one inconsistency among people with views, well, views like mine, is that we think we have learned you can’t export democracy at the point of a gun, but when we solutionize about Israel/Palestine we kind of assume we can. Israel should vouchsafe for Palestinians in Gaza a democratic state with sovereign control of its borders. but in 2006 elections in Gaza didn’t portend ongoing democracy. does Israel have the ability to encourage democracy and just cynically not, or do they just not have a way?
@stephenjbell lunar! oops.
is it dehumanizing to accuse people of dehumanizing?
@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.