It's been a while since I looked into this, but I believe the British blockade of Germany in WWI constitute a war crime because it covered non-military assets such as food. It caused wide spread hunger and the blockade was maintained even when the war was over and they were negotiating at Versailles. Worth keeping in mind when you wonder why Germany was so aggressive about US shipping to the UK.
The more desperate one side of a conflict is the more extreme their actions can be. And they’ll always justify it.
Most people are against inflicting human suffering but sometimes it’s not so black and white.
Right now we can look at Afghanistan for an example - huge humanitarian disaster going on but world powers think by giving the cold shoulder then can soften the Taliban.
Eh, no matter who history seems as “right” in that conflict, the British blockade of Germany was nevertheless against international law and norms of the time.
History is written by the victors. When you're on the overall winning side you can wipe out war crimes or genocide within a blink of a decade. Just as long as you can stay on that side until your past becomes distant enough.
Even provable facts don't really get traction and things get swept under the rug. You don't get to read that much about such a British blockade against Germany, about a Belgian genocide in Congo (or any other major European country, even for things from the past century), etc. It's not that they're not considered big deals, it's that people are usually completely unaware they even happened.
Aah! A book! But really, I tried to make my point very clear. It's not that there's no info out there. Sweeping something under the rug doesn't mean the dust stopped existing, just that it's not immediately apparent and most people won't notice it.
Ask a random person to list if they heard of King Leopold, the Congo genocide, etc. and see how many have heard the names before, let alone understand what's behind. Sure there's a Wiki page with details but the magic of rewriting history is not in deleting the truth but in making it uninteresting and obscure. And that allows people the assumption that nothing like this could have ever happened.
It was Germany which started the Blockade first. In February 1915 they announced they would sink all allied merchant vessels around Britain. Britain responded in kind a month later.
If you don't want other countries doing something to you, it is a good idea to not do the exact same thing to them first.
Finally, I'm not even sure it was against the law at the time. Both participants seemed to regard it as legal.
It was Germany which started the Blockade first. In February 1915 they announced they would sink all allied merchant vessels around Britain. Britain responded in kind a month later.
The timeline all the sources I can access with a simple internet search tell me this:
- the UK blockade of Germany began in August 1914
- the UK declared the entire North Sea to be a warzone in November 1914, and expanded their contraband list to include all food
- Germany declared the areas around the UK a warzone in February 1915, which is what you're referring to
It seems like it was gradually escalated on both sides to me.
> When Britain joined the war on August 4, 1914, they did not immediately execute the entire plan to blockade all German imports. It was not until nearly four months into the war that Britain labeled the North Sea a war zone, and also began directing limited forces in the Mediterranean as well to restrict all German trade routes.
> The final shift to establishing the full blockade came on November 11, 1914, after several German light cruisers were observed attempting to lay mines off the coast of southern England. This act of aggression gave British leaders the impetus they needed to declare the full blockade without U.S. resistance because during the first four months of the war, Britain had confined itself to blocking only war materials from reaching German ports. World opinion of Germany during this time began to deteriorate because of repeated reports of brutality directed against Belgian and French civilians.
These things have a way of "tit for tat" escalating. If your opponent is doing things like executing whole villages of Belgian civilians as at louvain (August 1914), then the blockade starts to seem like a moral imperative.
As well as that - if Germany is laying mines in layers off the British coast, that is a pretty effective way of stopping merchant traffic to Britain and is sure to elicit a response in kind. If a country started laying mines off the coast of New York how do you think the US would respond?
You keep shifting goal posts and I'm having real trouble keeping track of what your point is here. If you're looking for a strawman who will defend everything Germany did in WWI you'll have to look somewhere else - I'm not nearly as partisan about a 104 year old war as you are.
