3 thoughts on “War Games”

  1. Hmm, I haven’t watched the video, because I don’t trust pictures. This video seems to function as a total Rohrschach test: liberals like Yglesias or Crooked Timber see clear evidence of war crimes, moderates like Megan McArdle find it ambiguous, and the conservatives at pajamas media see a clearly lawful and proper operation. Which is why I don’t put much trust in pictures.

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  2. “Which is why I don’t put much trust in pictures.”
    What do you put trust in? Or, in other words, what evidence doesn’t function as a Rorschach test?
    McCardle did not actually find the video ambiguous — she said she did, but then she went on to conclude that “I’m not sure this video is so much evidence of a war crime, as evidence that war is horrifying” Does saying your conclusion with double negatives make your conclusions more ambiguous? Is that what moderation means — saying “perhaps” before the same conclusions reached by the conservatives?
    I do consider the question of whether there was a war crime to be a technical one that requires technical expertise in both war and law. But, I’m morally outraged by the attitudes, callousness, and ugliness expressed by the pilots doing the killing.
    Autopsies, organ donation, human anatomy, and animal research are activities I consider to be perfectly acceptable, but, in all of those activities, I expect respect to the animal, to the human (even if they’re dead). I would expect significant censure for a student who behaved as callously when, for example, dissecting human brain. The students are given instruction to be respectful, and censured for not behaving respectfully. And, that’s done both for its moral value, and the understanding that the system itself can be harmed by not behaving appropriately (i.e people won’t donate bodies). Oh, and yes, holding a dead human brain in your hands can be stressful, and induce inappropriate coping beavior (Not I know, comparable to war, but then holding a brain isn’t the same as having wounded an child or shot a photographer, either)

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  3. I think it would be easy to misidentify a camera as something more dangerous. Even close-up, people have a hard time identifying my husband’s telescope as being a telescope. “That thing looks like a mortar,” is what people usually say. And, by golly, they’re right.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon)
    I’ve heard this is a well-known problem in the amateur astronomy community, leading to lots of conversations with local police (comes with the territory when you drive out to thinly populated areas and hang out in the dark with your headlights off). My husband has painted a happy blue stripe on his telescope to make it look less menacing if he’s pulled over by a police officer who wants to know what that black thing in the front seat with the huge barrel is.

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