Thoughts

Video is through the link. http://www.collateralmurder.com/
I think it is hard to justify the latter half of the video, where they shoot up the van evacuating wounded. However, I do feel like the arrows identifying the two journalists are more of a play on emotion than reliable identification - especially after the shooting starts.

How about the role of Wikileaks in this whole thing? They somehow obtained the video, used supercomputers in Iceland to unencrypt the whole thing. Meanwhile, various governments were shadowing them and allegedly threatening them.

Lastly, this kind of gun-camera footage, the advent of drone aircraft, remote control war. What are the effects of the (for lack of a better term) video-game-ization of warfare?

Is liberty an inherently social concept?

So I've been enjoying the Cato Unbound blog lately. It's basically just a forum for debate between conservatives but they really hash out issues I care about. There's been a good one on Ayn Rand recently (here) and a neat one on whether or not college is worth it (here).

Today, I've been reading the current issue for debate, the nature of Freedom/Liberty. I particularly like a sub-debate going on about whether or not Liberty is a social construct. I.E. you don't have liberty if you live alone because liberty depends on your relationship to other people. (Ok, I'm kind of taking my own interpretation of it - call it a straw man if you want).

I'd argue that you have absolute liberty in that situation, but that it is largely meaningless as a value without a society present. Lots of things would be meaningless on an isolated desert island - gold bars, i-pad, lifetime supply of toner. The hypothetical doesn't really help us figure out the concept much.

If you're up for some good old intellectual procrastination, give it a read.