Above: “Stealth attack drone” – a bit of levity before the deluge of gloom…
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A couple of quotes from July 2013 articles that point to a divorce between capitalism in the extreme form into which it has morphed and what we used to think of as democracy.
Maybe there’s something wrong with our notion of paradise.
The above quote is from a book called Trouble in Paradise by Slavoj Zizek reviewed in the July 18th London Review of Books.
The second quote is from the same issue of the London Review of Books. This one is called What’s In It For Obama by Stephen Holmes. It discusses the current president’s now widespread and cowardly use of attack drones to kill mere suspects of anti-US activity and any other innocent humans and pets who happen to be nearby.
… has Obama’s switch from a policy of detain and interrogate to a policy of kill on sight really followed an anti-liberal script written by Bush-era hawks? The speculation has a ring of truth. At the very least, Obama’s armed drone programme is a blood relative of Bush’s original unindicted detention programme. Their kinship is suggested by the shared principle that suspected enemy combatants do not deserve hearings to prove they are innocent of the charges against them
I had a lot of sauce to add to these two quotes but I have distilled it into the following few lines. The last quote is mine.
I have called the use of drones cowardly before (here, here, here and here), but this cynical, callous and, yes, evil use goes beyond the pale. Marshall McLuhan saw early that technology changes how we live. It is clear that it has made it possible to make real warfare into a thoughtless and self-serving video game. This is (as if we needed it) ultimate proof that technological progress has outstripped humanity’s moral capacity for using it properly.
Disgust doesn’t even come close to how I feel about how far our species has fallen.
mightyturk 