My kid was recently allowed to sit in the pilot's seat because the pilot remarked upon his Superman shirt and he shouted back, "I'm just [name redacted]. Superheroes aren't real."
My mother tells me that when I was little, she sat across from me, she rolled a ball to me, I rolled it back, and then announced, "OK, we've done that now."
Uh, most kids dribble, heebs. Just give them a cup of water. I'm sure she's special in other ways, though.
It's not quite Standpiping when the second person making the joke thinks they're the first person making the joke, is it, Jesus?
The canonical response is "thanks for making that explicit."
Just wanted to make it explicit.
My mom likes to brag that I could peg someone in the head with a ball from across the room at some freakishly young age and did so with gusto and chuckling. I'm sorry to inform you, heebie, that I'm not a professional athlete (though I do draw some skrilla hitting drums and cymbals, so who knows?).
On the subject of talented kids, this made me smile many times.
9: That is one well-spoken 12 year old.
Is her dribbling a little bit messi?
I was the world's biggest football (i.e., handegg) fan until approximately age two. But I turned out to be a total dud, athletics-wise. In other words, don't get your hopes up, or you could end up as deeply disappointed by HP as I'm sure my parents are with me.
18-month-old J knows all of his colors, so I'm pretty sure he's going to be a hugely successful visual artist.
I'm trying to pack for a trip tomorrow and I can't find my toiletries kit ANYWHERE and I want to cry. I'm tired. I want to go to bed. I saw it on Sunday. Please, where is my toiletries kit?
my kid will be more athletic than yours
I know you're joking. But this type of shit from parents who aren't joking? Arg! Stop.
Your kid can't even make spaghetti. Really? That shit's pretty easy, especially not-very-good spaghetti. Give it fucking time and stop bragging.
I suspect there's some switch in many parents that clicks on uber-praise mode that's So. Fucking. Annoying.
Again, you're totes not doing that here, heebie, because you're being jokey. But, goddamn, that shit's annoying.
It really is. I had a cow-orker who would go on and on about how scary it was that her toddler was so smart. She would really impress upon you the scariness. It drove me up the fucking wall. It's not actually scary that your toddler is bright.
But more importantly: my toiletries. Won't you show me them?
EEEEEEEEEEE!!! In the hat rack by the door! In the umbrella stand lower portion! Oh thank goodness. Goodnight.
16: It's really, really hard not to. And then you work on not doing it, and you slip over into being self-deprecating about your kids, which is also uncool, because they're not yourself, and so you shouldn't be deprecating them.
Pity the poor parents who are besotted with their (objectively very ordinary) offspring.
Seriously. Not that I would know what that's like, as my children are objectively exceptional.
[Seriously. I'm wicked smart (he says, modestly). The 5-year-old has been blowing by milestones months before I did as a kid (counting to 100, knowing each letter's corresponding sounds, etc.). At the moment, I'm chalking it up to Montessori and trying not to think about it too much, but the little fucker may very well be another standard deviation out on the right side of the bell curve.
She is, however, a complete klutz.]
I'm kind of glad for 16, though. When that kind of thing is engaged in an unjoking manner, it's pretty clueless.
There's nothing wrong with being proud of your kids, of course not, but yes, they're not you. It's not you, it's not your genes that are the key to the kids' marvelousness, and they are not going to be you.
There's surely a way to be proud of your kids without bragging that they're more this or better that.
But if people don't brag about which kid is more this or better that, how will we ever know whose child won?
She'll be the one left standing.
We set them to bench-pressing or something. Actually, I thought being able to beat people, win over them in competition, was important to you.
Trashtalking is the best part of competition.
Speaking of the last one standing, I don't suppose any of you are reading the Hunger Games trilogy.
Heat 1: All the mineshaft kids into the pit with broadswords!
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Is this where we come to adulate LizardBreath for her performance in that damn CT thread? LB, you're my hero.
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Nah, I'm just up late working on a brief. I do feel a little constrained by wanting to keep the Crooked Timber comments clean -- I've forgotten what, specificially, it was I wanted to say, but there was something that would have been funny, and I would have said here, but decided it was inappropriate at a more serious blog.
but decided it was inappropriate at a more serious blog.
