I think you guys are taking what I said earlier on this thread out of context. When I was comparing the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to what Google was doing with The Pentagon by automating drone strikes with artificial intelligence, I was referring to the scope of how deadly one incident was to another. It had nothing to do with disregarding one incident to another because at the end of the day, a war crime is a war crime. Of course these incidents matter to me, it pains me whenever tragedies like this occur as my thoughts, prayers, and condolences always go out to the families, friends, and victims.
Ok, I'll confess to having been too obnoxious, but I really do question why you picked such an atrocious historical event for your analogy. It's like when people compare Trump to Hitler - the comparison is so obviously hyperbolic that it delegitimises reams and reams of rightful criticism of the turd. It comes across as hysterical.
Can we move out of the habit of minimizing atrocities simply because we have the capacity to point somewhere else in the world, or somewhere else in history where something worse is taking/took place? This kind of reasoning is endemic and really hurtful to progress. Take for example, low wage workers who want higher wages. We often hear them derided as spoiled brats because people in Western nations don't know what real poverty is. Having trouble paying your rent? Worried about health care? Can't afford heat and electric for the winter months? Well, that's just too damn bad and you should shut the **** up, because somewhere, someone, in a third world country is starving to death and plum full of parasites!
I come from a slightly different place - I think we are fortunate to live in a fundamentally boring part of Western history and that all the exciting stuff is happening elsewhere in the world, and the exciting stuff is overwhelmingly positive. Younger people have grown up on a fantastically varied media diet and are familiar with history like never before, and I strongly suspect the largely comfortable reality of Western life fails to live up to the strife-ridden ideal of modern TV, film and literature.
Amongst the alt-right, you'll see neckbeards cling to historical periods they feel give them agency, namely the crusades. They
love the idea of going in to physically battle for a culture under existential threat against a nebulous heathen outgroup, because their own lives are comfortable, unfulfilling and unchallenging (well, it's challenging in ways they don't like).
I feel it's more complex with elements of the left, but there are similar trends. I might be unduly nonplussed because I live in a relatively sane part of the Anglosphere, but it seems there's a strain of leftist who wishes they were alive under Jim Crow, because then there is a
real battle to fight against monstrous oppression. It would be easier if Trump
were Hitler, because they're a fulfilling simplicity in picking up a stick and going to war. Civilian casualties caused by drone strikes aren't just terrible, they're as bad as nuclear weapons.
I think I may have been partly defined by Kony 2012. I remember watching that video, I remember how powerful it was, and I remember how my niggling doubt was completely justified when I did some background checks. Nothing makes me suspicious like righteous outrage.