Oh, sorry, no - as the one or two longtime readers of my journal had been told, I'd been planning on proposing to my gf over the holidays.
I've been meaning to see Fog of War - maybe I'll get a chance this week before classes start. But yeah, a number of Allied tactics during WWII (most notably carpet-bombing, as we did to Dresden and Tokyo, among others) are now widely recognized as war crimes. Still, good luck bringing the U.S. to account for any of them... It's amazing how much fun you can have with jurisdictional issues, especially when you're the victor.
Hooh. That's a long answer. In a nutshell, there are basically two important elements - sources and jurisdiction.
Sources are how we answer the question, "what is the law?" For war crimes, the two major sources are treaties (like the Geneva Conventions) and customary law, which is basically a sort of int'l common law (the rules that everyone sorta follows without their being codified anywhere). Customary law is, as you might guess, a big mess (and my dissertation area). Of course, customary law tends to have a bigger impact on things like war crimes, since the first thing that almost any state does before committing atrocities is repudiate any relevant treaties it might be a party to.
The other part of 'who decides' is jurisdiction - who decides how various rules should be applied, who should get to interpret treaties, what punishments should be meted out, etc. Right now, this is a bit of a patchwork. The International Court of Justice handles state-state disputes, but its jurisdiction is strictly voluntary (that is, it only decides cases if both states agree to go to the ICJ). The new International Criminal Court handles cases against individuals, but it can only take cases from nations who have signed on (not the US, for instance) and for crimes occurring after 1998. The ICC is patterened after a number of ad hoc war crimes tribunals that have been set up to deal with specific situations - such as the Nuremberg courts after WWII, and the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. These courts typically only have very limited jurisdiction (e.g. the ICTY covers only crimes occurring during the Kosovo conflict). There have also been a number of hybrid UN/national tribunals over the years, like in Sierra Leone. The details are worked out case-by-case between the UN and the nation(s) in question. (This is what the UN wants for Iraq).
Finally, you can prosecute some war crimes in national courts, provided that you can assert jurisdiction. Usually, for a national domestic court to take a case under international law, the defendant either has to be one of your nationals or on your soil, or (more rarely is this asserted) the victim(s) of the crime have to be your nationals. Plus, the defendant can't be protected by any of various kinds of immunities (e.g., states can't typically prosecute heads of state unless the defendant's state waives sovereign immunity). There's a movement towards asserting universal jurisdiction (i.e., any state can prosecute, perhaps even trumping immunity) for certain kinds of war crimes (notably torture and genocide), but there's still a lot of conflict in that area.
I want to see "Fog of War" very much. I saw the trailer it last week and it looks excellent.
Since you liked it, you might wanna check out this article in BackStageWest that my friend Ben wrote. He interviewed Errol Morris for an article about the movie:
OOh, you saw that? I really want to see that movie, it looks fascinating (if not highly disturbing.)
I'm also a big fan of DVD, despite the consumerist aspect of it, I enjoy watching some TV shows without comercials as well. Between that and Tivo maybe this is the end of the commercial era? Or maybe it will end up being more like Europe, with commercials only in between programs. God forbid they go to a strict product-placement style of advertising. I hate TV as well but I'll watch a couple of shows if one of my roommates has the TV on and they're playing.
The incredible amount of casualties in Japan during WWII, especially Hiroshima, have affected the Japanese culture so greatly that a lot of their fiction, and certainly their animated films, have apocalyptic undertones.
I'm a fan of Errol Morris and his crazy Interratron.
That's really funny that you mention Chumley's, it's one of my favorite places to go on a date, and it's right around the corner from my apartment. The crowd tends to be a little too frat-boy for my taste, but if you go late enough (but has to be before midnight, when they close) it usually isn't all that crowded.
Hopefully I'll see Fog of War this weekend, I really want to, it looks facinating.
Lots of cool space threads in CE for once, I've seen a lot of your posts there. We'll see how long they last until people get bored and start arguing politics again...
(looking at above post...) well, that didn't take long. So much for space threads in CE.
Did you really watch the entire Ring cycle? I didn't know it was done anywhere outside of that one village in Germany that has the Ring festival and shows it every year. That's a serious commitment, though I have to say that I like Wagner a lot, I saw Tannhauser when I was in Berlin and it was amazing.
I've taken that Political compass quiz before 9/11 and it had different questions but I came out more or less the same then too....basically to the left and down from Ghandi, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. Solidly in the "green party" camp.
Economic Left/Right: -5.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.77
You were right, Fog of War was great, I really enjoyed it. It definitely brings home how absolutely brutal World War 2 was (we seem to have successfully romanticized it and relegated it to the realm of pleasant nostalgia.) And comparing MacNamara's number crunching at Ford with the kind of statistical rationalization for the escalation of the Vietnam war (think Stalin - "one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic") made a lot of sense. My only complaint was the somewhat self-serving aspect of it for MacNamara himself.
And trust me when I tell you that you do NOT want the girl I was talking about in my journal at the CE forums. Unless you want to know what it sounds like to have thousands of readers simultaneously banging their heads against their monitors in frustration.
Yeah, I think your assessment of Burton is pretty right on. He's less of an actual storyteller and more an expert in setting a scene or giving a particular moment just the right feel. His scenery in batman was unmatched, but the movie iteslf was fairly poor, I thought.
Rumor has it his next big project is to do Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp (his muse, I suppose) as Willy Wonka. I initially didn't like the idea, but I think there's a lot of room for darkness in that movie that was left unexplored by the original film adaptation.
I never saw Ed Wood, but now that you mention it maybe I'll rent it.
And that quote you brought up from Fog of War is my favorite from the entire movie, it sums up government so succintly and brilliantly in a single sentence. I really do think I'm going to end all of my seminars with a slide saying that from now on.
Sorry - I've been busy for a couple days and only just now found the post you mentioned.
Honesty, I hesitate to even hazard a guess on our strategy for going ahead with the missle shield. But I would suspect that we're not in it to bankrupt China - as you mention, there're a billion+ folks there just waiting to buy (and make!) iPods... were China's economy to collapse, it'd be a nightmare for the global economy. We don't have the hefty trade barriers we did in the Cold War, and (IMHO) it's generally been making the world a better place (though there are still plenty of warts in the system), but it's also made us much more interdependent. (duh)
I know what you mean about staying away from here for fear of it eating all of your time. When I have a busy day in the lab I just make sure that I stay the hell away from my computer, so that I don't get sucked into some discussion on CE or whatever.
Keeping my fingers crossed for the second martian rover landing tonight....
edit: oh yeah, and SGNY has started up weekly bar meets on Saturday afternoon. So if you're free on a Saturday and can make it to the Tompkins square park area it might be a good chance to meet some people. Let me know if you're interested and I'll send you a private message with details.
I've been meaning to see Fog of War - maybe I'll get a chance this week before classes start. But yeah, a number of Allied tactics during WWII (most notably carpet-bombing, as we did to Dresden and Tokyo, among others) are now widely recognized as war crimes. Still, good luck bringing the U.S. to account for any of them... It's amazing how much fun you can have with jurisdictional issues, especially when you're the victor.