War Crime

This is the video posted to Wikileaks the other day, showing the slaughter of a number of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists. I can't say I recommend viewing it for yourself; it's pretty brutal.

I can sort of see how the troops may have mistaken a camera for an RPG. And maybe a group of people walking casually down the middle of the road looks like an insurgent attack. (One guy *might* have been carrying a rifle!) But blowing up the van, with no weapons visible at all, that pulled up to tend to the wounded? It'd be charitable to say the troops fucked up big time, but this incident quacks like a war crime. And the fact that the subsequent US military investigation cleared the troops of wrongdoing just pushes culpability for their crime up the ladder several rungs.



What gets me is that, based on the radio chatter, it never even entered into the troops' heads that it might actually have been a camera. Shouldn't checking for cameras be part of their training? Not to mention checking for other factors: as far as I can tell, the only reason they opened fire is because they saw two things that looked a little bit like weapons. They did not see people behaving as though they were part of an attack.



The counterargument will be, "Oh, but if you stop to make sure everything that looks like a weapon actually is, they'll shoot you first!" And that's probably true. But the continuing claim is that we're there for the good of the Iraqi people. Slaughtering them by the dozens over an unexamined misunderstanding--AND THEN COVERING IT UP--does nothing to support that claim.

Identity Map

I’m currently trying to get my life, online and otherwise, a bit more organized. To that end, I’ve created this “identity map,” highlighting the online services I use and how they interact and integrate with each other.



Big, convoluted, and confusing! Bear with me a moment.

That’s me in the center, the blue box that says Shig Vigintitres. Branching out from me are the major services I use, like Google and MobileMe. From there it gets to the specific things I use: gmail, the MobileMe Gallery, and so forth.

Yellow boxes indicate services I’m in the process of phasing out. Mostly I haven’t yet because there’s still content to be found there, photos in the MobileMe gallery and the gallery on my personal site, and so forth. Red boxes are services I’ve already phased out, or hardly ever use any more. They’re included mainly as a warning: if you try to use them to contact me, it probably won’t work.

Then there are the relationships between services. Red arrows indicate content fed from one service into another, such as Twitter updating my Facebook and Buzz statuses. Green arrows are email forwards. (I haven’t bothered forwarding the MobileMe address because nobody’s ever used it. As for the theunmentionable.com address, see below.)

What Isn’t Shown

As you might infer, there’s an invisible link branching out into the third dimension, connecting the “Shig Vigintitres” avatar with a flesh-and-blood entity in the physical world. That entity (and if you don’t know his name, you probably haven’t met him face-to-face, so his name would mean nothing to you) has other avatars branching off of him, serving different purposes (conducting personal business, doing his job, and so forth). The Shig avatar is the one I use to socialize online, so most of these links are to social media.

Also not shown is the multitude of single-use sites I have memberships on: discussion groups, other people’s blogs, etc. For one thing, including them would clutter this diagram up even more, and besides, none of them is my first stop when I go online. If you want to find me on a site, look for the username shig23, and odds are good that it’s me.

What’s Wrong With This Picture

The most notable problem is that there should be a link associated with my name at the center, a springboard site that leads to everywhere else. Ideally, that should be my personal domain, theunmentionable.com. Unfortunately, the way that site is currently set up does not lend itself to such a purpose. As you can see, I’m in the process of phasing it out; once all the photos are moved to a different online gallery (probably Picasa at this point), I’ll be shutting down the site and saving myself about four bucks a month. That will leave me free to point the domain somewhere else; the only question is where.

One possibility is a Google Sites page. I’ve got one in progress, as you can see; if you’d like, you can go there and see my fumbling efforts at setting it up. It has a wrapper function that would allow me to insert other pages -- Facebook, this blog, etc. -- directly on the site. That’s a somewhat less than perfect solution for all kinds of reasons, but it’s a possibility.

Another is to link it to my Google Profile. That rather minor Google service is turning out to be a powerful tool for organizing and showcasing your online life.

Either way, we’ll have to see what pans out. Stay tuned!