News Brief, Cake Parade Edition
Posted by Joshua Foust on 15 Nov 2007 at 2:55 am | Tagged as: Notes on the war, social science, Technology, Foreign affairs, Domestic Politics
Cross-posted to The Conjecturer.
Defense & The War
- What, they’re accused of only murdered 14 people? Let’s see if the White Rabbit can break his weeks-long silence to defend them this time.
- Well, at least they’ve finally joined the war.
- Oh great. With friends like these… who says we’ll ever fix Iraq?
- Max Boot has a problem, and the only prescription is more FSOs confined to the Green Zone. Antonius Block has other essential thoughts on this half-baked essay. Much like my thoughts on Krauthammer… how do these guys still get paid to write on this stuff?
- More failing upwards in the military.
Around the World
- A Swiss group is offering anal for crips, and I don’t mean the gang. Possibly related, millions of us now have chlamydia. Gonorrhea and syphillis are on the rise as well. So let’s not have quite as much sex as before, ok? Who am I kidding, just double-bag that sh1t.
- So sometimes U.S. pressure can have positive effects. Just not in Uzbekistan.
- LOL! This is like when the Kazakh National Bank misspelled “bank.” But please—no Borat jokes, please.
- Interesting: Porsche makes more money from options than from selling cars. So does that mean they could sell their cars for less? Obviously not. But it’s nice to dream.
- Looking at Musharraf’s Ides of March.
- Péter Marton has another update on the Baghlan bombing.
- Don’t forget the simmering problem of Nagorno-Karabagh.
Back at Home
- Wonkette and Red State, united in fury against… Ron Paul? That’s reason enough to support him.
- This is a compelling reason to support the writer’s strike.
- Oh, so the weak dollar is why pot is so expensive these days? Actually, my friends tell me it really isn’t, at least around DC—and it’s gotten better in quality. Maybe they don’t have those Canadians supplying the ganj. But I wouldn’t know—I’ve never looked into pot smuggling supply chain management.
- The recording industry is trying to use federal money to blackmail universities for the behavior of their students. How appalling.
5 Responses to “News Brief, Cake Parade Edition”
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He is an infrequent poster, and I don;t even know if it is a defense he has been offering. Mostly it seems to be don’t jump to conclusions, which was correct.
Also, they are not being accused in that story of murder. They may be, but that story does not make any such claim.
I must be confused, then, about what else to call the machine-gunning of 14 innocent people.
Technically, they are accused of either manslaughter or Murder 2, which is basically homicide caused by reckless indifference. When someone is accused of “murder” that typically implies an unjustified intent to kill someone specific.
That being said, you’re not necessarily wrong to claim that’s what the Blackwater personnel are accused of, so much as inexact. I think most people who read that NYT article would arrive at the same conclusion as you.
We just hold you to a higher standard than “most people” ;)
Read the story, it says what they may accuse them of.
The story says this:
That may result in a charge of murder. In a war zone and under the circumstances I would suggest manslaughter might be a more appropriate term, but either way, innocents being killed, even if the shooting were unjustified, is not the same as murder. Police officers, guards and other people do kill innocents in confusing circumstances. We usually don;t describe it as murder or “machine gunning innocents” which might be literally true, but carries a moral weight the evidence so far does not support.
Oddly, what they are saying is kind of what White Rabbit suggested might be the outcome. So why the slagging?
Anyway, maybe it will lead to murder charges, maybe it won’t. Nor is the evidence conclusive as the FBI admits. Slow down, wait for things to play out. We heard about the video proving things, and then it fizzled, at least for now.
Exactly. You might end up being right, you might not.