I think you are conflating a blockade (search and seizure) with blatant attacks on neutral and civilian shipping. The British almost immediately (August 1914) started performing search and seizure of neutral-flagged ships sailing to unaligned port cities, on the doctrine that these supplies would be sold to Germany. Which was true of course, but nevertheless a direct violation of existing conventions regarding free use of the high seas. That was the start of the naval blockade.
i am pretty much in the minority but if USA and "allies" didnt help ukraine, russia would come in, wipe the ruling party out, maybe destry some cities but the whole thing would be over in less time. the exact same thing that happened with afghanistan or iraq for example.
instead, for once, USA has all the concern for human lives and "democracy" and is arming ukraine, thereby prolonging the war.
this isn't even my own idea, this is the same ideology that USA itself uses to justify hiroshima/nagasaki...
if USA isnt going to be responsible for actual crimes against humanity in hiroshima or vietnam with its napalm and others or with afghanistan or iraq then why are these same people trying to fault Russia for doing the same thing they did?
And when Russia comes for Poland, or Estonia, likewise they should surrender to make it quick? After all, to resist would be to harm the army of gunpoint Ukranian conscripts that would be used.
why not....... the world did not stop you over the years, why are you stopping someone else now or has the USA decided to no interfere with third party conflicts ?
Bombing Hiroshima was not a war crime under the rules in effect at the time. The city was a legitimate military target. There was no requirement for combatants to avoid all collateral damage.
Your comment is off topic and irrelevant. US war crimes allegedly committed during the GWOT have nothing to do with the current war between Ukraine and Russia, or with ships sunk during WW1 (the original topic).
Whether or not the US has done bad things isn't a factor in whether Ukraine deserves support against illegal invasion and war crimes by Russia.
Yes it would be much better if countries like USA has perfect track records, and hopefully they'll get better at not harming other countries, but that doesn't change the fact that they're on the right side in this situation.
> why are these same people trying to fault Russia for doing the same thing they did?
You mean unprovoked Ukraine invasion vs an attack spurred by Pearl harbour (at a time of World War that Japanese where allies of Nazi Germany). Not really "the same thing".
Comparing use of nuclear weapons in Japan to allowing russia to, uncontested, wage a war of invasion against Ukraine is silly. Japan started a war of aggression with the United States. We, as people with the benefit of hindsight, probably agree on whether nuclear weapons were an appropriate place to take the war. But don’t forget that Japan brought war to the US, just as russia has brought war to Ukraine.
As for Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I can look at US military moral failures there and still condemn russia’s epic moral failure in Ukraine. Incidentally, US’s invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 was far more justified than the soviet invasion of Afghanistan previously. If soviets hadn’t waged a similar immoral expansionist war there, I’m confident there’d have been no taliban.
No, the US isn’t morally pure, but Ukraine’s blood is on russia’s hands alone.
> Japan started a war of aggression with the United States.
Before that, President Roosevelt enacted a broad embargo on Japan. No more steel and no more fuel. Some say Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to act, and the timeline supports that idea.
The embargo was a matter of economic sanctions only. There was no blockade, no use of force, no act of war. If Japan was short of resources, well that was their problem. No one forced them to start a war of aggression by attacking Pearl Harbor.
Is there some other international sanctions beyond economic? Keep strangling an island nation, restrict imports, and expect them to not react?
If a person believes "my body my right" and is fired from a federal job for refusing to take an emergency use authorization shot, is that also ok because it only harms the person economically?
There are a variety of types of sanctions beyond economic ones. For example, the US sometimes specifically bans sanctioned individuals from crossing our borders (including airspace).
Japan was in no way being strangled. Before Japan's unprovoked attack, there were no US Navy ships blockading their harbors. International trade is a voluntary affair, and the US and its allies were under no legal or moral obligation to continue selling to Japan. Cutting off trade through non-violent means was not considered an act of war under the international treaties or customary norms in effect in 1941. Whether they were expected to react or not is immaterial.
I'm not sure why you're trying to derail the discussion with irrelevant questions about vaccine mandates. Those apply to individuals, not sovereign states, and are completely off topic.
Trade embargoes happen somewhat regularly. It would be absurd to suggest that refusing to sell materials to a geopolitical adversary is remotely comparable to an invasion that kills over a couple thousand people.
Also, US relations with Japan soured pre-war in large part due to Japan’s expansion by force in the region. “Expansion in the region” here encompassing events including that known as “the rape of Nanjing.”
So, again, US isn’t bloodless, but an embargo against the perpetrators of atrocities in Asia is hardly comparable to Japan’s war of aggression launched against the US.
