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Comment by avoutos | Hacker News Reader

Well, there are other things you can look at. For one, Khamenei was dictator of a regime that abducts women and recently murdered 10s of thousands of protesters in the streets. I'd reckon most, including Iranians, would not judge the killing of such an individual immoral, unjust or uncivilized.

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I don't know whether I'm "kidding" or not, but I might as well post what immediately came to mind as I read this:

Sandra Bland et al.

ICE detainments

The excess 20k (as far as absolute numbers go) road fatalities in the US versus Iran.

And the excess I-have-no-idea-how-many-k who died under Trump's bungled COVID response (and who are going to die from Biden's bungled rail strike response)(and who died under Obama's failed healthcare half-measure)(and who died under Bush's bungled Katrina response and because of his pre-9/11 mismanagement).

Yes, yes, per-capita and all that. I'm not really making a rational argument here, just appealing to the truthiness of noticing that America has its own way of killing its citizens.

    > because of his pre-9/11 mismanagement

I'm not here to defend GW Bush. He did many stupid things. But I don't recall a lot of criticism around his "pre-9/11 mismanagement". Can you offer some specifics? The hunt for Osama Bin Laden started (at least) with Clinton and continued with GW Bush. Unfortunately, neither was able to stop him before the 9/11 attacks.

It's well-known that the FBI and CIA had information that, if they'd been more amenable to collaboration, probably would have led them to the conclusion that an attack was imminent. The entire reason why the DHS was created was because the jealous compartmentalization of each agency's intelligence is why we didn't catch it.

Some quick temperature-check reading from around the time of the 9/11 Commission: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/weekinreview/the-world-an...

There was a cottage industry in elaborating the theory that Bush and his administration were unnecessarily caught flat-footed or even knew the attacks were imminent.

Richard Clarke is a good place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke

He seemed more interested in publicity and exaggerating his own bureaucratic importance than being objective—tendencies the political opposition and media were in no mood to criticize.

But YMMV.

Rail strike response casualties? Can you flesh that out a bit?

Everything that has and will happen due to poor working conditions after he broke the rail strike in 2022. The cause celebre was the East Palestine derailment, but conditions are still unconscionable, and it's hard to conceive of a situation where rail laborers are overworked and under-supported doesn't result in more, and worse, incidents like that one. And then, of course, there are the knock-on environmental and economic effects.

It's not the only objectionable thing Biden's administration is solely responsible for, just the one that came to mind.

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