71–80 of 491 posts
A little bit more background on Heather Linebaugh: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/soldiers-in-the-military-are-...
24 years old. I know this veers into hyperbole, but it seems we've both killed and ruined a whole generation.
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You act as if the alternative to drones (20 year old kids with guns) never kills the wrong person. Yvain's essay asking "what if drones came first" is highly relevant here. http://squid314.livejournal.com/338607.html?thread=9878703
The alternative to drones is counterinsurgency. For example, the wedding party in Yemen, if it were a target of actual importance, would have been captured and interrogated, with suspected insurgents detained for further questioning. The problem is that we don't have the manpower or the political latitude to do that in all these regions, so we send in killer robots instead and hope we hit the right people. This is a…
This is just another example of how the convenience of drone strikes has led to the belittling of war.
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Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human - since human lives are being removed from the universe as a result of their actions. This goes for the current Joint Chiefs of Staff as much as it does any historical figure.
> Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human Sorry, this is rubbish. This society we know of is built and established with guns and blood. We shall not have police, army or even guns. We fought wars. Your ancestors, my ancestors all fought in war one way or another. If you think that self-defending yourself against some murderer…
Just because we did do something in the past does not justify doing it in the future.
The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale. The places that these drones are being used are not places that have a credible military threat to the united states. (unless you count their governments having nukes)
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I don't buy the justification. We can choose not to kill people. We can choose to spend our time educating people, instead. Those who join the military, subjugate themselves to others, and stop making choices. This is a contagious disease, not some 'normality' about human existence...
Violence is a part of nature, and humans are evolved to participate in it like all animals. It only becomes evil in the context of human values, where I agree there is no reason for people to be killing each other. However the ability and taste for killing is a genetic trait that has been valuable for some individuals over time, so don't fool yourself that some people aren't genetically primed to be killers.
The moment you remove that choice - either personally or socially - you become an animal, again.
Genetic traits? Well, we've overcome them before, with our free will - we'll do it again. We had lots of genetic traits that predetermined our inability to live on the Moon - but we soon decided that wasn't going to get in our way. Why can't we do the same thing with War?
Because viewpoints such as yours are contagious diseases which fester in the mind of Mankind, and very few are ever prepared to cure themselves of it.
Also, they pixelate the feed on purpose, to remove hesitation when hitting the trigger.
That's about all I got from this. And yes, it does suck. There was a third claim, that the public is misinformed/misled, but I take issue with that one. I think most people understand that somebody, somewhere is pushing the button.
This essay didn't go into the rationale for drone warfare, or the situation that brought the west into armed conflict in the first place. So it's not hitting on a lot in terms of talking about the geopolitical issues, it's just a plea for more empathy about what's actually being done.
I share that concern. We should be more empathetic. However -- and this is a big deal -- feeling more fully the terrible things we are doing does not in any way make those things less necessary. Those are two separate subjects.
I think we are going down a bad road with armed robots, but I don't think essays like this are helping the discussion much. Still, it was good to hear this voice.
Civilians got killed by manned aircraft too. A-10s launching Hellfires at a wedding party, or AH-64 Apaches gunning down farmers in a field. It happens. And whether the pilot is sitting in the aircraft or a thousand miles away makes no difference. It's the same imperfect people making the same imperfect decisions based on imperfect information.
The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? We need an international ban on armed…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human Sorry, this is rubbish. This society we know of is built and established with guns and blood. We shall not have police, army or even guns. We fought wars. Your ancestors, my ancestors all fought in war one way or another. If you think that self-defending yourself against some murderer…
(Nice: You de-Godwin'ed yourself with an edit.) We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose. With the tools and technologies we have available to us today, why is that purpose still to maim, murder, kill? Shouldn't the purposes have been aligned, by now, to make the trillion-dollar debt of the American people worth at least something to the rest of the h…
If we never take hard problem to a philosophical discussion, what can come out from the discussion?
> We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.
And why is war or violence created? Because we have desire, we as thinking things have thoughts and emotions. We become jealous and angry. We become depressed and sad. We harm others for these reasons.
> We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.
And we have schools. And we teach them to respect. The world you are describing does not exist. As long as there is freedom for someone to think, there is violence. Violence can be physical or verbal. You can kill someone by saying something very harsh and this person may go depressed for the rest of his life and ends up in a messy, unproductive life.
I will respect you being a pacifist, but I urge you to think about other ethics theories as well.