Mini-Heap
New links…
Discussion welcome.
- “What scares me [is] the rhetoric of AI today that is about gaslighting humans into surrendering their own power and their own confidence in their agency and freedom. That’s the existential threat” — Shannon Vallor (Edinburgh) interviewed at Vox
- It “should be thought of as a dialogue between [logic and intuition,] between reason and instinct, between language and abstraction” — you thought that was about philosophy, but it’s David Bessis’ view about math
- “At some point we have to accept that there are limits on what empirical research can tell us” — Henry Oliver on the value of fiction (via MR)
- “When I read my first essay to my philosophy tutor I was, quite naturally, utterly terrified” — John Fuller’s recollection of the tutorial experience
- There’s “a toxic ethical narrative… that, paradoxically, construes the violation of the laws of war as evidence of moral courage, even moral goodness” — Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western) on the ethical cover that provides “almost complete impunity for atrocities”
- The machines bring efficiency, and with it the questions: “How am I to use the time, space, money, labor which has been saved?” — perhaps with those little green and red books of classics. W.H.D. Rouse launched the series in 1911 with this ode to the greats who authored them
- “The taboo on mentioning the N-word (as opposed to *using* it) is and always has been silly and harmful” — in a thread on X, Hanno Sauer (Utrecht) explains why
Prof. Wolfendale claims that Israel has invoked Hamas’s brutal tactics to provide cover for its own war crimes. This is part of a historical pattern, she says, in which democratic countries – she mentions the U.S. and France specifically – invoke an enemy’s brutality, inhumanity, etc. to justify committing war crimes themselves.
Whatever the merits of her historical claims, surely there are cases where attacks that would otherwise amount to war crimes really are justified by an enemy’s brutal tactics. For example, the laws of war permit certain kinds of attacks against civilian targets (which would otherwise be war crimes) when an enemy uses them for military purposes.
This is exactly what Israel has argued is the case in Gaza. Namely, Hamas has made the brutal strategic choice to embed its military within and beneath Gaza’s civilian life. As a result, there is no way to defeat Hamas without incurring high numbers of civilian casualties.
While some countries may have made similar claims disingenuously in the past, that does not mean Israel is doing so here. And indeed, leading independent military experts have argued stridently to the contrary (see, e.g., here and here).
RE Link #5: Prof. Wolfendale claims that Israel has invoked Hamas’s brutal tactics to provide cover for its own war crimes. This is part of a historical pattern, she says, in which democratic countries – she mentions the US and France specifically – invoke an enemy’s brutality, inhumanity, etc. to justify committing war crimes themselves.
Whatever the merits of her historical claims, surely there are cases where attacks that would otherwise amount to war crimes really are justified by an enemy’s brutal tactics. For example, the laws of war permit certain kinds of attacks against civilian targets (which would otherwise be a war crime) when an enemy uses them for military purposes.
This is exactly what Israel has argued is the case in Gaza. Namely, Hamas has made the brutal, strategic choice to embed its military within and beneath Gaza’s civilian life. As a result, there is no way to defeat Hamas without incurring high numbers of civilian casualties.
While some countries may have made similar claims disingenuously in the past, that does not mean Israel is doing so here. And indeed, leading independent military experts have argued stridently to the contrary (see, e.g., here and here).