"...leaving the likes of Putin unable to escape justice for his crimes."
The likes of Putin will indeed escape justice for their crimes more often than not in the world we now live in because the advent of 'shock and awe' on our television screens 2 decades ago completed the process begun during the Vietnam War and, in real time instead of tape delay, shocked the last of the awe and fear of man's ability to destroy fellow human beings right out of us, especially in the affluent and comfortable West, and that has not and will not return, if it was ever really there in the first place.
War, like politics, is now as important for its entertainment value as it is for its real-world consequences.
This is the polite way of saying that the effin' daily media deluge of the bloody, violent destruction of human beings by other human beings, from the mundane mass shooting in a school or club in the States to the mass destruction of a Ukranian town or city, is now so ingrained in us as a normal and to-be-expected event that literally nothing is shocking anymore, only surprising at best, and then only if some new novelty is attached. We've become numb to violence, both small and intimate and at the scale of entire countries at war, and in reality no longer really give a shit as long as it doesn't touch us personally and our comfortable lives are allowed to proceed apace, despite our protestations to the contrary.
Would anyone be genuinely *shocked* or even much surprised if Putin dropped a few barrel bombs on a few neighborhoods? Nah... that's already been done in Syria. Maybe used a few chemical weapons? Not really. Iraq and Saddam are old news. Lobbing in a nuke somewhere might produce some actual shock, but it would probably have to be a pretty good sized one, not one of those little tactical battlefield jobs. And that would only be because, practically speaking, it hasn't been done within living memory and covered near ceaselessly in real time on cable news or the 'net. And if it weren't for the knock-on effects that might make more than a few people's lives less comfortable in places other than ground zero, I doubt it would be long before a mushroom cloud here and there would no longer be shocking at all.
The indictment of Putin and the fact that absolutely nothing of any meaning or consequence will come of it would be better seen as an indictment of so-called civilized nations and their people for negligence and the nihilism of the comfortable self-delusion that, in the end, it may cause them a few problems to which they must respond in some way, but it's ultimately not really *their* problem to solve. And I can't really *Imagine* a time when this won't be the case, mushroom clouds or not.
"...leaving the likes of Putin unable to escape justice for his crimes."
The likes of Putin will indeed escape justice for their crimes more often than not in the world we now live in because the advent of 'shock and awe' on our television screens 2 decades ago completed the process begun during the Vietnam War and, in real time instead of tape delay, shocked the last of the awe and fear of man's ability to destroy fellow human beings right out of us, especially in the affluent and comfortable West, and that has not and will not return, if it was ever really there in the first place.
War, like politics, is now as important for its entertainment value as it is for its real-world consequences.
This is the polite way of saying that the effin' daily media deluge of the bloody, violent destruction of human beings by other human beings, from the mundane mass shooting in a school or club in the States to the mass destruction of a Ukranian town or city, is now so ingrained in us as a normal and to-be-expected event that literally nothing is shocking anymore, only surprising at best, and then only if some new novelty is attached. We've become numb to violence, both small and intimate and at the scale of entire countries at war, and in reality no longer really give a shit as long as it doesn't touch us personally and our comfortable lives are allowed to proceed apace, despite our protestations to the contrary.
Would anyone be genuinely *shocked* or even much surprised if Putin dropped a few barrel bombs on a few neighborhoods? Nah... that's already been done in Syria. Maybe used a few chemical weapons? Not really. Iraq and Saddam are old news. Lobbing in a nuke somewhere might produce some actual shock, but it would probably have to be a pretty good sized one, not one of those little tactical battlefield jobs. And that would only be because, practically speaking, it hasn't been done within living memory and covered near ceaselessly in real time on cable news or the 'net. And if it weren't for the knock-on effects that might make more than a few people's lives less comfortable in places other than ground zero, I doubt it would be long before a mushroom cloud here and there would no longer be shocking at all.
The indictment of Putin and the fact that absolutely nothing of any meaning or consequence will come of it would be better seen as an indictment of so-called civilized nations and their people for negligence and the nihilism of the comfortable self-delusion that, in the end, it may cause them a few problems to which they must respond in some way, but it's ultimately not really *their* problem to solve. And I can't really *Imagine* a time when this won't be the case, mushroom clouds or not.