Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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There's a reason why police and military are not the same thing. I don't remember offhand how many people died on the Pacific front in World War II, but I'm pretty sure it's more than died at Pearl Harbor. And at least at Pearl Harbor the US had the option of not entering the war and not getting any more Americans killed. The idea that you should not kill any more of the enemy than the enemy kills of you is something you and a lot of other people have basically made up. (And why aren't you counting the projected deaths from the murderer as the murderer killing a few people at a time until forever, thus resulting in infinite projected deaths anyway?)
Also, what do you do if the enemy decides to deliberately surround himself with civilians so as to maximize the civilian casualties from attacking him?
You're killing far, far more civilians than your enemy does (unless of course you now declared said civilians the enemy as well). You can't say that about any allied nation in WW2.
The same as what you already do when they surround themselves with Israeli citizens.