An NYU student is tweeting every reported drone strike by the US since 2002

[88m3]

probably because most of them witnessed their brothers sisters and parents get blown to pieces by drone strikes. It doesn't matter who you are, if you kill a member of someone's family, there is no way out of them wanting retribution against the assailant

sounds like we should upgrade the warheads

 

[Type Username Here]

Pakistani Kids:

 

[Type Username Here]

I'm contrasting the histrionics regarding the "senseless" deaths of innocent children with the way in which this standard is often not at all applied when it comes to the "collateral damage" of drone strikes (general observation; it doesn't exactly apply to everybody here obviously). Personally, I find the hypocrisy and application of such a double standard disgusting, especially by the US government.

There's also the less inflammatory fact that the thread on the one mass murder in Connecticut will have five to ten times the length of the thread on systematic murder. It's just a sustained aleatoric joke to me.

I didn't understand what you really meant until I started seeing the reaction to the President's speech tonight.

Now you have information coming out that these drone strikes are going beyond militant targets, and are now attack emergency responders. Now you have this:

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

Pain Continues after War for American Drone Pilot - SPIEGEL ONLINE

I can maybe understand collateral damage, but this is going way beyond collateral damage.

 

[newworldafro]

Pakistani Kids:

is that for real??? .................. ??

 

[88m3]

I didn't understand what you really meant until I started seeing the reaction to the President's speech tonight.

Now you have information coming out that these drone strikes are going beyond militant targets, and are now attack emergency responders. Now you have this:



Pain Continues after War for American Drone Pilot - SPIEGEL ONLINE

I can maybe understand collateral damage, but this is going way beyond collateral damage.

Sounds like Bryan has buyers remorse.

 

[TrueEpic08]

Pakistani Kids:

The thing about that sign is this: As much as one would think this would be the case, it's not. Far, far from it for the most part. It would require actual knowledge of their suffering, for one.

 

[Type Username Here]

The thing about that sign is this: As much as one would think this would be the case, it's not. Far, far from it for the most part. It would require actual knowledge of their suffering, for one.

I don't even think that's true. Chances are if you post here, you know this goes on. It isn't enough for some.

 

[TrueEpic08]

I don't even think that's true. Chances are if you post here, you know this goes on. It isn't enough for some.

I rethought that once I posted it. If I thought it was more than an illusion, I would say something like "empathy" moreso than just knowledge (you could still say that). Understanding, maybe?

The actual context for understanding of their suffering can't be just nailed down to one thing, though. Knowledge of cultural contexts, the violence of the state form and political economy as its realized (both actual and epistemological/metaphysical, for lack of better terms) and a history of the development of racial and cultural categories (hell, even a history of "history," or at least the philosophy behind it) is a small sampling of what's needed to fully understand this type of myopia.

You could know what goes on, but without the proper context, it either becomes white noise or just feeds into your pre-conceived perceptions of the situations at worse.

 

[Type Username Here]

I rethought that once I posted it. If I thought it was more than an illusion, I would say something like "empathy" moreso than just knowledge (you could still say that). Understanding, maybe?

The actual context for understanding of their suffering can't be just nailed down to one thing, though. Knowledge of cultural contexts, the violence of the state form and political economy as its realized (both actual and epistemological/metaphysical, for lack of better terms) and a history of the development of racial and cultural categories (hell, even a history of "history," or at least the philosophy behind it) is a small sampling of what's needed to fully understand this type of myopia.

You could know what goes on, but without the proper context, it either becomes white noise or just feeds into your pre-conceived perceptions of the situations at worse.

Do you have any recommended readings on this? I'm seriously interested.

I'd prefer something short, but if you have a book, that's okay. I'm half way through Ghost Wars right now, and will need something else to read eventually.

 

[88m3]

Do you have any recommended readings on this? I'm seriously interested.

I'd prefer something short, but if you have a book, that's okay. I'm half way through Ghost Wars right now, and will need something else to read eventually.

That was a good read

 

[TrueEpic08]

Do you have any recommended readings on this? I'm seriously interested.

I'd prefer something short, but if you have a book, that's okay. I'm half way through Ghost Wars right now, and will need something else to read eventually.

I'd have to look for something that coherently synthesizes that thought, since that actually came more from me reflecting on influences than any one thing. If I were to give you a reading list, it'd be ridiculously abstract until you could synthesize the thoughts, and you more than likely wouldn't come to the same conclusions that I did.

The most direct influences, as far as I can parse them in my head and from recent readings, come from writings on violence by Walter Benjamin ("Critique of Violence," an essay which is kicking around the nets somewhere), Simon Critchley (Mostly from his reading of Benjamin in "Violent Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek," which is a Naked Punch article you can get to as long as the site isn't down. The Ethics of Deconstruction is also on my table to be reread) and Frantz Fanon's thoughts on violence and its relation to colonialism and the mind of the colonized (The Wretched of the Earth, obviously).

