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kistaro | 4 years ago

Other things that lead to increased deaths: the Russian military intentionally bombing civilians.

I usually oppose “whataboutism” but I can’t bring myself to do it here. This is a war where the nation of Russia has decided to murder Ukrainians. Means to interfere with Russia’s blood-soaked campaign must be viewed not in isolation, but in the context of what they are attempting to stop.

To be clear, I am not making a general purpose “the end justifies the means” argument. I am making a narrow and specific “the circumstances justify extreme behavior with severe externalities” argument.

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slavik81|4 years ago

What ends were achieved? Has sabotaging node-ipc made any measurable progress towards stopping the war? The danger when you let the ends justify the means is that when you don't achieve your ends, then you haven't justified your means.

yyyk|4 years ago

This fails the 'proportionality' test. Contrary to popular knowledge, it does not refer to number of civilians killed*, but to whether any legal goal could reasonably be achieved proportionate to the hurt.

Now, there's nothing this action could achieve aside from making people angry, becoming Russian propaganda-fodder, reducing trust in NPM, etc, in any remotely likely scenario. So any damage is a crime, and arguably even the possibility of damage is a crime.

* A strike on head of ISIS while being surrounded with a class of children might pass this test. Similarly even if one side (say ISIS supporters) has more civilians killed that does not imply a crime by itself.

hutzlibu|4 years ago

"Other things that lead to increased deaths: the Russian military intentionally bombing civilians."

Yes, this is a warcrime. But the proposed solution is to react with a warcrime?

I do not agree.