[xmonkee]

>you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family's table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you.

Man, fuck these people. Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross.

[saurik]

> Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross.

FWIW, Captain America's character arc throughout the MCU, at least (which is what I'd assume we mean by "Hollywood"), has largely been to realize that he can't actually trust the government and that not only is the government now corrupt (becoming so during his time skip), but it has always been just as bad: the "good government" he believed in from WWII was propaganda, it turned out SHIELD was a so deeply infiltrated with enemy spies that it was effectively an arm of HYDRA... even the UN's attempts at diplomacy inherently result in moral compromises that he refuses to accept, and, by the end, he ended up as a fugitive. I think you'd be hard pressed to watch these movies and think that Captain America's existence demonstrates that America would never cross such lines.

[pmarreck]

A lot of people bash the Marvel content for essentially having the depth of an arcade beat-em-up, but the character arcs of Cap and Iron Man alone through the movies is something to behold IMHO

[keepamovin]

What is the alternative, ask them not to tell?

If you had to make the decision in the moment how would you weigh compromising the chance to prevent thousands or millions of deaths for advanced warning of nuclear or other attack using your ability to install that monitoring equipment now or in future, versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area?

You have to live with the moral cost, and human conflict means these choices have to be made.

[chubot]

What happens if you just abort the mission? Probably nothing, and certainly doing nothing is less likely to provoke war and further escalation than murdering civilians, hoping no one notices, and then having a front page NY Times article published about it later

If North Korean spies murdered fisherman off the coast of California on a failed mission, you bet there would be blowback

If they were simply noticed, the US govt might be able to and be incentivized to downplay it. Similar to downplaying whatever drones were flying over NJ

[keoneflick]

> What is the alternative, ask them not to tell?

The moment the seals fired the rifles the mission was over, a complete failure.

So the obvious alternative was to abort without killing everyone. The vaunted seals can't escape from a fishing boat? Nothing was accomplished by this mission other than killing a bunch of fishermen. For shame.

[impossiblefork]

The alternative is not murdering anybody and leaving.

You don't have a right to kill civilians and being discovered can never be a justification for doing so.

You can only kill actual combatants.

[mlhpdx]

False dichotomy. There were many other options available.

[lifeformed]

If I break into your home to steal something, and accidentally wake you up, is the only reasonable option for me to shoot you?

[lifeformed]

> versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area?

So what? Then you fight the people proven to be hostile or run away. At no point is executing innocents an option that should be on the table in that situation. If things go wrong and escalate to a life threatening situation for you, then that's one the risks YOU consented to. It's not a risk that civilians are responsible for.

Maybe you get killed, or there is political fallout, but both of those situations are a better outcome than killing civilians.

[NewJazz]

Amazon is showing Homelander do exactly this though haha.

[gamblor956]

The Winter Soldier was literally a film about how Captain America had to stop America from doing something like this because murdering innocents was a line that those in charge were perfectly willing to cross.

[xmonkee]

Do you not understand that that is also just more finely processed american propaganda? Captain America represents the "real" America, one that will not compromised by the corruption in our system. I think after the 90s it was just too much to show all Americans as the good guys, so now we do this dance where we are still essentially good, and we just have to stand strong against the bad guys within.