It has occurred to me, at various points in its history, that Unfogged sometimes aspires to be Crooked Timber in an open necked shirt.
29 - no, but my 5 year old is.
(No, actually, my 13 year old - she's read and raved about the first one, not sure about the second.)
I only know a couple of people who really wind me up with their child-bragging. But actually, I realised that if I like the *child*, then people can brag all they like, and I will be as pleased as they are about the kid's achievements. If I don't like the kid, it's completely obnoxious.
I was with some friends last weekend and they were engaging in some very minor child-bragging* about how their child [who is a lovely, sweet kid] was a much more advanced talker than her peers at nursery. That might have been true, but the whole time I was thinking how non-verbal and baby-like she was compared to my brother and (particularly) my niece and nephew at that sort of age (a little under 18 months), who were constructing much more sophisticated utterances, and talking at length.
* in a not-at-all annoying way, they are just clearly besotted with their child [their first]. It's very endearing.
Does it make a difference when the braggart mom is clearly aware that her daughter's objective awesomeness has nothing to do with the mom? I.e., is the annoying part the implied "I'm such an awesome mom to have created this amazing specimen!"? Does it depend on the competitive slant -- not just "my kid is awesome" but "my kid is awesomer than all the other kids"? Or are people just annoyed generally by parents who think their kids rock?
Or are people just annoyed generally by parents who think their kids rock?
Contrarywise, I'm inclined to be a bit worried about parents who don't think their kids rock. But yes,
1. the competitiveness thing is NOT necessary; many awesome kids are better than just one;
2. parents taking all the credit is diminishing the child's achievements (such as they are), and is totally adolescent behaviour;
3. The subset of parents who treat their friends to epic accounts of the hardship they endure to buy their kids "educational extras" proper to their genius while never actually interacting with them as human beings rather than trophies, is too big.
My friend's rather precocious three-year-old is using her powers for evil, destroying his self-confidence with her constant stream of criticisms: "Dad, you're not a very good dancer" and "Dad, you can't sing at all", and "Dad, your Spanish accent is terrible." She tries to be kind, but she has to be honest. I can't imagine what she's going to be like at 15.
Heh. Rory to me as I tapped my foot listening to some music in the car: "You do know that's not the beat, right?"
Kids and sports: after spending the fall and winter traveling from Atlanta to Philadelphia playing goalie for his hockey team, Keegan is now playing goalie for his school's lacrosse team. It would be nice if he'd pick a sport I had *ever* played (or even watched prior to his playing it), so that I could be even a little help, but no.
You could figure out how to stop a puck if you really wanted to.
First I'd need to learn how to ice skate, Moby.
I was trying for a puck/fuck joke, but clearly missed.
We could start with an ice skate/masturbate one to lead into it.
So the joke was that puck sounds like fuck and Apo should be able to succesfully be able to stop such a thing because of his sexual inadequacies? Is that why the joke was supposed to be funny?
If I can't make a joke with 75% of the laters the same, that's probably too difficult for me today. Lacrosse involves cradling balls in a net. Maybe?
45: I thought you were only supposed to do that if my joke was about rape or murder.
Rape/murder/kids' sports/what's the difference?
Rape and murder cost a whole lot less than youth hockey, for starters.
That's why Canada went to socialized medicine. So parents had enough money left to pay for hockey.
I love it when parents lovingly make fun of their kids for being weirdos, though. Kids do the weirdest things when outside people aren't around.
52: Heh. Sally stayed over at a friend's house the other night, and the friend's little sister's fish died while she was there. So Sally forged a goodbye note from the fish, telling the little sister that the fish loved her and she shouldn't be sad. The mother called and told me about it, talking about how sweet it was of Sally, and all I could think was "Yep. Bizarre, but sweet. That's her."
Keegan seems to be drawn to club based sports. Maybe you should introduce him to hurling.
It's not actually scary that your toddler is bright.
It is in Texas.
