Just watched the ISIS video of the fellas being blown up in a car and drowned in a cage.

What stopped you diverting your eyes, if not prurience?

I just thought you'd see it as part and parcel of the whole war business.

a part of our modern iconography with deliberately going out of your way to seek out footage of men dying are heroic but doomed, I'm afraid. They are in no sense similar.

Watching an aeroplane hit a building is in no way the same as watching the face of a dying man. In one, you can see the event, weigh its significance in political terms while imagining the horror and terror of the victims without having to see it in close up. In the other instance, however, you are actively seeking the close-up. The only wider significance the footage has is that which you give it by watching. You are therefore deliberately complicit in the act.

That doesn't mean I want to watch men die in agony.

and face the world you're bringing your children into.

You have no hiding place anymore.