> USA has all the concern for human lives and "democracy"
Well yes, a lot of Americans (and Europeans and Asians, and even Russians) value "democracy". They also value things like "freedom of expression" and "the rule of law" that aren't particularly valued by Vladimir Putin.
> i am pretty much in the minority but if USA and "allies" didnt help ukraine, russia would come in, wipe the ruling party out, maybe destry some cities but the whole thing would be over in less time. the exact same thing that happened with afghanistan or iraq for example.
No, not even close. Russia's goal in Ukraine is the destruction of Ukrainian statehood and ethnicity by merging its territory into Russia and turning Ukrainian people into servant underclass in the new Russian empire. Genocide, in short. See Putin's speech on the eve of the war and his pseudohistorical essays.
Nothing the US did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan or Vietnam comes close. The US did not attempt to merge Iraq into the United States and enslave the people of Iraq.
When facing genocide, surrender is not an option. It's insane to even suggest that. Nor are Russian ambitions limited to Ukraine, concessions will only lead to escalation.
A 'war crime' violating which war law, as it were?
I'm just curious whether this is judging the past with modern law or not, from my cursory search, the relevant agreements are the Hague Conventions, and the Second Geneva Convention; none of which seems to have provision for the protection of 'non-military assets such as food' like that, but perhaps I'm missing it, I am just skimming/ctrl-f-ing. (Civilians/non-combatants yes, but not their supplies specifically, if non-violently blockaded, afaict.)
Depends whether you consider a hostile country's navy's non-firing presence to be 'violent' or not I suppose. I didn't, so I meant a blockade without any combat, projectiles fired, etc. - no physical harm to life or vessels, they just physically can't get through.
That's what I mean, physically blocking the route, threatening sure but I'm calling anything short of actually doing (or attempting to do) the sinking 'non-violent' but I acknowledged others might not so tried to explain what I meant. The semantics of what constitutes 'violence' was really not my point.
Non firing presence is not blockade. It is just another ship you pass through, maybe waving flag. I do not think any navy ever had so many ships they would be able to cover the see.
> The declaration was signed by most of the great powers of the day: Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (It was also signed by the Netherlands and Spain.)[1] However, no state ever ratified the declaration and consequently it never came into force.[2] The United States insisted that the belligerent nations fighting in World War I abide by the Declaration, while the British and Germans ignored it.
Also it would have made the blockade more of a war crime, not less.
I think you're counting all casualties caused by Central Powers as a consequence of Germany's invasion of France.
It can be seen like that but you should make clear that it assumes German single responsibility for the war, including for her Allies' actions against civilians, and also indirect consequences such as deaths caused by malnutrition.
Then you would arrive at 3.78 million deaths, worst-case
Yes, I do. Austria-Hungary only invaded Serbia because they had the support of Germany. Germany's invasion caused the civilian death tolls across the continent. No German and Austria-Hungarian invasions, likely no mass murder.
You realise that Germany invaded Belgium and France because France and Russia mobilised against her? And that they mobilised because Germany was supporting Austro-Hungary against Serbia, whose intelligence service had commissioned the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and of his wife? Not countering those mobilisations would have left the German Empire at the mercy of Russia and France.
To the extent that one can talk about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sides in the Great War (which is not very far, really), Germany was on the good side (unlike in the Second World War).
I don't think a country that performed the grotesque "rape of Belgium" can claim to be the good side. The simple fact is, Germany initiated the war, and Germany implemented the worst atrocities of the war. That makes it the "baddie" in my book.
I don't think there is any country in Europe that wasn't guilty of doing evil before the war to stir it up (even neutral countries like Switzerland, though I don't know of anything they actually did I'm still willing to lump them in with the guilty). Even in the rest of the world there were not many parties that were not stirring things up (remember Europe had colonies all over the world)
I mean, I don't really buy this "they were all as bad as each other" argument. We're not talking about some moral assessment of the totality of German and British civilisations, but rather more specifically about WWI itself and the lead up to it. The simple fact is that Germany initiated the war (turned a "cold" rivalry hot), it invaded its neighbour, it treated civilians abonimably, and Britain's involvement in the war was in practice defensive to its ally France and took place mostly on French territory. I don't recall Britain rounding up villages of Germans and executing them.
