Lately I’ve found myself making an observation about the modern political left–it has a tendency to fall into a rather unbecoming technophobia. On a slew of issues, from guns to drones to surveillance to GMO food to nuclear power, there is an increasing tendency for people on the left to attack the new technologies themselves instead of any specific use or consequence thereof.
Tag: Drones
Begun, the Drone War Has
So yesterday, Rand Paul decided to use a filibuster–an old school, talking filibuster, no less–to stall the approval of Barack Obama’s proposed CIA head, John Brennan. The reason for this is that Rand Paul disapproves of the administration’s use of drones, specifically the administration claim that it could, in a sufficiently dire situation, kill a citizen within the territory of the United States with one. I’ve wanted to do the drone post for a while, but I haven’t gotten around to it, so Rand Paul can consider himself to have inspired me in this one rather trivial respect. Continue reading “Begun, the Drone War Has”
Dead Baby Interventionism
Lately I’ve been noticing a new social networking trend–the tendency for people who are passionate about a given humanitarian crisis (examples include Syria, drones in Pakistan, Kony in the Congo–surprisingly, not Mali) to post pictures of various dead, injured, or disfigured babies or children who purportedly were killed, injured, or disfigured over the course of their respective conflicts. Accompanying the pictures is usually some caption designed to engender empathy (one such example I recall was “imagine if this were your child”). This strikes me as somewhat simplistic. Not much critical thought is being given to what the responsibilities of developed states are. Instead, the entire discussion is being reduced to “children are dying, this is bad, developed states can stop bad things, developed states should stop this”. So today I’d like to think about it a little bit deeper than that.
Benjamin Studebaker 