Other stuff...
-Edward Said directly, even though I haven't read him in a while (Orientalism, pretty much)
-Gayatri Spivak's stuff on the subaltern's place in the struggle between hegemon and colonized ("Can the Subaltern Speak," which is admittedly more of a feminist text than anything, and also something that I would in NO WAY recommend for general interest)
-Traces of the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas on the Other (Stuff like Critchley's book, as well as Derrida's essay "Violence and Metaphysics," which is only recommendable if you're willing to slog through theories on Judaism's place in Western cultural development...there's a LOT more here...)
-Pierre Klossowski's work on Sade's thought (Sade, My Neighbor, maybe more specifically his essay "Sade and the Revolution". Some background in Sade is needed, and good luck finding it...it was a bytch for me)
-Giambattista Vico's writings on the philosophy of history and the beginnings of human culture is something I've been getting into, but haven't read enough to give a full recommendation to (New Science, if you're interested)
-Giorgio Agamben's work on Homo Sacer and the State of Exception (Books are of the same name, only recently getting into them)

...That's all that I've been thinking about. Nothing ultra concrete, more just me reverse engineering thoughts into that little nugget I wrote. If you want to start with something, I'd say start with the stuff on violence (the essays aren't that long), Said's Orientalism (Longish, but probably the easiest of the books) and Agamben's stuff (the most immediately relevant of the rest).

...That wasn't helpful, was it?

 

[Jello Biafra]

damn thats a lot of people killed. is there a number for unintended casualties from drone strikes?

edit:

Drone strikes kill, maim and traumatize too many civilians, U.S. study says - CNN.com

And all that does is create more people who hate the US and will be more likely to take up arms against us.

 

[Type Username Here]

I'd have to look for something that coherently synthesizes that thought, since that actually came more from me reflecting on influences than any one thing. If I were to give you a reading list, it'd be ridiculously abstract until you could synthesize the thoughts, and you more than likely wouldn't come to the same conclusions that I did.

The most direct influences, as far as I can parse them in my head and from recent readings, come from writings on violence by Walter Benjamin ("Critique of Violence," an essay which is kicking around the nets somewhere), Simon Critchley (Mostly from his reading of Benjamin in "Violent Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek," which is a Naked Punch article you can get to as long as the site isn't down. The Ethics of Deconstruction is also on my table to be reread) and Frantz Fanon's thoughts on violence and its relation to colonialism and the mind of the colonized (The Wretched of the Earth, obviously).

Other stuff...
-Edward Said directly, even though I haven't read him in a while (Orientalism, pretty much)
-Gayatri Spivak's stuff on the subaltern's place in the struggle between hegemon and colonized ("Can the Subaltern Speak," which is admittedly more of a feminist text than anything, and also something that I would in NO WAY recommend for general interest)
-Traces of the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas on the Other (Stuff like Critchley's book, as well as Derrida's essay "Violence and Metaphysics," which is only recommendable if you're willing to slog through theories on Judaism's place in Western cultural development...there's a LOT more here...)
-Pierre Klossowski's work on Sade's thought (Sade, My Neighbor, maybe more specifically his essay "Sade and the Revolution". Some background in Sade is needed, and good luck finding it...it was a bytch for me)
-Giambattista Vico's writings on the philosophy of history and the beginnings of human culture is something I've been getting into, but haven't read enough to give a full recommendation to (New Science, if you're interested)
-Giorgio Agamben's work on Homo Sacer and the State of Exception (Books are of the same name, only recently getting into them)

...That's all that I've been thinking about. Nothing ultra concrete, more just me reverse engineering thoughts into that little nugget I wrote. If you want to start with something, I'd say start with the stuff on violence (the essays aren't that long), Said's Orientalism (Longish, but probably the easiest of the books) and Agamben's stuff (the most immediately relevant of the rest).

...That wasn't helpful, was it?

No. It really wasn't. I was looking at more of a collection of philosophical or psychological collection of works or a paper of some sort.

I don't know much about you, but you're an extremely intelligent and articulate dude. If you can't seem to find your thought expressed in the previous works of others, I think it gives you a a great opportunity to put your thoughts and any subsequent research into a paper or book. I feel that something like that is needed.

 

[TrueEpic08]

No. It really wasn't. I was looking at more of a collection of philosophical or psychological collection of works or a paper of some sort.

I don't know much about you, but you're an extremely intelligent and articulate dude. If you can't seem to find your thought expressed in the previous works of others, I think it gives you a a great opportunity to put your thoughts and any subsequent research into a paper or book. I feel that something like that is needed.

Read Agamben's Homo Sacer then. That's probably the closest thing to what you're asking for. That might be the closest thing to what you're asking for. You still might have to make the connections yourself (Part of the reason I'm making the connections is because I also read a lot on Middle Eastern policy and political history; this is more general), but it's very good stuff. It's about 170 pages, but there's a 98-page document floating around on the internet that I can provide if you want it. State of Exception is also good, but I'll check the length on that.

I should've just said that from the beginning, but I get too worked up sometimes.... I promise to stop myself if this happens on the next podcast.

Edit: State of Exception is 104 pages. So you could read that too if you're so inclined.

And on the research thing: It's not that I can't find my ideas articulated by anybody else anywhere, it's just that I haven't looked yet. My actual research into the nature of epistemological violence is very recent (like, within the last few months recent) and I really haven't looked into finding theorists or philosophers who have published works detailing thoughts similar to mine. So the way I'd put it (and the way I like to think of it in general) is that it's not that no one's done what I've done, it's just that I haven't found anybody doing what I'm doing yet. More than likely, someone's written on my ideas 20-30 years before I ever had them. In my opinion, that idea allows for better research and it keeps the ego in check.

 

[Regular_P]