Even when it comes to the "war crimes" stuff in this thread - something like poison gases were straightforwardly outlawed by the Hague Convention, it was Germany that first decided to "go there" and make mass use of poison gas a feature of WWI.
'The nation that...can still be held least responsible for the outbreak of the war is France. This is so even if we bear in mind all the revisions of historical judgments, and all the revisions of these revisions, to which we have now been treated....The French, in 1914, entered the war because they had no alternative. The Germans had attacked them. History can be very simple at times.[1]'"
> You realise that Germany invaded Belgium and France because France and Russia mobilised against her?
Not sure any country would have accepted the terms of Germany's ultimatum to France, which included not only not starting mobilization, but also giving strong guarantees. Furthermore, if France was to bend and remain neutral, the German ambassador was instructed to add more humiliating terms in order to secure war.
No, the blockade was not a war crime under the rules in effect at the time. And Germany actually declared a blockade against the UK first. The UK blockade against Germany was declared later, in retaliation.
> even when the war was over and they were negotiating at Versailles.
The war wasn't over at that point, there was only an agreement to stop fighting while negociating. In fact, the German army kept sabotaging industrial sites in northern France after the armistice.
My understanding is that one of the terms of the armistice was that the German army retreat east of the Rhine. Allied occupation of the Rheinland began 1st of December 1918.
Could you name or provide a reference to one of the post armistice actions of the german army in northern france?
Ok right that doesn't surprise me. I had interpreted your original post is the German army somehow still having active military units in France while Versaille was going on which definitely would have.
Thanks for the links btw, it's not something I can remember seeing discussed in english before.
There are not that many good sources in french either tbh. Even the studies we have don't really focus that much on the post-armistice period, since Germany's sabotage started before the armistice, as they could see the writing on the wall.
> On the other hand, trying to get the enemy to surrender using hunger without having to kill them en masse is arguably more humane.
Haber claimed that mustard gas was more humane than having men rot in trenches for months while shooting one another, too, but when we justify horrors with "it's a kindness" we lose something important.
I can never read anything by nytimes, even with removing cookies, it's basically a black hole of non-content.
With all the technology at our disposal, why can no one build a system whereby people can read occasional articles at most websites by paying a penny or something reasonable? I can't subscribe to 100,000 different newspapers.
What's more, I have noticed an element of contagion forming where, for every paywalled article, there's several lower-quality unpaywalled articles referring to the former, but with their own biased spins. Fact-checking those articles is difficult because you can't verify the source, but they end up circulating more, because people can read them.
In the long-term, I think this is going to damage the quality of information conducting through our society, and maybe even worsen the propaganda problem that we're currently facing.
It absolutely is already happening. Fox and the NYPost is always free and end up owning the narrative for many people.
There’s coordinated campaigns when issues pop up. When the former president gets himself in trouble, I basically get an early warning when my father in law is upset about some “woke” school/mayor/etc doing something outrageous.
Information which helps you is going to cost you money. Information which harms you or benefits someone else - propaganda and advertising - will not only be free but ubiquitous. AI will make this even worse, as it can produce infinite quantities of fiction which looks like information.
I totally get the sentiment, but I really want to read 3 NYT articles a month.
To make the company what I pay now for a subscription, that would come out to around $6.00 an article. I'm not sure I'd press that $6.00 to read button very often.
Your scheme would broaden the total number of readers, but I'm unsure that the company would actually do well under it.
86 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadMost people are against inflicting human suffering but sometimes it’s not so black and white.
Right now we can look at Afghanistan for an example - huge humanitarian disaster going on but world powers think by giving the cold shoulder then can soften the Taliban.
There isn’t a clear cut right/wrong here imo.
Even provable facts don't really get traction and things get swept under the rug. You don't get to read that much about such a British blockade against Germany, about a Belgian genocide in Congo (or any other major European country, even for things from the past century), etc. It's not that they're not considered big deals, it's that people are usually completely unaware they even happened.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/king-leopolds-ghost-adam-ho... (published 2020)
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/king-leopolds-soliloquy-mar... (edition of 2020, written by Mark Twain in 1905)
Ask a random person to list if they heard of King Leopold, the Congo genocide, etc. and see how many have heard the names before, let alone understand what's behind. Sure there's a Wiki page with details but the magic of rewriting history is not in deleting the truth but in making it uninteresting and obscure. And that allows people the assumption that nothing like this could have ever happened.
