NP just the murder of children but don't call it "weaponizing"....

[Robert Mahnke]

Recognizing fully that it may not matter to you or change your posting
habits in any way, I find your emails to this list in which you share
tweets with a mere url almost totally useless. There is widely available,
well-designed software that enables you to share tweets. It is called
"Twitter." One can download the app, or use the open web version. I am sure
you are familiar with it, because you have an account, @markkohut, which I
follow. When you share (or "retweet") someone else's tweet on Twitter, the
reader sees both that tweet and whatever text you may add with it. By
contrast, when you email tweets, I have to click on each tweet and open
another browser window (in Twitter!) to see whatever content you are trying
to share.

With regard to this post to which I am responding, you did not bother to
tweet the same content to your 1,330 followers, an indication that the
tweet itself was not that interesting, and that you are only sharing it
here as a response to Thomas Eckhardt's post about whether Russia was or
was not weaponizing rape. If I understand correctly, you don't argue with
the truth of what he shared, so you're trying to rebuke him for drawing a
distinction between rape as something that many soldiers do when given the
opportunity, and rape as a premeditated military strategy. You're trying to
suggest that drawing the distinction somehow downplays the gravity of the
former. This post relates "just the murder of children" but not
"weaponizing," so Eckhardt must not really care about the murder of
children.

This is not fair to Eckhardt. The distinction between the horrible things
that happen in war and a premeditated strategy of pursuing those horrible
things is real and important. If you don't believe that, read up on war
crimes. But you do believe it, and it's hard to imagine that you would take
the same shot at someone identified as a supporter of Ukraine. Perhaps
because you think Eckhardt is on the wrong side, you are cheapening
yourself to try to score some kind of debating point on him. It only makes
one of you look bad, and it's not him. To state the obvious, it's bad when
children are killed in war, and worse when that killing is "weaponized."

Posting tweets here that consist of nothing but the tweet's url and maybe a
delphic subject line adds almost no value to the board. Anyone who can read
these emails can follow a twitter account (and if they can't, there is
absolutely no point in sharing links to tweets). If you have something to
say about a tweet and need more than 280 characters to say it, by all
means, develop the thought and share it here. But if you're just going to
share a tweet, for God's sake, do it on Twitter. Sharing a tweet's url here
but declining to retweet it can fairly be understood as an expression of
disregard or disrespect to your audience here, if not implicit hostility.

Please take this as a sign of my belief that you have something to say, and
of my desire to see it published in the right place.





On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 1:18 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> https://twitter.com/DMokryk/status/1536411047678169088?s=20&t=Lq75Xoo_e8wPP3vDsKJepQ
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>