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Settler leftists who have put their heads so far up their asses with "scientific socialism" that they actually believe in pure objective reality, deride morals as idealist and thus demeaning, and couch every argument in terms of some self-superior "rationality" that barely masks how much personal emotional projection is going into propping up their narrow world-view and rejecting anything that threatens their confirmation bias.

The kind of people who are supposedly interested in mass organization, but who look down on the actual masses as less rational, less intelligent, less pure, superstitious and backwards compared to their oh-so-educated secular European ideal.

The most annoying part is they'll pick a single sentence out of something you've said to argue an entire imaginary point on that is just being materialist according to them, but somehow always results in picking fights with marginalized people while asserting that it can't possibly be interpreted as a defense of the oppressor, because they never specifically said they support the oppressors. It's obviously a coincidence that they spend so much time randomly talking down to "comrades."

Then what precisely are you doing with this comment? /genuinely asking

I thought I repeatedly explained it, but let me try more general terms and see if that helps. Coming upon the correct solution does not mean that you used a good method for determining how to solve something ("a broken clock" is the most common example). It can be correct to kill enemy soldiers (it frequently is and I make no argument against it being correct here, and suggest it probably is correct), but that doesn't mean that every possible reason that leads to that conclusion is a good reason, and this matters because if we identify poor reasoning as being good reasoning thanks to it just happening to work out in one circumstance, then we are investing confidence in something that will surely lead us astray in the future.

I was not aware that killing enemy soldiers in war is "contorting one's approach." /genuinely sarcastic but also confused

I repeatedly say that the conclusion being right or wrong is not what makes it a contortion, but that considering arbitrary moral values over material outcomes (e.g. actually protecting the people of your country) is detrimental to the people you position yourself as caring about.

their continued happiness and their lives are salt in the wound; their suffering and their deaths are at least a bitter shred of solace, grim satisfaction that at least those bastards didn't completely get away with it.

Would you like a slash on your shoulder with salt in it or you and your family being shredded to pieces with no salt involved? You can say "bitter" this and "grim" that to paper over the hollowness of the moralistic reasoning here, but ultimately you are prioritizing the salt over more wounds by doing so.

And I will repeat again because of whatever unknown difficulty in communication here that blasting troops is frequently the right thing to do, but that if you have a choice for whatever reason between blasting a troop because it feels good versus actually helping the war effort by keeping them alive (maybe you have an effective hostage or something), you should choose the latter.

You may be surprised how many people who've been brutalized by the empire want -- no, need -- revenge in order to move on and perform some semblance of rebuilding.

No, they don't "need" it, and this is a ridiculous idea when you look at it seriously.

I say this not because it's pertinent to Iran but because it is pertinent to the broader point you're making: A major element of the greatness of the Chinese Revolution is that Mao understood that people often had to die (or be driven out with a stick, like many of the landlords) but strongly believed that people could be rehabilitated and that there was often great value in rehabilitating them. There are many people who were captured by the Chinese communists who did terrible things and would never suffer fractionally like the suffering they inflicted, but that's fine because there is no moral ledger that would thereby be balanced and no brooding "grim satisfaction" would outweigh them actually helping the revolution, as they would often go on to do. Though not great in number, it's worth remembering that with the Korean War this ended up also including American soldiers, whose testimony against their own country was such a serious concern that the west needed to basically invent myths about Chinese mind control ("brainwashing," a literal translation of how Mao once described rehabilitation, a joking analogy to a Daoist practice that can be translated as "heart washing") to try to erase their claims. Their defection and testimony remains useful to us socialists even today. Incidentally, the same can also be said of the testimony of people who didn't defect but who were treated without sadism in prison, and we have records of Korean revolutionaries taking pride in the fact that they weren't cruel to their captives despite their captives often being quite cruel people themselves. The Blowback series talks about this.

Che, likewise, participated in fighting, summary execution, etc., but once things stabilized he outlined and led a procedure for trying the remaining captives and was emphatic that they could not be tried by their victims, but by uninvolved people (with extensive testimony from surviving victims who wanted to offer it, of course) so that they could determine the best way of dealing with each defendant rather than have their actions dictated by maladaptive sadism (which is what this "need" for revenge fundamentally is). To my knowledge, this was still quite liable to end in execution or prison sentences and hard labor, because again my point here isn't to fetishize mercy for the sake of mercy -- that would of course also be moralism -- but to emphasize that we need to be concerned with the material outcome.

Real victory is when people kill your family and you don't kill theirs back, I guess

No, real victory is when you win the war instead of optimizing for suffering regardless of other consequences. Real victory involves inflicting a great deal of suffering -- often deliberately, to demoralize troops, etc. -- but that is not the goal, winning is. See the hostage point again.

When the fuck did "morality" become a dirty word on the supposed Left anyway? I've been seeing more criticisms of having a sense of right and wrong and justice and fairness around here lately which seems incredibly ass-backwards.

Theoretically, a lot of people here are Marxists, and while people may be motivated by moral sentiments (and that is perfectly fine), we shouldn't conflate that with moralistic reasoning contorting our actual objectives away from the ultimate goal of benefiting the working class. It is critical to Marx's basic framework of "scientific socialism" that, though he quite obviously had passionate moral feelings and these feelings helped him to do great work, he was not arguing from moral axioms but from empirical reality.