If you don't want other countries doing something to you, it is a good idea to not do the exact same thing to them first.
Finally, I'm not even sure it was against the law at the time. Both participants seemed to regard it as legal.
The timeline all the sources I can access with a simple internet search tell me this:
- the UK blockade of Germany began in August 1914
- the UK declared the entire North Sea to be a warzone in November 1914, and expanded their contraband list to include all food
- Germany declared the areas around the UK a warzone in February 1915, which is what you're referring to
> When Britain joined the war on August 4, 1914, they did not immediately execute the entire plan to blockade all German imports. It was not until nearly four months into the war that Britain labeled the North Sea a war zone, and also began directing limited forces in the Mediterranean as well to restrict all German trade routes.
> The final shift to establishing the full blockade came on November 11, 1914, after several German light cruisers were observed attempting to lay mines off the coast of southern England. This act of aggression gave British leaders the impetus they needed to declare the full blockade without U.S. resistance because during the first four months of the war, Britain had confined itself to blocking only war materials from reaching German ports. World opinion of Germany during this time began to deteriorate because of repeated reports of brutality directed against Belgian and French civilians.
These things have a way of "tit for tat" escalating. If your opponent is doing things like executing whole villages of Belgian civilians as at louvain (August 1914), then the blockade starts to seem like a moral imperative.
As well as that - if Germany is laying mines in layers off the British coast, that is a pretty effective way of stopping merchant traffic to Britain and is sure to elicit a response in kind. If a country started laying mines off the coast of New York how do you think the US would respond?
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/899/2/the-british-b...
this isn't even my own idea, this is the same ideology that USA itself uses to justify hiroshima/nagasaki...
if USA isnt going to be responsible for actual crimes against humanity in hiroshima or vietnam with its napalm and others or with afghanistan or iraq then why are these same people trying to fault Russia for doing the same thing they did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
so america can be involved in so many regime changes for the lulz, right?
The laws of war have changed since WW2, primarily through the Geneva Conventions but there have been a number of other international treaties as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war
says hi
lol
Yes it would be much better if countries like USA has perfect track records, and hopefully they'll get better at not harming other countries, but that doesn't change the fact that they're on the right side in this situation.
You mean unprovoked Ukraine invasion vs an attack spurred by Pearl harbour (at a time of World War that Japanese where allies of Nazi Germany). Not really "the same thing".
As for Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I can look at US military moral failures there and still condemn russia’s epic moral failure in Ukraine. Incidentally, US’s invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 was far more justified than the soviet invasion of Afghanistan previously. If soviets hadn’t waged a similar immoral expansionist war there, I’m confident there’d have been no taliban.
No, the US isn’t morally pure, but Ukraine’s blood is on russia’s hands alone.
Before that, President Roosevelt enacted a broad embargo on Japan. No more steel and no more fuel. Some say Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to act, and the timeline supports that idea.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1930
If a person believes "my body my right" and is fired from a federal job for refusing to take an emergency use authorization shot, is that also ok because it only harms the person economically?
Japan was in no way being strangled. Before Japan's unprovoked attack, there were no US Navy ships blockading their harbors. International trade is a voluntary affair, and the US and its allies were under no legal or moral obligation to continue selling to Japan. Cutting off trade through non-violent means was not considered an act of war under the international treaties or customary norms in effect in 1941. Whether they were expected to react or not is immaterial.
I'm not sure why you're trying to derail the discussion with irrelevant questions about vaccine mandates. Those apply to individuals, not sovereign states, and are completely off topic.
Also, US relations with Japan soured pre-war in large part due to Japan’s expansion by force in the region. “Expansion in the region” here encompassing events including that known as “the rape of Nanjing.”
So, again, US isn’t bloodless, but an embargo against the perpetrators of atrocities in Asia is hardly comparable to Japan’s war of aggression launched against the US.
Well yes, a lot of Americans (and Europeans and Asians, and even Russians) value "democracy". They also value things like "freedom of expression" and "the rule of law" that aren't particularly valued by Vladimir Putin.
