Posts by Sam F
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So, where's a good starting point? Looking at the Wikileak video and saying 'hey, what if it was all a catastrophic mistake?' I think it's quite clearly not the case, but what if it had been? How would it change the much broader picture of what technowar has been allowed to become, and how instrumental it has been in selling military interventions to the moderate Left, on the grounds that these days we have a technology that enables us to only kill the really bad guys?
Well, if you disagree strongly (I certainly do) with what technowar has become, and with the way it's been sold as ideal precision warfare to the moderate Left and to everybody else, then surely it's instructive to maybe bring an assumption that goes against your views ("what if it was all a mistake") to your viewing of the video? And thus allowing the various bits of evidence for it *not* being a pure mistake to stick out more clearly against that assumption, and also prompting more useful questions about the way that such decisions are made and authorisations are given, so that the place of "precision" technowar in Western warfare can be challenged more effectively and maybe made less of a useful prop for pro-war arguments in general?
There may be shades of grey in a case such as this or there may not, but I think if you believe that the promotion of technowar as an excuse for war in general is morally reprehensible anyway, then it behoves you to look for those shades of grey and address them, because otherwise you're abandoning that ground to those who will simply note your non-addressing of the complexities and use them to spin up a handwaving "fog of war" excuse-based argument (ahemseepreviouspage).
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It also sounds to me like not wanting to collude with murderers. And frankly I'm okay with that.
Well, when you put it that way, certainly it's hard not to be okay with not wanting to collude with murderers. However to me it doesn't seem to be a very useful starting point for serious questions about how and why modern technowar as practised by the US consistently results in these appalling things happening.
The idea that the Left in the last ten years has been too intransigent is just bloody ridicolous, to the point of being offensive. Try 'not nearly intransigent or principled enough'.
On so many other topics I would agree wholeheartedly, but surely here there ought to be room for solid debate about the truth of a situation before a really intransigent, principled stand is made.
Or maybe I'm an irredeemable war-enabling sinner for trying to read shades of grey into black-and-white truth. I guess if this is the case I can at least trust Christiaan not to hesitate in telling me so.
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And that's why you've made the mistake of decontextualising something that should be condemned into something that is, oops, just a mere mistake... move along people.
I think Keith's post was actually pretty open-ended in that regard. Some of the points he's just made in his comment above probably could have been clearer in the post itself, as Rich says, but I certainly didn't feel as though I was being somehow pushed forcibly towards the conclusion that it was all an error. More of a prompt to thinking, at least the way I saw it.
Finally, not meaning to start a flamewar here but I can't resist closing out with this:
Simon, sometimes I just think the real enemy is the moderate liberal who can’t see the forest from the trees. To look at this situation and suggest it might simply be a “mistake” is a kind of “moderate” extremism and hugely immoral. It’s almost as if there is a craving to take black and white issues of morality and try and turn them into something grey.
Such people have a lot to answer for with regard to where we’re at in the world today.
Now this is obviously just a part of your post, but do you realise just how similar it sounds to the zero-middle-ground arguments that helped get the US and the rest of us into this clusterfuck in the first place?
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So how was his Garthness tonight?
Quite genial he was, a very down-to-earth bloke.
But the mask slipped a bit when he was defending his support of Bruce Emery and demonisation of Pihema Cameron as a strategic decision by the trust "to focus attention on entry-level crime".
Also, closing out on "the end justifies the means." Good times.
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Islander: thank you.
For what it's worth this is still an enduring favourite of mine.
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Although I have heard that some of these rounds are so powerful that they only have to pass within a meter of you to kill.
That and some of the pavement being converted into supersonic concrete shards by the impact of the rounds.
Oh well, freedom isn't free!
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Vodafone once throttled a torrent of mine down to around 1 kB/s, on full-speed Red Zone broadband.
Less than impressed, was I.
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Watching now.
Bloody hell, that injured man from the initial shoot-up crawling away on hands and knees, and the crosshairs on him and the chopper crew just aching for him to pick up a weapon so they have a reason to blow him to pieces...
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I'll have a proper look at this stuff when I get home - although our irregular correspondent from New Orleans will probably have been drawn to the thread by then...
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Hopefully he’ll get sucked into an “I think my argument is so powerful that it's not necessary to talk about it” type moment.
Stringing 'em up high on three fun-loving levels