@carlmalamud you had mine.
@misc when they become instruments, their function is something other than “idea” in the sense of working anything out.
i stand with the humans, and against the categories and affiliations that unnecessarily divide us against one another.
over at the bad place, just read a guy describe refugees as “colonizers”.
simple analytical categories applied to messy humans conceal more than they reveal, and become information-space weapons rather than sources of insight.
like other kinds of weapons, once they’re out there, you never control who gets to shoot and who gets killed.
love of money is so much better than love of land, because money can always be compensated, while two people (or "peoples") attached to the same piece of land, each insistent on exclusively controlling it, have nothing to do but murder.
"never again" means throughly refashioning social realities so that the events don't occur.
not reacting indignantly when they do occur under conditions that render them inevitable.
it’s not a social media site, it’s a free fire zone in all the world’s information wars.
@mediocratese (thanks!)
“I swear that all my lying was the bravest form of truth” ~Rose Polenzani https://music.apple.com/us/album/parhelion/15204672?i=15204670
@cshentrup gotta love his UBI take.
what ever happened to milk and honey?
when a hospital is blown up, everybody immediately knows who did it.
everybody just immediately knows different answers.
(and of course the videos and OSINT prove them all right.)
@LesterB99 do you think anyone who meaningfully follows these things is unaware that both parties have pretty egregiously and routinely committed what at least seem on their face to be war crimes?
(the legal standards include scope for mitigations and necessity and stuff, so “seem in their face” is not the same as “ICC would rule”, even if it were totally impartial.)
@LesterB99 i don’t pretend to know the answers on this stuff. but one has to weigh any deterrent effect against entrenchment and desperation effects. if war crime trials for Putin are prerequisite to a peace deal, there will be no peace deal. if a leader thinks he’ll be hanged if he doesn’t win, he’ll fight to his country’s death. 1/
@LesterB99 also, perception that rules are unevenly applied is itself a cause of war, as some countries don’t think there’s a less violent dispute resolution forum that won’t be rigged against them. i don’t want to overweight Putin’s public pretexts, but he justifies the war in part by claiming the “rules-based order” is just a fig-leaf for an unfair system where the US makes and breaks the rules. /fin
@llimllib there’s been quite a lot of war. video and close quarters misery somehow seemed less present with aleppo, raqqa, mosul, ethiopia, tigray, afghanistan, etc. but first ukraine and now gaza sure are bringing it all unbearably home. i’m not sure that even in these conflicts with first-person shooter atrocity and crying children recounting heads exploding and hospitals blown up on camera all this exposure has led to less tolerance for war. 1/
@llimllib it seems as much to stoke (and often manipulatively to direct) our anger as to provoke demands for peace. /fin
@LouisIngenthron i hate experience.
in my younger, techoutopian days i imagined that the internet would make war so unbearable—once distant agonies would become so horrible and palpable—that it would be the end of war.
i was right about the first part.
@LesterB99 nobody found guilty ever is innocent, in the broadest sense.
putting aside justice towards the accused, the question is does this framework help or hinder (or neither) good outcomes in terms of preventing war and atrocity in the first place. what if we made ordering combat punishable by death (if the ICC gets you), but enforced that unevenly. would that help?
@LesterB99 sure, if ICC is the standard, do you think it will be evenhanded?
i don’t think it’s the court of public opinion pointing out very often that war crimes by international law definitions are committed by the US over the course of most administrations. most Americans certainly don’t know this, but I think it’s nevertheless true, and not always clearly unjustifiable. was Trump’s “no kid gloves” war on ISIS justified by its success despite its means, like Dresden?
@LesterB99 i guess i think that “war crimes” is an aspirational but broken formulation, that it’s either tautological (war is crime!), or or conditional on so many circumstances and tradeoffs that no crime-like legal code could hold and be fairly adjudicated.
holding war criminals and genocidaires to account is fundamentally a political matter, and aspects of victors’ justice inevitably seep into it (but as a political matter we should absolutely hold some to account!)
@LesterB99 never leaving the country again would basically become the price of high US officialdom. Trump crushed ISIS with lots of war crimes. Obama drones. W… ha! Do we think Clinton is a war criminal? (bc Serbia? what about not acting in Rwanda?!) Bush/Reagan if connections to death squad Latin Am were revealed. Etc.