No, not even close. Russia's goal in Ukraine is the destruction of Ukrainian statehood and ethnicity by merging its territory into Russia and turning Ukrainian people into servant underclass in the new Russian empire. Genocide, in short. See Putin's speech on the eve of the war and his pseudohistorical essays.
Nothing the US did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan or Vietnam comes close. The US did not attempt to merge Iraq into the United States and enslave the people of Iraq.
When facing genocide, surrender is not an option. It's insane to even suggest that. Nor are Russian ambitions limited to Ukraine, concessions will only lead to escalation.
I'm just curious whether this is judging the past with modern law or not, from my cursory search, the relevant agreements are the Hague Conventions, and the Second Geneva Convention; none of which seems to have provision for the protection of 'non-military assets such as food' like that, but perhaps I'm missing it, I am just skimming/ctrl-f-ing. (Civilians/non-combatants yes, but not their supplies specifically, if non-violently blockaded, afaict.)
It's a bunch of ships hanging about on the route, saying loudly over the radio "don't come this way or we will sink you"
Blockades are enforced by firing.
The "Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law" of 1856.
The neutral flag covers enemy's goods, with the exception of contraband of war;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Declaration_concerning_...
Also it would have made the blockade more of a war crime, not less.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/world_w...
It can be seen like that but you should make clear that it assumes German single responsibility for the war, including for her Allies' actions against civilians, and also indirect consequences such as deaths caused by malnutrition.
Then you would arrive at 3.78 million deaths, worst-case
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
But that doesn't mean that I'm right or that you're wrong...
To the extent that one can talk about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sides in the Great War (which is not very far, really), Germany was on the good side (unlike in the Second World War).
Even when it comes to the "war crimes" stuff in this thread - something like poison gases were straightforwardly outlawed by the Hague Convention, it was Germany that first decided to "go there" and make mass use of poison gas a feature of WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_...
'The nation that...can still be held least responsible for the outbreak of the war is France. This is so even if we bear in mind all the revisions of historical judgments, and all the revisions of these revisions, to which we have now been treated....The French, in 1914, entered the war because they had no alternative. The Germans had attacked them. History can be very simple at times.[1]'"
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Remak
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_entry_into_World_War_I#...
Not sure any country would have accepted the terms of Germany's ultimatum to France, which included not only not starting mobilization, but also giving strong guarantees. Furthermore, if France was to bend and remain neutral, the German ambassador was instructed to add more humiliating terms in order to secure war.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/blockade-warfare
The British blockade against Germany was August 1914, according to these sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany https://nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/spotl...
Can you provide a source for a pre august 1914 German declaration of a blockade on the UK?
The war wasn't over at that point, there was only an agreement to stop fighting while negociating. In fact, the German army kept sabotaging industrial sites in northern France after the armistice.
Could you name or provide a reference to one of the post armistice actions of the german army in northern france?
...And they destroyed industrial sites during their retreat.
> Could you name or provide a reference to one of the post armistice actions of the german army in northern france?
[1](https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/hauts-de-france/pas-...) [2](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_des_mines_de_Dourges) [3](https://www.cairn.info/revue-guerres-mondiales-et-conflits-c...)
Thanks for the links btw, it's not something I can remember seeing discussed in english before.
The blockade was arguably the main reason for Germany's capitulation.
There's no excuse for continuing the blockade after the surrender, though.
Haber claimed that mustard gas was more humane than having men rot in trenches for months while shooting one another, too, but when we justify horrors with "it's a kindness" we lose something important.
With all the technology at our disposal, why can no one build a system whereby people can read occasional articles at most websites by paying a penny or something reasonable? I can't subscribe to 100,000 different newspapers.
In the long-term, I think this is going to damage the quality of information conducting through our society, and maybe even worsen the propaganda problem that we're currently facing.
There’s coordinated campaigns when issues pop up. When the former president gets himself in trouble, I basically get an early warning when my father in law is upset about some “woke” school/mayor/etc doing something outrageous.
Disable JS on nytimes.com (i use the Ublock Origin extension for this) and it works fine.
To make the company what I pay now for a subscription, that would come out to around $6.00 an article. I'm not sure I'd press that $6.00 to read button very often.
Your scheme would broaden the total number of readers, but I'm unsure that the company would actually do well under it.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...