banned
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9hr ago
Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
My thoughts? I think think they're not "a necessary evil" only because they're insufficient. I think Neema Parvini has a point when he asks:
Tell me why the mayor of L.A. and Gavin Newsom aren’t arrested for aiding and abetting an insurrection against America? Why aren’t they arrested for treason, under the Insurrection Act?
and calls for the Democratic Party to be banned, and replaced with a left-wing party that isn't "mental":
And like I said, we're getting to the point where they just need to be banned. It's like, at what level of corruption, and at what level of stupidity, do you just say, look, this is not a viable party anymore. We need to just, like, ban it, and replace it with, you know— okay, it can still be leftist, but you at least have to be… you at least have to agree to basic things.
Like, one, America is an actual nation. Number two, the concept of having a passport and citizenship mean something. Being an American means something. Therefore, number three, different laws apply to foreigners, illegal immigrants, than to the native population. Number four, if people who are not native to America start burning things down, then you not only have to take action, you have to deport those people immediately. Number five, if foreign politicians like the President of Mexico starts cheering on, you know, effectively a kind of invasion into your country, you don't side with them, you side against them.
These are just basic, basic, basic kind of… I know there's no such thing as the social contract, right? But there's a tacit agreement between the rulers and the ruled in all societies that would agree to all of those things that I just said.
If you do not agree to that, you should not be allowed to be part of public life. You shouldn't be allowed to be an official if you don't agree to all those things I just said. These dickheads are meant to take an oath on the Bible. That they're meant to take an oath, you know, on the Constitution when they take office. This is treason. It shouldn't be allowed.
Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.
Historically the limit on such technologies has been that you need one at least one human to actually be the weapon, wield the weapon, or direct the weapon. The weapon would not be able to go places where humans cannot go (at least not without using vehicles, which makes the weapon a lot larger, more detectable, less flexible and less affordable), cannot be deployed in numbers greater than the number of available and qualified humans, and will never be cheaper than the price of one qualified human + the technology involved, and will be at least as detectable as the human wielding it.
With sufficiently advanced drones, those constraints go out of the window. All of a sudden your weapon can be arbitrarily small, arbitrarily cheap, arbitrarily numerous and arbitrarily dispersed. We're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones. They will fly close to the ground if not crawl outright, utilize cover and concealement, infest all your nooks and crannies, be so cheap as to be freely replaceable, operate completely autonomously, and if they find you they'll shoot you with an embarassingly small zip-gun right in the dick.
At least that's the way things are headed right now. As so often, attack precedes defense. Maybe there are low-hanging fruits for countermeasures - some kind of electromagnetic weapon that prevents drones from functioning in a large area but that doesn't affect humans. And then, since we've already tasted the forbidden fruit, you can bet someone will develop organic circuitry. Maybe human soldiers will huddle in fortified bases surrounded by miles of completely denuded flat country, protected by some kind of automated RADAR and LASER system that zaps anything that moves their way. But honestly, it's wishful thinking either way.
More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare. I don't feel like there's any more to explain here because it seems so very obvious. With autonomous drones, we will have uncoupled warfare from the human frame and mind. The current human-controlled drone phase is just a clumsy first step towards honest-to-god man-made horrors beyond all possibility of comprehension. From that point on it will barely matter whether the drones kill us with jury-rigged mortar shells or by dropping polonium in our coffee cups or by buzzing near our ears until we go insane or by shooting a tiny laser from the horizon that neatly severs our neck arteries. It will not matter much wether they're built in a dozen factories, in a million living rooms, or self-replicating right here and now. Either way, us humans will be obsolete as combatants.
But that's future music, of course. For the more immediate future, near-term developments will depend on what the lowest-hanging technological fruits are and who's picking what. Just making drones cheaper, making them smarter, and making them more easily controllable in large numbers (i.e., giving them limited autonomy) will significantly increase the numbers deployable en masse. Short of that, we may see more drones integrated organically into existing human and vehicle formations, like the Americans are already known to be experimenting, where they will probably work much like they already do in Ukraine, mostly for reconaissance and as loitering munitions, only everywhere and used by everyone and employed even more liberally.
This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.
The big cracking point will be drone autonomy. One might think that this is not going to happen, that it'll be unethical and banned by some convention or treaty, but I posit that it's entirely inevitable. Unlike with NBC weapons that are either useful mostly against unprepared civilians (BC) or have incredibly high requirements of the situation before their use becomes at all practical (N), autonomous drones will be universally useful and practical due to their scalability and flexibility, from high-level strategy down to tactical nitty-gritty. No military force will be able to afford not employing autonomous drones. The killbots may not be right around the corner, but they are coming for sure. Anyone refusing to use them will be militarily irrelevant.
This is a perfect explanation for the semi-rhetorical question later posed by @hydroacetylene here- as a response to you, in fact- the reason "liburals" (I prefer "progressives" for this group- progressives are not classical liberals so I don't call them that) don't take traditionalists seriously about decreasing baby murder is that decreasing baby murder is obviously not a terminal value for them and it's just a fight over aesthetics (because if it was, traditionalist organizations would be handing out as many free IUDs and Nexplanon as humanly possible; since they oppose this, they're obviously not serious about solving the problem as long as it's not their way).
No, you're proving my point. Gynosupremacy/feminism pushed for high age of consent laws coincident with their emergence as a viable political force, which itself follows socioeconomic effects (gender equality following the decoupling of physical strength from production of goods) in industrial societies; I'm explaining why they did that. I can't link to the original post(s) here more fully explaining this because the person who made them has their account set to private (and they're banned, or at least their alt is).
Yes, obviously. Children are property of those who make them, and it is their right to dispose of them as they wish coincident with the child's ability to resist it as dictated by market conditions (usually a society's age of majority, though less than that due to the fact an age of majority results in market distortions so it's usually higher than it actually is).
What, you weren't told "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it" as a child? That was a Cosby show thing, I believe.
You really haven't read enough of me.
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