{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "some people are discussing the merits of calling presidents war criminals. here are my thoughts on this.\n(1) if people do this a...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/170139592893/", "html": "

serkentsi:

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silver-and-ivory:

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some people are discussing the merits of calling presidents war criminals. here are my thoughts on this.

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(1) if people do this a lot with American presidents only and never with other state leaders, other people might get the (true? false?) impression that the US is uniquely bad at having war criminal heads of state. this probably shouldn\u2019t influence any one person\u2019s actions but at least it seems worth mentioning.

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(2) calling someone a war criminal has an emotional/moral valence, not just a legal meaning. it conveys disdain for someone\u2019s character, evaluated as a whole.

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I think that this is something to be careful of. yes, absolutely, if someone authorizes drone strikes on civilians as president, that\u2019s a war crime and it\u2019s an awful thing to do. and they would indeed be a war criminal.

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but are they a person to be looked down upon?

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(3) probably presidents will not be much affected by anything anyone here on tumblr says. probably future presidents will not be either.

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but \u2014 the values of the ~rationalist community~ will be influenced by how we view presidents and how we judge them. do we say that they are war criminals (emotional valence: evil, Hitler-level, morally wrong)? do we say that they were great men, perfect and bereft of flaws? or do we say that they were a mixture of both, doers of good and evil in different measure?

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(4)

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the obvious objection to my last point is that different presidents are different people. George Bush II is not the same as Nixon is not the same as Obama.

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and this is also something that has been missing: talking about Whether Presidents in General Are War Criminals is pretty fruitless.

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I would personally prefer if presidents weren\u2019t talked about as practically the same morally (all of them are war criminals, implying that their EVIL attribute is set to max). this is because there were real differences between presidential policies and motivations and so on. but this isn\u2019t a strong preference.

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(5)

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do I think that people shouldn\u2019t call spades spades?

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I think that people should be careful about the emotive and moral implications of calling something a spade. an illegal immigrant is an illegal immigrant, but it\u2019s hardly a neutral thing to call someone.

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War crime isn\u2019t real and I bet these diaper-pissing cowards think Nuremberg wasn\u2019t a sham, which it was, and it\u2019s not even a secret that it was, if you take the right law classes they tell you that in the first week and it\u2019s in the textbook

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Whenever someone accuses America/Americans of war crimes the comeback is \u201cOh no, better look out for the war cops!\u201d

The joke being that America is the war cops

Anyway, \u201cwar crimes\u201d require the predicate crime of losing a war, that\u2019s why we drag our hopeless wars out into stalemate

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