Wars and war crimes

War crimes follow wars as surely as night follows day.

When you look at the list of things that constitute war crimes according the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Tribunals, you will immediately see that any sustained conflict inevitably leads to actions, such as “Atrocities or offences against persons or property, constituting violations of the laws or customs of war”, “the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages” or “devastation not justified by military necessity”, that fall into the category of war crimes. So when the US declares that Russian troops have committed war crimes during its invasion of Ukraine, they are undoubtedly right. One major crime is “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.”

But what is infuriating is the revolting hypocrisy demonstrated by all the righteous indignation by the US and its allies about Russian war crimes when the long and ugly and incontrovertible history of war crimes by the US is ignored by the US political class and that mainstream media. After all, the US has so many times in the past been involved in the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”, Iraq being merely one of the most recent.

I was trying to formulate a post about this but Chris Hedges pretty much said it all.
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Covid-19 fatigue

I am one of the fortunate ones in that I was able to get vaccinated and boosted and since I am retired, during the worst of the pandemic I could spend most of my time at home and thus could easily practice social distancing. I also wore masks whenever I was in any indoor facility with other people. But while it was not onerous, I too have started to feel weary of taking these precautions and was hopeful that the rapid decline in cases in the recent past signaled the transition from a pandemic phase to an endemic phase that would enable us to let down our guard and just take the kinds of precautions we are used to with other familiar airborne contagions like the flu and cold, where we stay at home when we have symptoms and avoid contact with people who are exhibiting symptoms.

But now we hear reports of a delta-omicron hybrid and a BA.2 version of the omicron variant causing a slight uptick in cases in Europe and the UK, which in the past have been leading indicators of what would happen in the US after about two or three weeks. 45% of the US population has been infected with omicron and thus have some immunity to that BA.2 version of it but that still leaves a large number at risk.
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The US is no longer the world’s longest consistent democracy

Politicians in the US (and many ordinary Americans) like to boast about how this country is the greatest and the oldest continuing democracy. The former claim has always been dubious since from the beginning the country has gone out of its way to limit the right to vote to a favored class: first by not giving Blacks and women to vote, then by placing restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests that excluded the poor, and to this date seeking to find novel ways to discourage poor and minority communities from voting by making them jump through various hoops and by gerrymandering electoral districts so that the elected representatives are not representative of the electorate.
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Great moments in cheerleading

You would think that by now, after all the protests about racist depictions of Native Americans, that at least some person in large organizations would realize when something is at best racially insensitive or downright racist and say, “Wait a minute! This is not appropriate.” But apparently not.

Walt Disney World apologised after a Texas high school drill team performing at the entertainment giant’s Florida theme park wore fringed outfits and chanted: “Scalp ’em, Indians, scalp ’em.”

“The live performance in our park did not reflect our core values and we regret it took place,” a spokesperson, Jacquee Wahler, said in a statement.

Native American advocates criticised Disney and Port Neches-Groves high school after video of the performance to Twitter.

“Any Natives who attend [Port Neches-Groves high school] should prolly just accept their classmates dehumanising them cuz ‘tradition’, right?” wrote Tara Houska, an Ojibwe tribal attorney and founder of the Giniw Collective and Not Your Mascots.

“Shame on [Disney] hosting this,” she said. “Nostalgic racism is RACISM.”

According to the Orlando Sentinel, a Disney employee asked the troupe to remove headdresses prior to their performance.

Wahler, the Disney spokesperson, said the performance that followed was “not consistent with the audition tape the school provided and we have immediately put measures in place so this is not repeated”.

I am pretty sure that Native Americans must be simply fed up with people ‘honoring’ them without first consulting with them about what would be an appropriate form such an action should take, and instead going with the first stereotype that they can come up with and then defending their decisions with ridiculous rationalizations.

The anti-worker bias in the media

Currently we are are experiencing a rare period when employers are finding it hard to fill positions, especially in the lower-wage service sector. But it is telling how differently the media covers this to how they cover the times when unemployment levels are high. The common thread is that in each case, they present the point of view of the employers, not the workers.

Cartoonist Ted Rall accurately captures the differences in the way that the media and the pundit class cover a labor surplus versus a labor shortage.

When jobs are scarce, workers are told to make big changes in their lives to adjust to reality. Now that workers are scarce, however, whiny employers are offered sympathy rather than given advice to change their obsolete business models.

The monopolies behind live concerts

A great example of why monopolies are bad can be seen in the practices of the two companies Ticketmaster and Live Nation. The merger of the two has resulted in them wielding enormous power when it comes to live concerts. As a result, consumers get both price-gouged and lousy service.

Back in 2009, New Jersey congressperson Bill Pascrell, Jr., among others, warned that allowing the merger would be bad but the Obama administration waved it through. In 2018, Pascrell wrote an article saying that all their dire predictions had come true.
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Rebels without a clue

By any measure, the supposedly massive convoy of trucks that was supposed to sent a stern message to the government protesting its pandemic polices was a major bust. Part of the reason may have been that there seemed to be some confusion about some basic issues, such as when and where the trucks would gather and what they would do when they arrived. For people who claimed to want to seriously challenge the government, they were remarkably inept.

Some organizers wanted to stage the event on Tuesday, March 1st in Washington DC at the National Mall, which was the day when Joe Biden was to give the annual State of the Union address. Hardly anyone showed up, with reporters outnumbering the twenty or so people who showed up. Another group seemed to have set the target date to be Saturday, March 5th and some on Sunday, March 6th. Some wanted to rally in Washington DC while others planned to meet outside the city. It was also not clear what they intended to do. Create massive gridlock by parking on major streets in the city, like what happened in Ottawa, their inspiration for this event? Create massive traffic jams by driving at a crawl on the Washington Beltway? But beltway traffic is usually at a crawl anyway, so no one might even notice.
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The shifting of conservative and reform parties

I have been re-reading the classic work On Liberty published in 1859 by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). In it, he emphasizes the importance of allowing complete freedom for people to advocate ideas, even if they seem to contradict what seems to everyone to be obviously true because he says that we never know what is true or false and that it is by being challenged by alternative views that ideas become strengthened if they are good ones or overthrown because they are false, both outcomes being preferable to a fossilized unquestioned orthodoxy. He says, “The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.”
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“Vote for us now. Learn our plan later”

It is usually the case that political parties each lay out some form of manifesto before an election to help voters decide whom they plan to support. The Republican party seems to have decided to reverse that practice.

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has been reluctant to release details of what Republicans would do should they retake Congress in the midterms, with McConnell saying only an agenda will be revealed “when we take it back”.

…

“If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader,” McConnell told reporters. “I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor.

Got that? He’s saying to vote for them first and after the election they will tell you what their legislative agenda is. Although this is a perversion of what politics should be, it makes for a kind of cynical sense and McConnell is as cynical as they come.
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