Are you supposed to watch videos of people getting killed? A couple days ago, Unherd writer Aris Roussinos made a strong argument for the no camp, and I think I agree. Which is a little funny, because if you’d looked at his and my work five years ago, you might have thought we both wanted you to see more videos of dying people.

I’m being slightly too flippant, so let me back up: Roussinos is a former foreign correspondent for Vice TV, from back before Vice focused on Bushwick marginalia. He produced lots of excellent warzone reporting (and continues to write great essays). I spent a summer working for Airwars, a London organization tracking civilian casualties from airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during the fight against ISIS. The following year I wrote a thesis on the gap between our casualty numbers and the official numbers produced by the Department of Defense: it was Airwars’ contention that the DoD was fudging its numbers on purpose, and I agreed. I thought it was profoundly important that we “bear witness” to what was happening in Syria and Iraq, by counting and naming dead civilians. And we did this by looking at photo and video evidence that those civilians were dead.