53: So the joke is that you are mocking MH by pretending to have screwed up when in fact you are quite proud of having re-used the trope in a new thread. Have I got that right?
16: This. The comment I meant to make last night was, "Be sure to point this out to the kid's first youth sports coach. That would be very helpful."
Maybe you should introduce him to hurling.
Oh, he'll get to binge drinking soon enough.
56: Actually, the joke was a weak attempt to overcompensate for my self-conscious angst that my attempt to reuse the trope was ultimately unfunny. I am now openly expressing vulnerability in an attempt to garner sympathy.
59: No, I thought it was pretty good.
60: The joke or the attempt to garner sympathy?
Keegan's next sport is surely going to be rugby? He's definitely on that progression ...
Ack. I'm having a moment where I can't figure out the proper English behind a figure of speech. If you're trying to say "If you need to get ahold of me, here's my cell number", what is the word ahold? A hold? If you need to get a hold of me? How does the real world speak again?
How does the real world speak again?
Poorly and much too often.
"If you have any questions or concerns, I can be reached at 1-800-MIX-ALOT."
what is the word ahold?
A horrible Americanism. In context, I think it's part of the compound verb 'get ahold of', made up of the verb 'get' and the prepositional phrase 'ahold of'. I'm seeing a friend who teaches ESL at the weekend if you want me to ask him.
That makes it sound like a single word, like afford or allure. I can ahold that meaning.
re: 68
During the brief pre-Taliban window at the start of the 1990s, the BBC had a documentary about some North London taxi driver whose ambition was to go to Afghanistan and play. He managed to go, too. The locals kept telling him the last foreigner to try [some MSF doctor] had been horribly injured, but he went ahead anyway.
He was fine, he even managed to carry the calf/goat a bit, and performed perfectly respectably.
BTW, if you dial 1-800-MIX-ALOT (as I just did), you just get a recording telling you to call 1-800-962-TALK to chat with interesting people.
I like big telephone bills and it ain't no lie...
72: You could westernize this by using a road-kill possum and Big Wheels.
I think in proper beer-swilling Texan it's "get aholt of me". Seems to be mixed. Merriam-Webster lists it and gives an example from Mailer ..., my Random House has it as "informal", others decry it. Per above, alternative phrasing is undoubtedly the best solution.
I changed it to "If you need to get hold of me". That oughttaholdem.
"If you need to get hold of me"
...the butt is a good place to start.
29: I am reading them! I like them, though the second left me less engaged than the first. Is she really going to manage everything in book three?
And my non-legal kid is the awesomest because he called last night to say he's going to graduate from his residential treatment program in May and thinks he may be ready to try living with a family even though that still totally scares him (at least until fall, when he'll turn 16 and want to be transferred to an independent living program). I do have to admit that his basketball skills are not as great as he thinks, though.
...the butt is a good place to start.
Even better, I've got handles.
78: And my non-legal kid is the awesomest because he called last night to say he's going to graduate from his residential treatment program in May and thinks he may be ready to try living with a family even though that still totally scares him (at least until fall, when he'll turn 16 and want to be transferred to an independent living program).
Rowan, you mean? That's so cool, and so excellent of you to be there for him despite the initial placement not working out.
...the butt is a good place to start.
Baby calls back.
...the butt is a good place to start.
See Heebie on flickr...
54.1: I hope I'm not the only person who got a little verklempt at that. I'd turn in my man card if it hadn't already been taken by the seven year old girl who beat me to a bloody pulp last week.
It's not all adorableness -- there's a fair amount of making farting noises with her hands, and random violence directed at her little brother. But we're fond of her.
85:
a bloody pulp? What is the story with that?
86:...there's a fair amount of making farting noises with her hands...
When farting noises are deprecated, only the deprecated will make farting noises. The rest of you uptight fogies will just gradually inflate until you pop, or your sphincter springs a leak and you go flying around the room like a balloon, making high pitched squealing noises from your butt. Sally and I will laugh our asses off at you: Ha Ha Ha Plop!
87: It was brutal! She jumped me from behind a dumpster, rained blows upon me like a thresher, reached into my wallet and stole my Man Card! If I can't get a new one issued within 30 days the government will revoke my balls!
