fragments of an attempted writing.




 Drones are part of a post-heroic age.


A friend of mine noted thus in response to this article: "This is interesting in conjunction with Obama's argument that the War Powers Act does not apply in Libya. Essentially, he says since there is no major risk to American lives, it does not count as war. With that logic all future wars can be prosecuted by drones and RPV's, purely on Presidential whim."


One of these new drones will require 2,000 analysts to look at the videos it takes.  So no worries - once that gets privatized that will be a hell of a lot of $11 an hour jobs.

4 comments:

  1. I got into an argument with a guy on FB who said that he loved war. He said he was active duty, and personally I have only met one person who had been in combat who loved war, a guy in 1971 who had just come back from Vietnam and bragged about shooting speed and picking off peasants for sport. A war criminal, that is.
    I sent a message to the woman on whose page the argument was taking place, asking her about him. Turns out he is in the air force but is not a pilot and was deployed stateside. He conducted drone attacks from the safety of his office, than clocked out and went home to his family.
    Meet the new war pig, the kind who was formed by playing video games, killing far-off abstractions in complete safety. At least war has traditionally required a modicum of courage...

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  2. He conducted drone attacks from the safety of his office, than clocked out and went home to his family.

    There was a show about these guys a little while ago, on PBS I think. I'd never heard of this stuff before then. I still can't believe it's real. Talk about surreal. Yep, it's Video Games on Steroids. I guess people don't look real from a distance or on a screen, or something. :o

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  3. You'll find that the more hawkish a pol is, the more they love these stupid fucking video-game wars. They know that the public has little tolerance for casualties, so any technology that decreases casualties for the winning side (i.e., us) lets them launch more wars with less voter backlash. One of the many reasons I'm a luddite.

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  4. BTW, has anyone here read Ernst Junger's 'The Glass Bees'? Very relevant here.

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