One other thing about Dave Winer — does he think before he writes stuff like the Winer doctrine,
Then I came up with a new doctrine. It goes like this. If you have a choice, you have no excuse going to war. You can only go to war if you have no choice. I’m sorry Dubya. Let’s just put the tanks in reverse and bring the boys home. Say we’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. It’ll be a lot easier than playing it out. This war is just plain wrong.
But this is absurd since you always have a choice short of war. The United States did not have to enter World War II. It had plenty of other choices short of war even in the face of Pearl Harbor.
Gandhi certainly agreed with Winer and believed that even though Nazism was evil that fighting a war against Germany even to protect the Jews was wrong (Gandhi urged Jews to choose instead to sway Hitler with nonviolent resistance).
Where this sort of thinking leads you is Rwanda where Kofi Annan and the Clinton administration had plenty of warnings about the genocide that was coming but chose the easy way out rather than risk the political ramifications of having to intervene in Rwanda.
Winer’s doctrine is not some high minded philosophical approach, but one that leads straight to pacificism (which is always an available choice) and a surrender to evil.