regarding drone porn
55ella2007k writes:
"have decided NOT to post a link to the article since it leads you directly to these YT vids by the Defense Dept. No thanks! Instead, I will leave you with a comment, posted by somebody who watched this shit, with which I fully agree:
Sickening!
I have seen young kids watching this stuff on their mobile phones and sharing with friends, like it's all some big game. Of course, that's the target audience though. Get them desensitized to death, all seen in an imaging virtual world, and they'll make good little recruits to operate their remotely piloted vehicles. They never get to see the aftermath and the bloody mess, that would likely have them puking their guts up and the images staying with them to death. It also means they never get to see any colatteral damage, the innocent people, just like them and their families, torn apart while they whoop it up and marvel at it all.
I bet the same people who give it the old "YEEHAR" on viewing this stuff would then call someone watching a snuff movie a sicko. After all, this is good viewing and you don't really get to see anything really gruesome and besides, those dead people really are ALL bad guys...aren't they?
Feels great doesn't it? Seeing the soft core imagines. Until you are in 'theatre', scared shitless, seeing your buddy blown to bits (close up!) or having to shoot somebody else, because you don't know who they are, as that vehicle approaches your checkpoint, with some poor chap and his family in the back...you shoot first and deal with it later...or maybe, later, you can't deal with it ? Because it doesn't make sense, afterwards..."
addendum, Wednesday the 13th, from Russia Today:
(Thomson seems rattled by the interviewer, as if he just expected softball questions and an opportunity to promote his novel.)
Labels: Afghanistan, video, war, Youtube
posted by Jonathan Versen @ 10:47 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
I do believe we're finished as a moral nation. Bur what are we? After seeing this post, I cringe from even contemplating that question.
Not America’s style? I recall they showed these type of videos on national tv during the first gulf war. It was something to watch while you ate dinner I guess.
hi mimi n rob,
For what little it's worth, I don't think we're finished as a moral nation-
1.we never were that moral, but
2. that doesn't mean the aspiration to make our country better is therefore stupid.
Don't get me wrong, the age we live in is very discouraging, and I get so tired of hearing how "9-11 changed everything."
(As I suspect both of you do too.)
One of the things that really gets me is that when people say that criticizing the military effort gives "comfort" to our enemies, but fail to see how things like this are precisely why "they" hate us, as opposed to the mind-numbingly nonsensical notion of "hating us for our freedoms."
But pointing this out to some is tantamount to spoiling their fun.
I don’t think that aspiration of a better world is stupid at all. That’s why I find it exasperating when people say we have to accept the status quo because that is reality. Reality, it seems, remains a slippery and elusive item. We’ve heard all the excuses like – Oh its human nature etc. But it isn’t really human nature; it’s the nature of western civilization. Certainly the reality is that things are the way they are with the militarization of the federal government but that doesn’t mean it was inevitable because it wasn’t. People who have never studied another culture don’t have a fucking clue what reality is. To them reality is baseball and football, eating hamburgers and bellowing like an asshole. But that is only their reality and it isn’t necessarily “normal” or inevitable. It’s only when you look at what other people experience as “normal” that you come to see that “normal” is a very fluid thing and that there is no universal set of norms that apply to all cultures and world views. I’ll step down from the podium now, just call me Brother Rob.
Hey, you guys, I do think that in the past--or maybe just my past--there was a certain generally accepted morality. The existence of "preemptive strikes," officially-sanctioned torture, and the systematic ruin of the middle class was not, in my memory, embraced by the populace.
Hmm...or maybe I'm seeing what was before from a child's view or through rose-colored glasses. Either way, I miss that elusive something--kindliness, maybe..
I agree with you Mimi. As far as the popular consciousness goes, there seems to have been a shift, as if popular culture celebrates brutishness more nakedly than before.
once I started an essay about this, comparing Bonanza with 24, and suggesting that Bonanza's contemporary audience from the 60s accustomed to the do-gooder Cartwrights would not have tolerated a protagonist like Kiefer Sutherland's "Jack Bauer" character even if, somewhat ironically, some of the older people watching it were in fact part of the earlier audience when they were younger.
But then I realized I have to make so many caveats about the reality of our history, and I didn't particularly want to closely study several episodes of "24", so I filed it away.
Mimi, Jonathan,
It depends on who you are talking about, the general population or the federal government. I think it is true that Bush was more blatant about things like torture than past presidents though he really hadn’t done anything that hadn’t already been done in the past by other presidents. In a way this relates to the militarization of America and of course this is where Obama comes in because part of appointing Obama president was to make the presidency respectable again after bad-boy Bush was so naughty.
I don't want to beat a--uh, never mind--but note this from Fred Reed. I often disagree with his sentiments, but I believe this is pertiment to our discussion:
"The Bill of Rights is largely defunct. Americans now accept random searches in public places, and NSA monitors everyone’s email. So much for the Fourth Amendment.
Police powers grow. Cops increasingly are militarized, ninja-ed out, jackbooted and unaccountable. Habeas corpus is doubtful....The FBI can pull your library records, and the library can’t tell you. As the twilight deepens, journalists hesitate to criticize the government. (This latter, amigos, is happening.)
Ours is not the America it recently was, and it gets differenter by the month...."
That’s all quite true and I don’t disagree with it. In fact habeas corpus is dead. But what that concerns is the militarization of America not so much the morals. Slaughtering brown people is something Americans have been doing even before this nation was formed. If that’s moral I guess I could be confused. Americans have always been subject to the double standard of one form of justice for whites and another for black, brown and yellow, and red. There is nothing moral about that. American soldiers were torturing Filipinos more than one hundred years ago and Americans used torture against Native Americans quite liberally well before that. In fact if you consider we stole this land from the American Indians one finds that America’s morals have never been great.
Also recall president Lincoln suspended habeas corpus long before Bush was pretzel. I mean president. It’s all been done before, really.
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