thats such a bs argument. literally any nazi could’ve been like “i was just killing one person at a time, i didnt intend to eradicate an entire people”. there’s a reason we didn’t allow the “just following orders” defense to pass

“special intent” is a horrible definition of genocide bc intent is near impossible to prove. also intent doesnt really matter, outcome does. there’s no real difference between dropping a nuke on Gaza bc u want to eradicate all Palestinians and dropping a nuke on Gaza “to kill one Hamas guy”. there’s only a difference to libs who want to live in a fantasy world where hitler was some once-in-a-millennium cosmic evil while the IDF is just trying to secure the existence of israel and a future for Jewish children

no he has a point. if you didn't have that soldier in a fmri machine to detect the presence of the Racism Tesseract at the exact millisecond his brain decided to launch the nuke then we cannot say he did anything wrong.

Reckless disregard for an entire group of people doesn't count as special intent?

Sure bro, knowing that you're going to wipe out every living Palestinian in Gaza but you not caring about that fact is definitely different to specifically intending on wiping out every living Palestinian in Gaza in a qualitative sense /s

Pressing the big red button is special intent as far as I'm concerned.

Is this something that can be proven in The Hague? Of course not. But OJ was acquitted by a court too, y'know?

By that ridiculous logic you could murder this guy and get away with it. See you just fire a gun at his direction and it hits him and it kills him. It's not murder though, you didn't have the special intent to kill him. You were just firing a gun in his direction and it hit him. That's not really your fault, you're totally innocent in this. Him dying was a completely unavoidable thing

With all due respect, I don't think you should waste your precious and limited time on Earth talking to this guy.

If I drop a bomb on a bank because there are robbers inside it I am not responsible for that bomb killing all of the bank employees because I only dropped that bomb with the intent of getting the robbers.

its morally permissable and wouldnt constitute a genocide to nuke every single major american city just on the off chance Trump is in one of them

This conversation would be reason enough for me to never speak to this person again so I'm glad they told you who they are

Intent is definitely important in determining genocide, but acting like someone would launch a nuke with the intent to just kill one person is insane. The effects and radius of nukes are well known, it would obviously kill more than just the one guy and the person who launched it would know that. How can he not hear how insane that sounds?

To take this seriously: legally, genocidal intent does not mean "you can't prove my mental state therefore not guilty". Requiring intent may not be the best standard, but even within the UN convention defninition, intent is usually inferred from the sum of actions taken, and euphemisms and rhetoric used in statements, and such, it is not taken as a requirement of definitive proof of the (fundamentally unprovable) mental state of the perpetrators. For example in the Srebrenica trials, the act of mass killing itself, with an awareness of the consequences it would have, was taken as the factual basis for specific intent all on its own. just "you killed a bunch of members of the group, knowing full well it would decimate their population in the region, that's genocide." If anything dropping a nuke would be far more clear cut.

Bullshit "gotcha" technicalities don't actually work IRL when you are being judged by other humans, not law-following robots. The only way I could see this hypothetical soldier not being guilty of genocide is if they were ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial, like to the point that they actually did not realize what they were doing and what the consequences would be. And even then I would think there would be a case to be brought against the israelis collectively, if not that one person.

BadEmpanada's video on this is decent background though you have to hop around a bit to find the parts that are relevant to this hypothetical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRDyitlHVRA

I'm going to use the cod ghosts continent disintegration ray to take out this one debate pervert. By his own logic this is fine.

"It couldn't be clearer, Homer is definitely not guilty of eating that pie!"

IOF is going to use this logic and just have a button for launching nukes somewhere with a sign that says 'DO NOT PUSH'. "How can we be guilty of genocide? The sign said not to push!"

Punch him. There was a fly on his nose.

"Your honor, it was a negligent genocide, so my client should get a reduced sentence for genociding Gaza"

This is the shit that happens when people don't read theory, they don't even take a passing glace to scroll through the wikipedia article for mens rea.

He wants to use a nuke, capable of vaporizing large portions of land, to kill a single Hamas soldier. The intent is there.

