Whats the difference between a Predator Drone or an Improved Explosive Device such as a Landmine, or a Car Bomb (place a bomb inside a car and then use it as a battering ram)
The answer is there is no distinction. There are merely tools used to kill people.
(Just give you a heads up, my Uncle was a Colonel in the US Army, he retired in the last 6 months. One of his major jobs over the last 10 years was being in charge of the unit responsible of identifying IEDs in Iraq and disarming them)
The only distinction between these weapons (predator drone, land mine, IED, Car Bomb) is the man behind the trigger. The man behind the trigger decides whether to pull the trigger or not.
A sniper riffle can kill a mass murder or it can kill a baby. It can kill a mother, or a child, or an innocent man who was merely a man of fighting age.
The difference between a sniper riffle and a predator drone is you are not on the battlefield when you pull the trigger, there is no danger. Thus it behoves you even more, you have a duty to society, a higher burden than the person with the sniper riffle, to make sure you do not kill the innocent for if you are not on the battlefield it is so much easier to say go ahead, I am willing to take the risk, I am willing to risk the death of an innocent man to kill a villian
But is this villain just an innocent bystander, or is he or she a terrorist etc. Both of them fall under the definition of the word villain, one the old definition (honest farm hand who is just living on the land) and the newer definition (person who wishes ill to another person and is an agent who is trying to cause another person pain.)
<QUOTE>Why didn't you just make a post about drones if that was what you wanted to talk about?</QUOTE>
The more "layers of abstraction" we place on us and our weapons, layers where we are not technically on the battlefield in space and time (our bodies are not located there), yet we feel we are on the battlefield (in our mind we feel we are there except we really aren't) the more we need to be sure that we really are on the sides of the angels and we are doing the right thing. There are no backsies.
Put another way we need to make sure we do not fall into the 14 defining characteristics of fascism (as identified by Umberto Eco)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco
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Note I am not calling people who use predator drones nazis or evil or anything like that. I am saying that part of the human psyche is that we can justify our behavior when we are not in tune with our bodies and our psyche. We can say it was always neccessary, that I had to do whatever I did and thus I can sleep well at night because it was neccessary.
Once you do so you are destroying the soul, it is destroying your own humanity. To do an english paraphrase of a German Philospher Freditrch Nietzsche
And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."
The mirror can be both the abyss and also the light the frees you from the abyss. When you use a mirror and you try to justify your actions you can find a 100 excuses to say that it was necessary.
Only by admitting prior to looking into the mirror that you were capable of making a mistake, that you did wrong, that you did evil, can you look at the mirror and see truth. Only by always centering yourself and trying to do the right thing, the christian thing, can you make sure you do not become a monster
(Note I am an agnostic but when I say christian thing I can say this even though I am not a believer of Jesus as a divine being, that said I can respect Jesus Christ philosophy and how he states we should treat our fellow humans).
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Need I remind you I said this
Please feel free to skip this. If you can't understand the point I am making then you either need to think about it alot, or just to drop it. You need to see things from my point of view before you jump to conclusions of the argument I am trying to make. If you are not willing to walk all the way and see my argument not from your first impressions of my argument but by trying to view the argument from dozens of angles then you just need to walk away.
I brought up the whole predator drone thing for it is at the core of the issue I brought up, what is a villain?
Here, how about using some versuses from John Chapter 8 to illustrate my point (He who would cast the first stone)
1but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
2Now very early in the morning, he came again into the temple, and all the people came to him. He sat down, and taught them.
3The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman taken in adultery. Having set her in the middle,
4they told him, “Teacher, we found this woman in adultery, in the very act.
5Now in our law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What then do you say about her?”
6They said this testing him, that they might have something to accuse him of. But Jesus stooped down, and wrote on the ground with his finger.
7But when they continued asking him, he looked up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.”
8Again he stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.
9They, when they heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning from the oldest, even to the last. Jesus was left alone with the woman where she was, in the middle.
10Jesus, standing up, saw her and said, “Woman, where are your accusers? Did no one condemn you?”
11She said, “No one, Lord.”
Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way. From now on, sin no more.”
Now the rest of chapter 8 is just as important as the story you remember from bible school.
https://www.bible.com/bible/206/jhn.8.web
The rest of the chapter of John 8 can be summed up by the philospher John Rawls Veil of Ignorance (read the whole wikipedia page)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
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Is this societal system ever moral if we are willing to kill a person who is either a villain who is a farm hand, or a villain who is a true monster. If we can't tell the difference then we fail John Rawl's Veil of Ignorance test.
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Do note that John Rawls is a very contemporary philosopher with his main famous writings came out in 1971, and he did a major revision of his work in 2001, a year prior to his death in 2002.
That said you can trace the lineage of his thoughts and ideas going back thousands of years. For example the Veil of Ignorance is much like the Jesus and the accuser of heaven vs the accuser of earth in John 8, or it is much similar to Thomas Jefferson's Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration of Independence.
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Put another way my post was about the idea of liberty (freedom) yet are we truly free when you can be predator drone from the sky because you convinced enough people to say it was necessary and thus the state without a trial without a warrant decided to pull the "sniper rifle's" trigger.
Note the reason for the edits is because the quote boxes were all messed up for I did QUOTES in <> instead of the proper formating which required quotes <> instead.
