context: the 
-fan high school friend I’ve complained about before, I’m pressing him on his debate daddy’s claim that nuking the Gaza Strip and annihilating the entire population of it would not be an act of genocide
He tries to say it depends on the context, and I’m like, ‘elaborate’ 
Here is the hypothetical scenario in which an Israeli nuke is launched into the Gaza Strip, killing everybody in it, where purportedly no one is guilty of genocide. I am going to try my best to quote this conversation as close to how it played out as I can.
Let’s say, a rogue IDF soldier sees one Hamas guy in the Gaza Strip, and he launches a nuke to deal with him.
That would still be genocide, dude, the rogue IDF soldier would have committed an act of genocide.
It wouldn’t, because–
What do you mean it wouldn’t?
Because he’s using the nuke without the special intent to kill everyone in the Gaza Strip, he’s using it to get the Hamas guy-
No, wait, when you’re launching a– if you unleash a WMD the results of the action is a responsibility you take on and can be assigned to your– unless a fucking breeze literally takes your nuke and puts it somewhere else, it’s– you assume responsibility for the consequences of your actions, especially if you can comprehend them, which I’m not even going to consider people not knowing what nukes do to be valid.
But it wouldn’t be genocide! He doesn’t have the special intent.
How the fuck did this rogue soldier get the nuclear codes anyways 
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
Zeno's school of genocide denial: well to cleanse a group, first you must cleanse half the group. And half a group is still a group. By induction, it takes an infinite amount of steps, and therefore time, to cleanse groups, therefore no genocide has ever happened. QED.
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.
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Uuuuh, i think we have a problem here.
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
'uhm, actually, that would be manslaughter
' i say as the kinetic projectile follows a trajectory at an accelerating rate into my biomatterIt's only murder if it comes from the murder region of northern Canada, otherwise it's just sparkling manslaughter
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.
Show
Is this something that can be proven in The Hague? Of course not. But OJ was acquitted by a court too, y'know?
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.
even better, have a dog press the nuclear launch button. that way you can kill everyone without ever committing any act of aggression. after all, the dog didnt intend to nuke the world...
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?
Because he started out with the assumption that the actions of Israel must be defended, then he started coming up with an argument and this is the best he could do. People like this don't learn things or come to realizations, if the argument they're making falls apart they will just start looking for another argument that defends the same point and if they can't come up with another one they'll just assume that someone smarter than them must have a good reason even if they can't point to any evidence for that
but acting like someone would launch a nuke with the intent to just kill one person is insane.
OP's friend's concept of nukes coming from fallout 3
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 found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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!"
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Also libs and chuds love to cry about "intention" because it can never be truly known and you can speculate that monsters you love have a noble intention when they are doing monstrosity. How is anyone gonna measure intention. You can completely use this "intention" to paint your enemies as more evil for doing same shit your monster did.
"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.
