Must be a lot of americans in Elite if everyone just wants to shoot first.
Thargoids could have completely destroyed the Aegis spacestations. Yet they didn't. They retaliated, with restraint. What they did was simply send a message... you steal from us or attack us, we shoot back. But in their retaliation they were far from as bloodthirsty as they could have been.
Still, despite all this, people are going "lets shoot them!".
Critical thinking is a rare commodity these days.
We reap what we sow, and we press on with violence that's what we get.
Did they retaliate with restraint? Or did they attack with a more subtle purpose? Who knows how many station escape pods/people they abducted after their attack, which crippled the station but left people alive to rescue/abduct.
I think they're just testing our defenses, used this attack to abduct more people, and to tie up our resources. There is that old adage about a severely injured enemy soldier being more valuable than a dead one, as it ties up enemy resources retrieving/treating the wounded.
Also, where was there restraint when they fired on that prison ship (megaship) a few weeks ago? In both cases, we have logs showing that humans took ZERO provocative actions and the Thargoids attacked anyway. And you can still see them scooping up escape pods from that ship. If they are so benign, why haven't ANY of these escape pod occupants been returned to us?
We know of only three space faring races so far in this universe (in our galaxy). The Guardians, masters of biotech, who used automated (and probably organic) weapon systems/soldiers to wipe themselves out in a religious civil war. Then we have the Thargoids, a totally organic-tech race, that have been fighting a civil war between two factions for at least a few hundred years; this race also hates Guardian tech, probably because they're the descendants of those Guardian biotech weapon systems/soldiers. And there is humanity.
At what point do you want to start fighting back? Various Native American groups (e.g. Incas) welcomed Europeans. That worked out well. Wonder how the world would've turned out if Native American tribes had been hostile and repelled every initial land fall?
As for your comment about Americans, exactly how many World Wars did we start? Yes, our current foreign policy, only made worse under the MAGA orange dufus, is in a downward spiral. That doesn't mean we all want to shoot first at everything. (And yes I did vote, I voted for Hillary, and I was politically engaged the entire time)
As for myself, I'm losing my patience with the Thargoid apologists. The ones who keep claiming "We don't know they did such and such attack" just because the dead ships bear the marks of corrosive weapons and Thargoid ships happen to be there, scooping up survivors. Then we get footage documenting their unprovoked attack (prison ship), and video footage in the case of the stations, and now it's "Oh, it's a just a limited retaliation."
Whatever. I'm done. I've read the official books and seen more of what these aliens are up to then has been publicly revealed in the game so far. Feel free to keep saying "give peace a chance" and making offers to appease the Thargoids. I'm going to go rescue civilians - something I've been doing since I started playing this game 2 years ago, rescuing escape pods from crashes on planets in my Sidewinder - and maybe start fighting the Thargoids. I have an engineered AX FGS on standby in Merope, but haven't used it yet. Yep, all of us who don't trust the Thargoids are just warmongers blasting the crap out of them... ugh.