78 - Well, she brought book 1 to a close, so perhaps she can work all the threads in. How am I ever supposed to wait until August for book 3?
Asilon, they're super fun and scary. If you've already got them in the house, I'd pick 'em up.
81: Thanks, LB. Yeah, this is Rowan, who's 15. I think it's important for us to have a stable mentoring-type relationship even if he doesn't want to be in our part of the state. I imagine he'll want to come back someday, and when he does I want him to have some safe and healthy connections. Also, he's just an amazingly resilient and awesome person and I selfishly don't want to lose touch with him!
If you find out that Rowan is about to be sacrificed to ensure a good harvest, don't panic because it's probably a ruse to draw you into a trap.
Why not panic about the trap even if the human sacrifice isn't a real concern?
88: You may be interested in this book.
Is this where we come to adulate LizardBreath for her performance in that damn CT thread? LB, you're my hero.
Which one, which one?! Is the Orin Kerr thread still going?
Until very recently. Comments now closed, unfortunately giving Kerr the last word. LB is definitely teh hero.
Justice is done! Except now that poor man is afraid to have open windows in his house.
96: Topical because of the potential for dribbles?
Comments now closed, unfortunately giving Kerr the last word.
Yeah, what's with that? And he never did stop calling LB "LizardBreadth".
The LizardVolume is equal to the LizardHeight times the LizardDepth times the LizardBreadth.
This was my favorite part, after she made clear she agreed with Greenwald:
LizardBreath,
I see. How about this question: Are there any commenters here who went to law school who still think Greenwald was right?
At least the Kerr thread was more entertaining than the "Helicopter gunship attack" thread, which makes me lose all faith in the basic decency of my fellow people.
I just skimmed that thread. LB is wonderful.
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No more masturbating to Malcolm McLaren.
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For a moment, I confused Malcolm McLaren with Marshall McLuhan and thought, "Holy crap, he's still alive?"
96: Hey, it's good that guy was acquitted.
No, but I happen to have his rotting corpse right here.
110: You know nothing of my work!
111: Certainly sets a good precedent for me, as I live in the same state. I even have a big sliding glass door I could parade around in front of, drinking my coffee and wowing the neighbors.
Aside from "Buffalo Gals" and the Sex Pistols, 113 is pretty much true.
114: Just make sure nobody can prove intent to indecently expose, I guess.
114, 117: If they can connect you to comment 114 they may be able to convict!
make sure nobody can prove intent to indecently expose
Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces ruined me for further academic work by inspiring me to write a senior essay that made intuitive, half-baked connections across wide swaths of history. Among the more concrete revelations it contained was that McLaren hung out with the Situationists in Paris '68, and so draws the final link of a chain connecting punk rock all the way back to the Dada revolt in the Cabaret Voltaire.
One of the less concrete revelations it contains is that John Lydon has a namesake in millenarian wildman John of Leyden, who burned hisself up or something.
Also it introduced me to this picture of Emmy Hennings, which still haunts my dreams and the occasional artistic burp.
If this is at all new to anyone here, it's a great, weird read if you have any patience at all for Greil Marcus. (I have a biscuit!)
121 - I read it when I was in high school and had already discovered punk rock and had the opposite problem: it rendered me deeply confused about the Situationalist International.
I still have an eighties mashup of Puccini and crappy disco of his that I like. Makes sense that he liked DeBord.
121: Did you notice this perfect gem? I'd believe he'd set it up himself if I could work out how.
116: And Formula One Race cars, a really versatile guy.
It's not actually scary that your toddler is bright.
It might be scary in a "maybe we need a paternity test" way. 18 yrs, 18 yrs, etc.
It might be scary in a "maybe we need a paternity test" way.
I don't have twelve fingers and you don't have twelve fingers. What is going on here?
At least the Kerr thread was more entertaining than the "Helicopter gunship attack" thread, which makes me lose all faith in the basic decency of my fellow people.
The equivocation I've read and heard over that massacre has sickened me more than anything in recent memory. What a bunch of remorseless fucking monsters.
