Via Ace of Spades.
Silly, but entertaining and obviously very popular. I’m pretty sure that everyone involved realizes it’s over-the-top, but now it’s a big tourist attraction.
Instructables, via LikeCool.
Is it ethical to transplant the brain of one gummy bear into the head of another?
A few months ago, a former founder of Human Rights Watch took the organization to task. He wrote:
At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.
That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.
He was writing in response to a sharp disparity in criticism coming from the organization towards liberal democracies, such as Israel.
Wikileaks suffers from the same loss of perspective as Human Rights Watch. They got a hold of footage showing an engagement, hyped it’s release, and cast it in the worst possible light for America. Was it deserved?
Wikileaks tries to fill an admirable role – that of an information clearing-house to shine light in dark places. But with this, they shift from a sunlight organization to that of political activist. Their website, “collateralmurder.org”, the description of events as “indiscriminate killing” and quotes from George Orwell about lies and murder make for the strongest condemnation of both the actions of the US military, as well as the investigation following it.
But it is also disingenuous.
In 2007, when the incident took place, Iraq was in some of the worst times. Harry Reid had declared the effort lost. American and civilian deaths had skyrocketed. It was before the surge.
Off camera, several blocks away, an American convoy was under attack, and headed for the location shown. The helicopters weren’t just loitering around, but supporting the convoy during the firefight. Found, alongside the cameras of the dead photographers, were AK-47′s and RPGs. Several commentators have noted that the video footage appears to show the men armed, but Wikileaks only highlights the reporters and their cameras, not the RPG or rifles.
As a commenter on Slashdot noted, “[an illegal combatant] that does not wear uniforms and hides among civilians is both not entitled to the protections of the conventions, but also is the responsible party in any attack that kills those civilians.” Just so. It’s that line of thought that has kept the US from signing the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention – it places an unreasonable on those who attempt to adhere to the Geneva Convention in both legal and moral terms.
War sucks. Terrible things happen, and even the good side does bad things. That is why perspective is important, and why one should guard against the moral relativism that has infected Wikileaks.
Consider the of the most infamous war crimes committed by a member of the US military – the My Lai massacre. Everyone knows it. A small American unit, under tremendous stress and having lost it’s commander, goes on a rampage and wipes out a whole village that had served as a base for the Vietcong, irrespective of civilian or fighter. It’s eventually ended when an American helicopter pilot threatens to fire on the American soldiers.
Now consider the less well-known Massacre of Hue. During the Tet Offensive, the communists took over the city of Hue for four weeks. They had conducted extensive intelligence gathering operations and created a list of ideological undesirables in the lead up to the attack on the city. Upon taking over the city, working from the list, they killed political, social and religious leaders. The numbers totaled in the thousands. Unlike the massacre at My Lai, this was the the result of considered and premeditated policy. It ended only with the recapturing of the city by American forces.
Both incidents were crimes, but one tells you far more about the stakes involved than the other. To present both cases as moral equivalents of each other is simply wrong.
Wikileaks displays that exact lack of moral perspective by calling the actions of the US soldiers “murder”, while not presenting important contextual information that explained the actions of the soldiers involved. What they did was justify the classification of the video in the first place – it didn’t document a crime and it’s publication did not serve a purpose beyond hurting America and giving support to our enemies.
“A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride. ”
