18 Comments

Good suggestion at the end. The only problem is that international law already proscribes the punishment for not wearing a military uniform in battle, and it is summary execution.

The issue with summary executing all fighters is that it discourages surrender. That said Israel should and probably will hang most of the Hamas fighters who surrendered on October 7th.

At the present moment there is a tension in international military law. Namely there are two streams international military law, the classical and the newer international humanitarian law.

International military law allows Israel to pretty much glass Gaza for Hamas fighting the way it is. International humanitarian law is a leftist method of tying the hands of stronger combatants to attempt to basically outlaw war.

At the present moment every single international body is constituted of International humanitarian law activist leftists who’s goal it is to outlaw war.

I recently took an international military law and ethics course at Cornell Law. It was taught by a retired Jag officer who converted to Catholicism. It was one of the only actually interesting courses I took in law school, but it was still too leftist. The one thing I took away from the entire course was that the international military, like all avenues of law everywhere in the world, went off the rails into the 1960s.

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"I’m aware that some normies read this blog, though I could never for the life of me figure out why."

Compared with the average hard-rightist you're practically Mother Theresa. At least you have a conscience. The reason most normies lean left is because the average politically-active right-winger has a temperament somewhere between Nietzsche, Timur, and Julius Streicher.

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The true test of a white person's racism level is whether they know the difference between a Shona and a Lemba.

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But here's the really important moral question about Clive: Does he eat shrimp?

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"Now, you might say ‘isn’t that what Israel is trying to do already?’ Yes and no. During this war alone, according to its own estimates, Israel has captured 6,000 Hamas fighters. What I’m saying is that, provided it can be demonstrated that they are members of Hamas’ military branch, they should all be, for that reason only, executed."

An even more modest proposal: terrorists who 1) have killed Israelis 2) are unrepentant 3) brag about doing it again if they could, and 4) are likely to be released the next time a terrorist group gets its hands on some hostages, should be executed *before* said hostages are taken.

It's beyond insane that Eichman is the only one who ever got executed by the state of Israel. If anything, by that point he was less of a threat than the average Jihadi.

"Indeed, the ideal international law of war would look like this:

Both sides agree at no less than 3 days in advance when hostilities will commence.

The geographical area for hostilities is specified in advance.

Both sides can only use weapons listed on an online wiki-document"

This is basically what I was taught in elementary school about why British redcoats lost the American revolution to a bunch of ragtag drunks.

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Your elementary school history teacher was terribly remiss in leaving out the French and Spanish. Some of those ragtag drunks understood the rudiments of diplomacy.

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As a first order approximation, international law is simply the position of the US State Department. We will soon see what international law means for the next four years.

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This makes sense. Law in general is just the position of the sovereign. And the United States is the closest thing to an international sovereign.

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No, that's what we call the "rules based order". Putin, for example, is a big stickler for international law, and he clearly knows the difference.

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Good poast.

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There's a lot of things you could threaten Hamas fighters with, up to mass executions. I don't think it would dissuade them, they seem devoted to the cause of martyrdom.

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Do you really think that summarily executing captured Hamas military personnel will actually do the trick here? I mean, this is probably what they are expecting they will get right afterwards in Paradise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri

Or at least many/most of them. Maybe a few of them have doubts or are secret skeptics.

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Maybe not, but it still sets a precedent to disincentivize other paramilitaries adopting this tactic. If I recall correctly, the British in India used to bury executed Muslim rebels in pigskins, which they apparently believed would prevent them going to pimp-heaven. Probably, the more refined Sharia schools don't believe that, but something along those lines might work.

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The more refined Sharia schools believe that they’ll go to pimp heaven either way?

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Yeah, it sounds to me like Pakistani peasant superstition, but I defer to those with more knowledge of fiqh or whatever they call it.

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Do you have the original chart, without the red circle?

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