Taking it back to Gaza, a genocide is a genocide. It’s an attempt at eradication of a whole group of people. Of course it’s heinous, and it’s difficult for me to think of any other way to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, which clearly is the goal as said by their own nationalists, without killing the people there. If there are kids there, they will be involved.
This is inherently heinous, by virtue of its scale and overarching goal. The fact that it necessitates killing children is simply obvious to me, and in no way changes how I see the whole thing. It’s like pointing out a candle when the whole house is already on fire.
I suppose a core difference is I’m not really trying to convince anyone of anything regarding Gaza though. Lemmy is overwhelmingly against the genocide, which I think is good and correct. I’m more interested in personally understanding various things, and correcting misinformation when I run into it, particularly with regards to history or science. Which is why I originally jumped in to talk about the prevalence of genocides in the modern era.
Back to child murder, you’re still applying an inherent value, this time on the good of the society, where children have more years ahead of them. This is still a cultural influence, a purely objective position would not apply additional value to anything like human health or happiness. Nobody has to care about the future, and I’d say recent times illustrate that a great many people even desire a future of human extinction. All these apocalypse-cheering types you run into online, the hardcore religious rapture folks, groups like that. I do not agree with these positions, but I cannot understand them unless I am capable of being coldly objective about these things.