I'm going to repost and elaborate on a reply of mine that appears to be shadow dead with no explanation. This doesn't seem to be the usual result of disagreement flagging. The only problem I can see is that perhaps this did not meet the level of substantiveness expected from an HN comment (OTOH I don't see how what it was replying to would meet this either, and mine is at least coming from the direction of intellectual curiosity!)

"Perfect example of how no one thinks they're the villain in their own story"

To be clear, the comment I'm replying to is justifying "mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms" based on some amorphous other "players" supposedly not valuing their own life (as a hypothetical soldier!). If this isn't a stark illustration of how individual people in a cycle of violence justify their own crimes to themselves, I don't know what is.

The position would make sense in the context of say a street mugging where the victim ends up shooting the assailant. It might make sense in the context of domestic policing where the subject of an arrest attacks the police (modulo the usual moral hazard wherein cops create pretexts to claim they were being attacked). But in the context of this article and the proceeding comment, I don't see how it is anything but a rationalization for some pretty sick violence.

[dead]