I felt compelled to create 2 new tags for this post. It's been a while coming, nonetheless. This will be mostly an opinion piece. If you're expecting links or narcissistic mention then you will likely be disappointed.
One has not been able to read the blogs or the Twitters, or FaceofEvilBook for months now without encountering the dire stories of drone strikes, Kill Lists, the maniacal psychopath Obama and his blood lust or tales of innocence destroyed by the Skynet machines ... Drones! The righteous wrath is coming from the right and the left, though I would be remiss in failing to point out that most of the outrage is coming from the left, and much of the 'America, FUCK YEAH!' is coming from the right. To many on the left, unmanned drones are the horror that spies on us as we plot a new government, as well as the devices that kill entire wedding parties in WhoGivesAFuckistan. To many on the right, drones are the crushing fist of Obama that will spy on our crops for the EPA, and force us into the FEMA camps.
~Yawn~
Where the hell have these people been for the last 20 years? Or more to the point, where have they been for the last century? For over a hundred years science fiction writers have been scribbling about unmanned war machines. If one needs to go further than that, then the jewish tale of the Golem is about the good and evil of an inhuman killer controlled by those with agenda. These dread devices are not a new outrage; they were fricking inevitable. It was going to happen, people. The only question was "when". 'Walky-talky' wristwatches? Inevitable. Social networks based on world-wide communication? Yes, actually inevitable. Unmanned machines that fly through the air? Yep, you got it. Inevitable. These are machines, devices. They have no moral will. The question concerning those has never been whether we would have them, but how we would use them. Based on that alone, I find most of the outrage silly.
Every new technology faces opposition based on moral value. Some passed that test, like cel-phones. Some fail that test, like Nukes. Consider how long it took us to get over that fear ... Oh wait, we haven''t yet. Drones are no different than cel-phones. We see the bad use they can be turned to, but fail to recognize that these technologies exist, and there isn't a damned thing we can do to stop their use.
But wait! Obama has a kill list! Obama wants to spy on farmers! Obama, blah blah, blah. Every President since Clinton has had this technology at his disposal. I grew up in the Bitterroot valley, where the fly over of SR-71s was frequent. Screw black helicopters. Anything that needed to be seen could be from those. It was the technology of the time. Drones have replaced the SR-71. Just as we needed to learn how to deal with ultimate spy plane, we need to learn how to deal with the next ultimate spy plane, which doesn't have a human on board. And it really doesn't matter which man sits in the White House; the technology will be used. I'm kinda thinken' that we have a job to make certain that the man (or woman) in the White House uses this technology for good.
Drones aren't going away, anymore than nuclear weapons did back when this same argument was being made about them. They're not going anywhere. The choice in every election going forward from this has nothing to do with whether this technological clock can be turned back. It obviously can't. It's time to buck up and admit. Who do you want to use it? Mitt Rmoney? The future Mitt Rmoney? It's time to adapt, people.
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