memes

It is a perfectly coherent argument that Boeing is more harmful than Lowes despite both being $120 billion megacorporations. You have a point, but there are real functional differences between the actions a person or a corporation or a country takes. Make another pro-nihilist argument, I will listen, discount the validity of viewing the world through any other lens and I will not give a shit

I do not think it is a coherent argument to lean on history to discount the effects of brand new surveillance and killing tools. Drones are supposed to be able to limit casualties with precise strikes but the disconnect between the operator and the victims is so great that it makes the act of killing easier, evidenced by so many botched attacks during Bush and Obama administrations. Which way does the pendulum swing? We don’t have historians and declassified documents and longitudinal studies to rely on for an answer. Maybe our children’s children can fill us in, but in the meantime I actually feel very confident claiming that expensive advanced weaponry widens the gap in power between oppressor and oppressed. The fact that practically nobody from the US died while the Misdle East cowered is evidence of this; I think Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge actually reinforce this claim as well. Clashes and bloodshed and genocide are ancient—but I think the systemic rounding up and genocide of millions in just 4 years is quite difficult to accomplish without fairly modern weaponry. There are only a handful of genocides that even compare on a numbers scale and only one I can think of is pre military industrial complex. I don’t see how today’s superiority through guided missile, drone, etc. systems differ from yesteryear’s superiority via small arms in that regard.