria. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/are-al-qaed...

We even now have weird indirect US-Iraq-Iran cooperation against ISIS. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/field/field...

> end the cycle of violence with bombs

Worked post WWII most places.

Really only for Germany and Japan, only because those were state-led wars. Not for any of the subsequent conflicts; Korean war isn't even really over yet.

No national swipes on HN, please. They lead to flamewars, and it's easy to make your substantive point without them.

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

Not for me, because maybe I deserve the downvotes, but in controversial topics like this please try to not downvote other people just because of different point of views.

I am seeing good opinions being downvoted... why? The karma system is not a popularity contest.

I'll admit i wasn't too impressed when the USA started killing British civilians in Iraq and Syria with drones.

Murder each other as much as you see fit but can we at least respect the rule of law and have these ISIS members stand trial in the future?

People in military uniforms, that are part of a (well-?) organised group armed with small arms and heavy weapons that is currently fighting against other military and paramilitary groups, can not with 100% honesty be called civilians...

I think that if you introduce a kind of mechanism that gives so much power in the hands of a selected and unaccountable few, you are on the road of corruption of power.

You're right, it isn't - and that's why the military solution exists.

Who would command those drone strikes? A neutral party, that would not target specific people who are in the way of some specific interests?

I can imagine that if you weild those tools where there are interests, a lot of hands will want to grab the controls and point them at people not involved with the original problem.