Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants. ISIS slaughter wantonly. Some people have a world view that needs to see the US and ISIS as equivalently evil.

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/

"Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

ISIS seems to have a similarly broad definition. No, they're not morally equivalent, but we have serious issues with how we prosecute the War on Terror.

Wow, that's exactly what Judith Butler is talking about when she talks about which lives are grievable and which are not[1].

[1] https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_16/review...

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

How do you know? What downsides are there to targeting non-combatants? And how do you define non-combatants. Person in the field with a stick in their hand, is that a combatant? A wedding, is it a combatant gathering.

If anything it actaully helps to target civilians because it promotes creating and perpetuating more resentment, which in turn provides more opportunities to do drone strikes, make more drones, repair more drones, get promotions based on drone operations, etc.

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

IIRC Laura Poitros's talk at the CCC a few days alluded to the fact that targets on drone "kill lists" have values assigned to them -- denoting specifically the acceptable threshold of non-combatant collateral damage.