I don't have twelve fingers and you don't have twelve fingers. What is going on here?
A direct link between the spike in autism diagnoses and and the wanderings of a very, very sexy autistic dude is finally established.
128: It is sickening. And then there's stuff like this from George Packer:
Anyone who sends young troops into war should expect them to kill innocent people by mistake, and to crack jokes about the people they've killed. This doesn't make them war criminals, or even moral monsters.
You know, I'm pretty sure looking for excuses to kill innocent people and then joking about it does make one a moral monster. I'm also pretty sure that it is inevitable that war will do this to people, but I don't understand why many people apparently don't see that as an anti-war argument.
sickened me more than anything in recent memory
I guess. It really isn't much different than almost every other conversation about Iraq/Afghanistan for the past eight and a half years, though. I long ago decided that somewhere between a quarter and a third of this country is made up of utter psychopaths.
130, 131: Exactly. I think what's made this different is that the second-by-second reality of a horrific incident is inescapable, and not only do people jump to excuse the pilots, but they just dismiss the idea that there's anything wrong it, or blame the victims, or take it for granted that everything went down according to the rules of engagement, so there's nothing more to see here, just move along. Not a trace or remorse whatsoever, unless you count the token acknowledgment that well, it was unfortunate. Never mind that it's going to be an enormously effective recruitment video for terrorists on both sides.
129: That's pretty close to the plot of a Phillip K. Dick story. I may be no Johnson scholar, but I love Dick.
132: The weirdest bit of that is the people who concede that of course massacring the people in the van was a war crime, and then go right back to a frame by frame analysis of whether one of the first batch of victims was holding an RPG. Once you've got the pilots chuckling while they kill people trying to rescue the wounded, who cares whether the beginning of the incident was a crime as well or the sort of mistake that could have happened to anyone?
130-132: Yes, this is where abstractions like "country" go horribly wrong. When someone like Michael Ledeen says, Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business it includes, "Every ten years or so, have our forces initiate some large number of incidents pretty much like this".
The only way I can make sense of all this is that for a significant fraction of people, morality functions like this: there's my tribe, and there's the other tribe who's the enemy. We're entitled to murder everyone in the other tribe, and the fact that we have not yet done so is a sign of our incredibly magnanimity.
It's the only way I can make sense of the additional fact that when you bring up that an American committed a war crime, that people get offended. In their primitive forebrain, all they can think is "Dude! He's from our tribe!"
136: Hey, it's that five-axes of morality guy again. Haidt?
One man's in-group is another man's game.
I guess it's his Loyalty axis. It's such a weird form of loyalty, though. Someone who wouldn't think of defending some stranger for stealing a car will suddenly defend that same stranger for killing foreigners. I guess stealing an Iraqi's car would also be okay.
Once you've got the pilots chuckling while they kill people trying to rescue the wounded, who cares whether the beginning of the incident was a crime as well or the sort of mistake that could have happened to anyone?
Really? It seems to me like the very last thing I would care about is what the pilots were saying as they committed war crimes -- what if they were sobbing, or simply remaining silent, as they executed exactly the same actions? Would that really change anything?
In their primitive forebrain, all they can think is "Dude! He's from our tribe!"
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and suggest that a sizable fraction of United States citizens are either related to, or know someone, who has served in the military.
It seems to me like the very last thing I would care about is what the pilots were saying as they committed war crimes
Fair enough, I misspoke. Leave the chuckling out of it.
140: I went to college with a guy who years later molested his children. And yet I don't think he should remain unprosecuted.
And yet I don't think he should remain unprosecuted.
Did I say that? Did I suggest anywhere that I didn't think it was a war crime?
140, 143: I think what happened there is that you responded to 'In their primitive forebrain, all they can think is "Dude! He's from our tribe!"', by pointing out that many Americans actually are 'tribally' affiliated with the military, when the point wasn't that "Dude! He's from our tribe!" was false, so much as it was irrelevant to the criminality of the actions.
And then mutual point-missing occurred.
And then mutual point-missing occurred.
