From Pine View Farm

Droning On 5

James Carroll starts with the murder of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle and ends with robotic death raining from the skies. A nugget:

Now the U.S. military, along with its CIA paramilitary, is moving into the age of the automated sniper – the armed drone. The public reticence that inhibited discussion of the actual meaning of Kyle’s history pales beside the silence with which the nation – government, media, citizenry – treats the moral threshold of assassination by drone.

Death out of nowhere, inflicted by unthreatened operators, upon designated enemies, who may or may not pose lethal threats and who may or may not be as guilty as the joystick judges decide. America has become a sniper nation.

(Link fixed.)

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5 comments

  1. George Smith

    February 11, 2013 at 7:11 pm

    It’s a shame the Mexican made movie Sleep Dealer was so poorly produced. Made a few years ago it accurately projected a good bit of where we are. As satire.

     
  2. Frank

    February 11, 2013 at 10:57 pm

    The Professional Left had a somewhat different take on robotic death raining from the skies in Saturday’s podcast.  Can’t say I agree, but Driftglass made some interesting points.

     
  3. George Smith

    February 12, 2013 at 2:57 am

    Hmm, an interesting broadcast. As a side, it’s not particularly hard to explain why Nazi scientists settled in Alabama. Huntsville. NASA aerospace center, the Saturn 5. They were recruited to work on the space and ICBM programs. I’ve no interest in arguments that drone use against paupers in the desperate places of the world is ‘like’ bombing of civilians in Nazi Germany and Japan and WWII. Both countries had militaries that fought until the end, that put terrible losses on their enemies and occupied nations. There’s never been a shortage of discussion of the morality, or lack of such, in these campaigns and there is a considerable amount of account, from the time, that the German people deserved it, that they had it coming. Even the Germans felt they had a terrible reckoning coming upon them. What we have now is different, the technology is an enabler. Now we have a matter of proportionality and no finality. And in Germany, it ended when the Russians took Berlin and the Fuhrer committed suicide. And there is no comparison with now. At forty minutes, I listened, he started talking about cyberattack shutting off the power in a city and Americans dying and I turned it off.  

     
  4. Frank

    February 12, 2013 at 3:02 pm

    From a Philsophy 201 “Ethics” perspective, Driftglass has a point.  

     

    His argument misses the point of the PR for drone strikes, which is that they are somehow “surgically precise” and “clinically successful,” which they are not.  If they were seen as the arbitrary, capricious tactic that they are, they would be subject to much more suspicion.

     

    The myth of the “surgical strike” is the war monger’s friend. 

     
  5. George Smith

    February 12, 2013 at 4:01 pm

    Yeah, agreed, it’s the received wisdom, the framing, that’s been a major part of the problem.