Category: war

The battle of Aleppo is creating a disgusting future for war

Not that war is pretty anyway…

Usually, I try to keep it chill on the Sundry Letter, but as history unfolds, one must take note. 

The Battle of Solferino that took place in June 1859 left 40 000 Italian, French and Austrian soldiers dead or wounded. Henry Dunant was there and he spent his time tending to the wounded. The reflections he wrote then led to the founding of the Red Cross.

Paul Mason for The Guardian: 

Solferino inspired the principle that hospitals and army medical personnel are not a legitimate target in war. Today, with the bombing of hospitals by the Russians in Syria, the Saudis in Yemen and the Americans in Afghanistan, those who provide medical aid in war believe that principle is in ruins.

Land ownership and digital products

Maximum geek alert. Here’s Rebekah Cox, original designer of the News Feed pattern for Facebook and Quora, using the image of physical land ownership to explain the digital platform wars: 

Land ownership couldn’t exist without violence. Violence to take the land and violence—or at least the threat of violence—to keep the land. Systems have been created to keep that violence to a minimum: courts, property lines, rules, regulations, police, lawyers, deeds, sales, etc. New laws are created to compensate for new abuses: height restrictions, offsets, building permits, etc. But where lawyers fail, sheriffs are there with guns for enforcement.

There is no digital land equivalent. Products like Facebook and Twitter are platforms and the foundation on which you build your parcel is your profile but for the most part it grows without harming others. Your gaining friends and followers and likes and retweets should not detract from other’s opportunity to do so. By and large, the ‘battles’ are between the major platforms themselves. Snapchat innovates, Facebook-owned Instagram clones. Actual violence is avoided entirely.

The largest war in animal history is happening right now

Suzanne Sadedin is one of the most interesting writers on Quora. Her answer to the question: ”Do animals fight wars and if so what was the largest war?” is both well-written and interesting:

Once upon a time there was a tiny brown ant who lived by a swamp at the end of the Paraná River in Argentina. Her name, Linepithema humile, literally means ‘humble’ or ‘weak’. Some time during the late 1800s, an adventurous L. humile crept away from the swamp where giant river otter played and capybaras cavorted.

She stowed away on a boat that sailed to New Orleans. And she went to war.

At home in the Paraná delta, L. humile nests would ferociously defend themselves from other nests, both of their own species and other kinds of ant. It was a life of never-ending territorial skirmishes, where nobody could really get ahead. When two L. humile met, they would flick their antennae over each others’ bodies, tasting the combination of hydrocarbons on their skin. This flavor would tell them whether the stranger belonged to the same nest. If she tasted familiar, she would be recognized as a sister. She would be gently stroked, offered food and welcomed into the nest. But if the flavor were not recognized, the ants would try to kill each other.

In New Orleans, something changed.

Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.

He must be thanking a whole array of gods that he didn’t go to war. The US already went to war because of wrong intel, let’s not do that again. Long but research piece. 

Drone pilots get as much stress disorders as pilots actually in combat

A new study led by the United States’ Defense Department found that pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, experienced PTSD, depression and anxiety as much as pilots who are actually “over there”. 

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Interesting.