I read it as, "I don't think he should remain unprosecuted [and since there are only two of us in this exchange dot dot dot]," and only realized I had missed the point after I had hit "Post."
Whatevs. Unfogged is probably the wrong place to be working out my anger issues. I'm sorry for getting so vitriolic so quickly -- I'll take it elsewhere.
143: I didn't think that you were saying that. I'm arguing against the idea that the fact that people know people in the military is decisive. People that wouldn't dream of making excuses for crimes committed by members of their in-group will suddenly make excuses for crimes of violence against their enemies.
will suddenly make excuses for crimes of violence against their enemies.
I think the very fact that people think some random average person can be their enemy just by virtue of living in a particular place is a large part of the problem.
Of course, one extraordinarily volatile topic that could be explored on the incident would be, "What are the appropriate consequences for the various actors and stakeholders in the incident?" Lots of room for mutual and group point-missing on that one.
147: Especially when one of the ever-changing rationales for the war was the necessity of liberating exactly those random average people in that particular place.
Years ago, during a hiatus, a bunch of commenters from here swept over into a CT thread and for a short time turned it into an Unfogged-like thread. I mention this only because I find it amusing how in the last few days this has become a sort of alternative CT comments section. I blame the server outage.
The comments at CT are infected by a shower of utter bastards, which is why I (personally) find them almost unreadable. Which is a shame, as the front-page posters are almost always very interesting.
Certainly the gunship attack thread over there seems to be infested with the intellectual heirs of the French royalist exiles who in 1813 had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. You wonder what they do with the rest of their lives.
152: I'm frustrated that there doesn't seem to be anywhere on the net where a rational discussion of the event is taking place. Within the first few posts there's always someone saying something inflammatory, people flame back, and reason retreats to it's bunker to wait out the storm. Even the ne plus ultra of sensible people , LB, seems to think at 134 upthread that discussing the details is bad.
Nothing will change unless an alternative is offered that acknowledges the realities on the ground. The ROE at the time of the attack were in my opinion a war crime. There will continue to be criminally lax ROEs in future wars unless an alternative is on offer that's workable based on what actually happens in combat situations. What the liberals I've seen arguing over this incident have offered have ranged from absurdly naive to insane.
I guess. It really isn't much different than almost every other conversation about Iraq/Afghanistan for the past eight and a half years, though. I long ago decided that somewhere between a quarter and a third of this country is made up of utter psychopaths.
Eh there's a bunch of nice middle class NZ liberals I know who started talking about the situation and how, you know, what about the chain of command and all that nonsense. Shouldn't the people in charge be part of the problem etc etc.
And yeah. I was v. v. disappointed at that one.
that discussing the details is bad.
Not so much that it's bad, but that once you've acknowledged the clearcut war crime, killing the people in the van trying to rescue the wounded, there's nothing meaningfully exculpatory about an argument that that initial shooting might have been excusable.
I don't really feel equipped to pick at the details of the initial shooting, because it does seem to me relevant what, if anything, the people killed were armed with, and I wouldn't know what an RPG looked like if one were on my couch. I read some discussion of the footage linked from CT, where a blogger claiming to have worked as the guy on the other end of the radio giving authorization to shoot in similar circumstances, pointed out that at 3:39-45 the guy in the center of the frame is clearly holding an RPG. Me, watching the footage? I can tell that the guy is holding something long -- that's it. A claim that it's clearly an RPG seems wrong to me, but I can't tell.
155.1: There is, however, a lot to be gained from close examination of the incident from the standpoint of advocating better ROE. I'm not actually that concerned about the pilots - in my view the war crime is the ROE. If the pilots believed what they are saying in that video, they were within the ROE and so will never be held to account.
My frustration stems from seeing a whole bunch of people who would very much like to avoid future such incidents treat this as a simple open and shut case that reinforces their worldview and gives ammunition to fire at their political opponents (not you, mind). Any discussion of realistic and effective action to reduce the number of such incidents is shut down. We all get to feel smugly superior to the evil men who made this happen, or we are so outraged we cannot think. Either way, nothing changes and more children get torn to pieces.