It's the same fucking logic that the US and hell, Israel, have used to justify killing scores of civilians just so they can take out single enemy combatants. A war crime is a war crime. Genocide is genocide. If you are willing to kill millions so that you can claim a victory over a few enemy combatant then you are, by your actions, saying you do t care for the lives of those other people and their lives are forfeit because they just happened to be in the wrong place.

this is literally just sam harris style mental masturbation that michael brooks used to make fun of

Trying to do 'lawyering' about an ongoing genocide

if one Palestinian is still alive in Gaza, then Israel hasn't actually done a genocide
and if all Palestinians in Gaza are killed by Israel, it's still not a genocide if that wasn't their intent

According to that logic:

If you shoot the debate bro to make him shut the fuck up, you're not committing murder because it doesn't have the special intent to commit murder, shooting him is simply a means to make him shut the fuck up.

“Intent” may signify an action taken with a purpose to achieve a given result, but the term includes as well an action taken with awareness that a given result will follow. The additional intent for genocide is a state of mind that accompanies the requisite acts. In that regard, it is unlike the intent required under a criminal statute prohibiting, for example, assault with intent to kill, where the actor assaults while anticipating a harm to the victim beyond the harm involved in the assault. The additional intent for genocide relates instead to what is anticipated to result from the underlying act. The act is part of the destruction of the group of which the victim is a member. The District Court of Jerusalem, in convicting Adolf Eichmann of genocide, explained that “the people, in whole or in part, is the victim of the extermination which befalls it in consequence of the extermination of its sons and daughters.” (A-G v. Eichmann, Judgment 1961 ¶190) The group, in other words, becomes a secondary victim upon performance of the act.

Link to full article, couldn't be assed paraphrasing myself.

This means if you're racist enough and consider a group not just inferior humans, but non-humans entirely, you can't be committing genocide, there's no intent on genocide in your brain waves.

good thing we're not in that hypothetical then, all these motherfuckers are blatantly acknowledging their "special intent" on live TV/social media/everywhere they can every 5 mins

Punch them and say it's not assault because you were aiming for Hamas

Do you have a good therapist - what did they say about this? Because the last one I went to was like "stop reading the news, Joe Biden is not gonna ask you how to solve America's problems".

I need a therapist that lets me vent about the utter horror that it is living in American society - with the occasional reminder/suggestion to do a gratitude journal.

We already know they think nothing to open fire on Palestinians for fun, so this hypothetical the IOF soldier used a highly destructive measure against a single person with no concern of the damage to those also within the effective area of the bomb because he wants to inflict that damage.

You dont burn a house down to kill a fly.

Your debatebro guy is absolutely hilarious. Dunk tank level take from him here.

Zionist theory: imagine a frictionless genocide in a vacuum.....

Wild that his hypothetical rests on a guy who somehow has access and authority to use nukes, will use them on a single person, AND somehow doesn't understand what a nuke would do the rest of the country and the surrounding human beings.

I'm hoping the sheer depravity of your friend's argument eventually triggers some deep self reflection leading to a change in their perspective. I used to have a lot of chud views, but I had friends who patiently explained things to me and even if I didn't get it right away, we stayed friends because they knew I was a good person, I was just confused.

See if you can get them to watch something other than Destiny though. Or maybe read actual books

What’s even at stake here? Like, let’s say we agree that this doesn’t fit the definition of genocide, so what? What does it matter? It would never happen, and even if it somehow did happen, it would still be an unforgivable atrocity that Israel would be responsible for by association.

This is like arguing about the difference between involuntary manslaughter and criminal negligence resulting in death. Possibly interesting for legal perverts, but definitely not in any way meaningful compared to someone being dead.

Honestly if this person agrees with everything Destiny says, or most everything, he's probably just too big a fan to want to acknowledge that Destiny is wrong and frankly a bad person. Everything he's concocting to defend Israel is probably coming from investing himself too deeply in Destiny, that or/and he just doesn't care about the lives of Palestinians.

This hypothetical is extremely stupid for the very simple reason that Zionists, ranging from rando nobodies all the way up to Netanyahu and his handpicked ghouls, have all expressed genocidal intent to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. The lesson here is you should never entertain his dumbass hypothetical. Just repeatedly bludgeon his head with material reality.

The energy these freaks spend trying to get away with committing horrible crimes...

Is this about mr borelli? Just spent an hour replying to all of his pathetic cultists running damage control in the youtube comments, they really are disgusting freaks

How many civilians should I be morally correct (and allowed without consequence) in killing to kill one of my "enemies"?