Remove photos of corpses

[jesseskinner]

I was not expecting I'd have to look at dead bodies while I'm trying to research a JavaScript library. I'm all for you raising awareness about this awful war, but please consider removing that last photo.

[qwertie]

Respectfully, I see only people. Not "corpses".

And where you see two, I see two hundred thousand. Rest assured that the photo is quite tame among available records.

Reliable data is hard to come by, but I estimate about a thousand people are being killed every day in this war. It's like five jumbo jets are crashing every day, but it's the "new normal" so it's not worth much media coverage. Even today―Christmas day―as Putin sent 70 missiles to destroy energy infrastructure, a few people were hit too.

Putin keeps it going because he thinks he can win. He thinks the West is in an inevitable downward slide and, if it doesn't collapse from all its infighting, will at least flip-flop on helping Ukraine eventually. Indeed, while at first the Free World was united in opposition to the invasion, after about a year most people seemed to have forgotten about it. So now Ukraine finds itself with twin manpower and equipment shortages while Russia is supplied by Iran, North Korea and China, including North Korean troops. I don't see much talk of the new "axis of evil" even though this one is real―North Korea even has a "mutual defence pledge" with Russia now.

As Perun noted, NATO has 27 times the GDP of Russia. We could outclass Russia if we want. The West has helped Ukraine a lot, but never enough to make it a fair fight. So Putin thinks he can win. So he keeps it going. The West could have signed contracts two years ago to set up enough long-term production to make sure Ukraine keeps getting supplies. They could've made clear pledges not to give Putin what he wants. They could have clearly shown the CCP that invading a democracy is a bad idea (coughTaiwan); instead, the west rules out a no-fly zone, rules out sending troops, and sends a modest supply of equipment ― just enough to prevent the front lines from collapsing.

I don't know where you come from, but where I come from the pro-life groups were given a rather large space at the center of my university campus to show photos of dismembered fetuses to make their point. I don't support those groups, but I do support their right to free speech. Democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of association and even freedom from bombs dropping on software developers (among others) ― the war is about all of this.

"we don't [cover] Ukrainian [deaths] but…it's not pretty and the Russians celebrate it… The amount of…civilian property damage [and] civilians killed you find every day in telegram, the amount of clear disregard for anything…human…makes you wake up… so, open invite to any politician, just join us here for one day, see what we see and get your shit together."

That's a recent quote I took from Andrew Perpetua's open-source intelligence team stream, which meticulously documents losses in the various war videos that are released every day. Recently Andrew mostly just talks about how sad everything is. They're not paid for this s**t, and neither am I (regarding B+ trees and Ukraine both), but we watch because we care.

It seems to me that on balance, the photo is more likely to help save lives than lose them. And since most people see many gruesome murders every year (albeit fictional ones, which people call "entertainment" for some reason I've never really understood) I find it hard to believe that this is actually a big deal for anyone, in and of itself.