155: Spell out what's wrong with the ROE, in your view? I don't know what I'm talking about, and so my opinions here aren't set, but under the following set of assumptions:
(1) There is current combat going on at the same moment, very nearby, such that it's plausible that people in this area could be participants in it (I've seen this asserted. Of course, I don't know it's true, but say it is).
(2) There is no plausible reason for carrying an RPG around rather than immediate intent to participate in combat. (This clearly wouldn't be true of an AK-47, which I understand people in Iraq carry around like pocketknives. But I think an RPG is different, as in implausible as a personal defense weapon.)
(3) One or more of the people in the video were visibly carrying RPGs, and the other people were clearly, um, cooperatively associated with them. (The first part of this seems false to me from looking at the video, but I could be wrong, and I know I don't know enough to argue about it.)
I can't see what would be wrong (beyond the fundamental wrongness of the war itself) with ROE permitting the pilots to kill the people in the video if those assumptions were true. What seemed wrong to me about the initial killing was what appeared to me to be the pilots lying about how and whether their targets were armed.
What am I getting wrong?
That was, of course, to 156 rather than 155.
157: As I understand it the ROE at the time required 51% confidence that the person in question poses a threat to US troops. Obviously it's impossible to quantify confidence under those conditions, but it's clearly intended to permit lots of slack, which opens the door to things like the attack on the van. More restrictive ROE would require that not only the confidence level be higher, but also that attacks such as the one on the van only be conducted if there is a probability that the window of opportunity for an attack is in danger of closing. The van could have been followed from the air and attacked if it went anywhere other than a hospital or US military base, for example.
As far as your list of assumptions, I think 1 is known to be true unless you believe the cover-up is vastly larger than seems plausible, 2 is simply true, and 3 needs to be modified with "appears to be carrying RPGs." To a pilot looking for weapons and likely paranoid about mistakenly failing to identify a real weapon that is later used against US troops the video presents plenty of opportunities to see what he expects. Whether there are or are not weapons in the video is not going to be resolved in web discussions, or likely ever. To me it seems that there are things that appear to be AK-47s and an object consistent with a real RPG and inconsistent with the sorts of stuff I'd expect someone to be just carrying around on the street, in addition to the deceptively suggestive zoom lens peeking around the corner.
Huh. I'm generally hostile to attempts to quantify the certainty of belief -- I think 51% certainty means something, in terms of "that's the way I'd bet if I had to", but I don't think other percentage levels of certainty correspond to much outside of situations where you're really talking probability (like, "If I draw a card from this deck, I'm 75% certain it won't be a spade.") So I don't think changing the required level of certainty would do much, unless you jacked it up to something unworkable. (For example, if the ROE was 60% certainty, it wouldn't change behavior. If it was 95% certainty, it'd either be disobeyed or would make actually fighting very hard.)
But I don't think anything wrong with the ROE applies to the attack on the van -- there just wasn't anything about the van that made it plausible to think that they were a threat to American troops, 51% level or any other.
160: I agree that the percentage thing is very mushy, and I'm not sure how to tackle that, which is one reason I'd like to see sensible people talking about it - that often helps me figure things out.
As far as the van goes - I gather that it's common for insurgents attacking US troops to have a vehicle standing by to pick up wounded and weapons, and that is the justification offered for the attack. If you assume the van is picking up weapons that will later be used against US troops, and that the people inside are with the insurgents, then the attack is less obviously an atrocity and might even be considered justified depending on how heavily you weight the lives of enemy personnel. As is, it's clear the van driver was just passing by, saw someone who needed help, and provided it. Even the worst of the insurgents aren't taking their young daughters into battle.
But that, you can see they're not doing -- all they do is pick up the wounded guy. The pilots lied over the radio when they said 'wounded and weapons', that's not a problem with the ROE, that's a problem with the pilots.
(Not that I'm committed to there being nothing wrong with the ROE -- I don't know what they are in detail.)
162: True, you have to assume it, as they didn't see it.
