Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Multiple schemas for one document 5:05:54 PM • • comment [] • Google It! In general, the more links that there are in the world, the better off we all are. [Sam Ruby] I fully agree (but see below). With regards to the mapping between document(s) and schema(s) (or schemata or whatever), this could easily be resolved by allowing a single document to specify all the schemas that it conforms to. BTW, I only linked to Sam's page, but he links to Tim Bray which links to two individual messages from James Clark. If we had a topic-id concept, we could have used that to tie together all these related information capsules together. Even today our aggregators have sufficient information to make this whole discussion appear "threaded", rather than having to manually backtrack through the Web.

Dresden bombing: all evil? 3:38:54 PM • • comment [] • Google It! Rafe Colburn quotes his reader saying: I think we would have won the war without touching Dresden, and that the firebombing was only done to break the spirit of the Nazi soldiers, by killing their families and destroying their national treasures. rc3.org daily There's an Hebrew saying that seems appropriate here: "He who shows mercy to the cruel, will end up being cruel to the merciful". (Yes, it sounds better in Hebrew.) What is legit in a war? What isn't? These are certainly difficult questions. Considering the issue of Dresden, however, there are two issues that "absolute evil" opinions ignore: (1) laws of conduct at war must apply to all sides equally, or they lose their meaning; and (2) that the value of human lives on your side is greater than the other's. It has somehow become very popular in post-WWII Europe to ignore these issues. People would like to think there is some greater moral their side must abide by even if the other doesn't. What's even more alarming is that people are willing to sacrifice soldiers fighting on their own side to save the other side's "civilians". (Or, they are willing to do so in theory, when they are condeming other countries.) I quote "civilians" because these issues usually come up when the other side has complete disregard for the first issue: they do not follow any established laws of war, they do not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants when they target civilians, they do not let the other side make this differentiation by having all of their own combatants wear civilian clothes and live inside civilian camps, etc. Regarding the second issue, a point that has been repeatedly been raised before is how many lives on your side are you willing to sacrifice to save the other's. Assume that breaking the spirit of the Nazi nation saved the lives of 250,000 ally soldiers. Was it worth then? How about half that number? Just so that it be clear: I am not saying that bombing Dresden was justified. I am not saying it was unjustified as well. What I am saying is that there are some issues that are not so easy to dismiss. (Written by a non-combatant Jew who lives in Israel)

© Copyright 2002 Ziv Caspi.