Armchair warriors
ICBMs. Cruise missiles. Predator and Reaper drones. Military robots.
War by remote control or computer-based logic.
Armchair warriors.
Will those "doing the fighting" be called heroes?
Will these armchair warriors be deemed to have displayed great bravery and courage under fire?
Will they be awarded medals and honours?
What will their citations say?
"...sat in his armchair, and without giving any thought to his pizza going cold, he tracked them, and when too much excitement became barely enough, he pressed the trigger, and bravely murdered a dozen suspected freedom fighters walking with their families to a wedding."
Will they be marching in veterans' parades?
Will the spectators cheer?
War by remote control or computer-based logic.
Armchair warriors.
Will those "doing the fighting" be called heroes?
Will these armchair warriors be deemed to have displayed great bravery and courage under fire?
Will they be awarded medals and honours?
What will their citations say?
"...sat in his armchair, and without giving any thought to his pizza going cold, he tracked them, and when too much excitement became barely enough, he pressed the trigger, and bravely murdered a dozen suspected freedom fighters walking with their families to a wedding."
Will they be marching in veterans' parades?
Will the spectators cheer?
posted by The Editor at
10:06 AM
11 Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
LW, I hear your despair and your angst.
But Afghanis and Muslims are people too. Your empathy seems to have temporarily deserted you.
You speak your atheism not unlike a religious fundamentalist. You've taken it from sketicism into blind belief.
You have entered the world of the extremist blind believer. You have become a man of faith. Absolute faith in the nihilistic world of the true believer in the teachings of the Church of Atheism. As such, you have gone over to The Dork Side Of The Farce.
I hope wisdom will soon compel you to seek a more tolerant, empathetic, less absolutist lilypad from which to sing your song.
I suggest you use the search box to search this blog for the following keywords:
[1] atheist
[2] anan
(Anan, a Muslim nun, left some very illuminating comments on this blog in 2005.)
This comment has been removed by the author.
Yep. You've nailed it. And now what!?! Every man for himself? Since it's all going to go pear shaped I may as well rob a bank? What!?!
We're supposed to be intelligent. The scenario demands an intelligent response.
This comment has been removed by the author.
LW, I think a steady state economy would still trash the planet. We need a gross reduction in consumption so vast that not enough people will support because they won't give up their lifestyles and aspirations.
We'd need a dictator to force it through. Democracy can never deliver this. And no one's going to trust a dictator, so it's all over Red Rover. The London Riots were just a warm-up act.
But we've wandered off the topic... :-)
This comment has been removed by the author.
LW, have a great weekend and thanks for your comments. :-)
Wow. You may not have triggered an on-topic response, Gerry, but there's no denying LW's passion.
But he's wrong about intelligent war machines not mattering because we'll have population overshoot and societal collapse before that happens.
Approximately 50% of the US military assets deployed in Afghanistan right now are robots of one sort or another. None are fitted with machine guns or howitzers. Yet.
A version of SkyNet could be upon us within 5 years. All it would take is some self-evolving military AI; scientists are working for DARPA on such a thing right now. Population overshoot and societal collapse will not happen in the next 5 years.
LW may not care if the whole of the Middle East gets turned into a radioactive desert, but I'd bet he'd care heaps if his own back yard was treated that way because some robotic satellite followed its programming (completely free of any programmed morality) and blitzed it because it perceived a threat.
Your blog is reinvigorated better than ever, Gerry. You'd hope that some steady state thinking might eventually permeate economic and social planning, but not while there's a buck to made and someone to oppress in the making thereof. I used to have the reference to a trial community that was testing gradual resource usage - somewhere in the UK as I recall -but now can't remember.
I have been to Afhanistan. Savagely beautiful but now completely f**ked.
Phil, there's no country America can't f**k utterly.
And they wonder why 9/11 happened...
And they think they're "the superior culture"...
I give up...
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