I've avoided discussing this previously because my position is basically that the pilot's actions are extremely bad but not so extremely bad as to be clearly outside the bounds of what typically happens in a war. That's an anti-war argument more than an argument against this particular instance of routine atrocity. The temperature of the discussion surrounding this incident hasn't really allowed for that level of nuance.
That's an anti-war argument more than an argument against this particular instance of routine atrocity.
The name of the embedded in Iraq invasion HBO series slips my mind, but I will always remember a darkly hilarious short intro to one episode in which our heroes are artillery/air power spotting a village.
Whispered
"Base, all I'm seeing are women washing clothes and some kids playing s..."
BOOM
"Base, hostiles are neutralized."
This was later contrasted with a particular soldier with an itchy finger accidentally shooting a civilian, and the trouble he got into and the disapproval he was subjected to within the group.
I no longer argue against war, or the moral nuances of combat. As much point as being a pacifist or disarmament advocate in 1910.
"Those methods used against the Boers..."
BOOM.
I argue for Revolution.
"But, hey Bob, you monster, important principles and rules were established in 1899 and 1907. It's a slow incremental process, but progress is happening."
Go sing it on the Somme.
embedded in Iraq invasion HBO series
Generation Kill?
||
Coffee babbling.
"...but if the spirit of it survives
Prussia,--my ambition and those names will be content; for they will
have achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders."
I have long been obsessed by these lines in Wilfred Owen's "Preface". Last week, I don't remember much, but I encountered some note about an older poet working in British propaganda during WWI and writing a piece attacking Prussian society. I spent some time googling for it, but couldn't find it.
Prussian Education System Because I think this is part of what Owen was talking about.
"If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will." [1] ...Fichte
So we have all the alternative theories of education that arose in the 1st 1/4 of the 20th.
But the sense of totalities that started the 20th, of which this is just one example, people thinking that you can create warriors on the playing fields of Eton or end war at a Montessori or New School...have nearly disappeared from the discourse.
Some other blogger this week visited and had pictures of the ruins of Black Mountain College
WTF happened? I look at current academia and the decline of the humanities. Did Prussia win?
|>
155-164: I am in general sympathy with togolosh's point although I think I'd frame it as "US being there in those conditions": really wrong, "ROEs/whole approach once you are actually in Iraq"; really wrong, "the soldiers actions even within that context": wrong. Their specific actions should certainly be investigated and weighed by the military against their regulations and appropriate punishments meted out (although I have little confidence in that being done justly or well). But I am very leery of folks like us trying to come in and focus on and legalistically assess and judge based on the video as released. If out of something like this, *all* that happens is a Lynndie England and Charles Graner and folks are satisfied with that then we really are moral monsters*.
*Overstated no doubt. Given all the collateral damage to innocent Iraqis in the war, the potential scapegoating of some individual soldiers who did in fact behave reprehensibly does not loom that large, but it does strike me as the worst kind of collective moral cowardice by a country (but then see my 148).
And to illustrate my view better than I could, I'm going to take the liberty of re-posting two spot-on comments from deep in that thread (185 & 186)
Glen Tomkins:
But what this video also shows is that all of that is completely irrelevant. It is a war crime, pure and simple, to make of a whole country a war zone for years on end. To do so simply erases the fundamental distinction of combatant vs non-combatant on which all civilized, legal, limitations of war rest. No amount of care to avoid particular incidents of "collateral damage" under those conditions of the universal exposure of an entire country to being treated as potential combatants 24/7, can prevent systematic and cumulatively massive loss of non-combatant life. This is genocide that this video documents, a genocide in which scrupulously careful procedure only serves to insure that the genocide only happens one drop at a time.Alison P.
Yes, that's what I have been thinking too. All people all day and everyday have to behave ostentatiously as 'not an insurgent' . And yet, nothing the populace do can sufficiently convince. The whole country has 'forfeited the benefit of the doubt', and each person must 'convince (foreign soldiers) they are not a threat' or be killed without warning. Even if they do not know the soldiers are watching them. Must refrain, for example, from acts such as running to a person who is bleeding which all of us would do without a thought - and this blanket surveillance operating in all areas at all times, and enforced by gun ships. This is what we have become.
