I Am Sitting in a Room: Drones, Part 2

There's a horrible synthesis of liberal ideals and imperialistic violence in the idea that a drone operators mental health is important.

I kind of wish we could do that thing in Star Trek where the consoles on the bridge suddenly explode for no reason durring a battle to drone pilots.

got link for that Ring of Gyges essay?

Re: around 50:30 you discuss close range killing and willingness to kill, etc. From Father Patrick Desbois, In Broad Daylight (2018), p 170 A Wehrmacht soldier, Josef F. received ‘permission’ to view a killing operation (2,000 Jews) in Crimea. He watched most of it. Then a girl came to him begging him to tell the SS to spare her. The SS shouted ‘Bring her!’ but Josef refused. (Only there to watch, after all…) As the SS marched toward them, Josef stared into her eyes (who, by the way, ‘spoke German fluently, without an accent. She had brown hair and did not look at all like a Jewish child’) as she begged, hoping she wouldn’t turn around to see her killer approaching. However, the SS shot her right there. ‘I didn’t think he would shoot her right in front of me.’ With that context, Desbois: “He had to be begged for salvation by a young girl in his native German; she had to look him in the eye in order not to see her killer coming, and collapse on his shoes in order for him to realize that what he was watching was murder. … The disgust he experienced so late is most likely linked to the fact that a young Jewish girl believed in him and spoke to him as her savior.” I believe she also challenged his conceptualization of masculinity. The entire ‘scene’ before him was part of the masculine ideal—but what good was it if he, a big strong man, could not save one girl, *should he choose to*? Anyway. My thoughts 😅

In 2020 I was smoking weed to sync with the Vyvanse peak like it was my job and I had some vague, ever-expanding concept of something called “screen reality.” A lot of that had to do with drone warfare, the reproduction of images and the shell game of quantification. The back half of this episode more or less puts all that shit into a never-before-seen cohesion….Never disown or forget your theories, friends

The comparison between drones and the behavior of people online is hard to miss. The general toxicity and dehumanization of others online. Gamergate was an emerging front for the war of the minds and will likely have much further reaching repercussions than I will live to see

This episode felt especially timely - today was the UNGA where both the president and FM of Iran attended. Whenever an Iranian official travels now, it’s with such disdain for death, such faith in their upcoming martyrdom, it truly takes my breath away. It’s not just a Shia trait, too - I see the same, like, warrior’s acceptance of fate in all the Ansarallah soldiers, and the pre-AA tribes in the last big Saudi invasion. It’s very much the opposite of what Reaper “pilots” experience.

Great ep, love the show. Andreas Malm has a good bit in his "Destruction of Palestine" essay about the asymmetry angle, invoking 10/7 as one of the first successful strikes against the "invincible" technologically superior surveillance force, and how that asymmetry made the attack hit that much harder on a psychological level

As an archaeologist, I'd push back slightly on the description of art, particularly early human and Neanderthal art as separate or obscured. We have good new data to suggest that cave paintings, for example, were often projects that were visited and revisited, and updated over generations. Why, we don't know. Maybe it served a religious or spiritual purpose, or maybe it served to connect the artists to their ancestors who had painted them before--linking their present to the past. Slightly tangential, I apologise, but yes. Good to know.

sustained excellence. compliments on the Lucier pull, which works incredibly well. my only note is that "deathics" was right there

Oh, I think I have another of those cult vs exhibition examples! Music. Singing. Especially using song to learn the proper priest/shaman/whatever rituals. Now we just stream our favorite tunes, and it’s been so many generations since recording and broadcasting sound began, we can’t even understand what we’ve lost.

George Bataille called, he wants to talk about risk, also like eyeballs and fuckin

I tried to post this on the last This Week in Violence, but it vanished into the aether (twice!), so: Stupid Gregk tricked me into subscribing and giving him all my money by making podcast too spicy, show too good... (also does anyone else pronounce his name "greck" like some sort of star wars glorp shitto in their mind)