Artists and writers in the late 19th century feared the 20th century; they foresaw that it would herald the rise of the machine. Thomas Hardy saw the rise of the machine as the death knell for the pastoral life; machines negate the need for humans to toil the land. Tolkien saw firsthand the horror of mechanised warfare. In the 21st century we have the drone - the hunter is now the hunted. Soldiers in trenches, walkers disobeying Covid law in the middle of nowhere, no one is safe from the eye in the sky. I recently had the misfortune to see the film ‘Civil War’. The thing that didn’t make sense the most about that depiction of a war (and there was no shortage of choice) was the total absence of the use of drones….as you say, this machine is how war is waged now.
I think our future will be characterized by remote control of the type you suggest. Drones discovering you outside your approved zone and the inbuilt loudspeaker shouting at you.
Nice and efficient, until it is shot down of course.
All you need is an air rifle or even a paint gun. The paint guns are probably the way to go. Render them blind.
Most are apathetic. What we really need people to understand is a tiny handful can stop anything. The authorities are often quite nervous about how policies are perceived. Any bad publicity tends to stop them.
Definitely. Sadly so many people have been conditioned into compliance. Legislation for the introduction of a Digital ID system is currently going through Parliament here in Australia. The Australian government tried to introduce a similar scheme years’ ago but protests stopped it. There’s barely been a whimper this time round. All the media are on board, it’s just people on the fringes like myself (people with no power whatsoever) that are objecting. And a few brave MP’s who have voted against it….It’s like most people just don’t care.
The media really is a disgrace. I often wonder what is going through their minds. Do they somehow believe they alone will be spared? They can't all be true believers.
I know. The media here in Australia is particularly bad. Last month, when the Catholic Bishop in Sydney was stabbed by a Muslim during mass, all the media could do was talk about how the Bishop was against the Covid vaccine and transgenderism. They are sickening beyond belief.
The only true thing about the meme appears to be that drone operators cam be slight and unable to fight their way out of a wet paper bag in real live. Drones, at least those used to kill individual soldiers, have to be controlled from close to the front, not some office block in the strategic depths. There is a recent video in which one such command center was overrun by advancing Russians. Like snipers, or guys carrying flamethrowers, drone operators have not much to look forward to when caught.
As to it feeling more odd than mass deaths through more traditional weapons, I agree that it is the individual aspect, one man killing another without risk to himself. We see similar in the Gaza conflict. The Hamas fighters killed individual people, the Israeli pilot turning an entire Palestinian family, grandmother to infant, into red jelly on a wall bombs an anonymous building.
On a side note, what the Russo-Ukrainian conflict revealed is that there is a shocking number of psychopaths on the Internet.
I don't think they are psychopaths. I suspect in real life, face to face, we'd see much less of their psychopathy. Many would be nervous cowards in real life.
I suspect it is a form of pornography. I think it excites them. That is to say, they are not indifferent, which we would expect if they were psychopaths. They are enmeshed in visual pornography. They are lost.
Yeah, the people I know in real live who are totally buying into the black and white view of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict pretty much fit your description. I think an additional aspect is that people in western societies nowadays have to suppress prejudices and resentment against other ethnicities so much that once they are allowed to hate someone they do so with extra gusto.
When I was much younger I certainly bought into the official story about the breakup of Jugoslavia and baby murdering Iraqis. But many people do not seem to have learned a more nuanced approach since.
Concerning your other post. Kevin Batcho's second to last piece goes into how the indoctrination of Western society to always take the side of the underdog backfired in the case of Gaza.
I participated in drone warfare, long before it became fashionable. We even insisted on the terms "UAV" or "UAS"; "drone" was for the ignoramuses in press.
While most of the drones being used in Ukraine are controlled near the front, it is not true that only such drones are used to kill individuals. Indeed, America's pioneering work in developing armed UAVs was directed at the capability to kill individuals thousands of miles away.
The commenter who said that drone footage is like pornography hit the nail on the head. We considered it a sub-genre of "war porn," shocking gore and violence enjoyed by those not presently at any risk.
The operations center was usually occupied by people directly involved in conducting, well, the operations in question. But when word filtered through the building, by mIRC chat or, later, MS Communicator, that a strike was imminent, people would filter into the back of the (stadium-seating) hall.
I was three rows from the front, but I still hated this. I called it the "peanut gallery" and referred to its occupants as "strap-hangers." Where were they during the long hours "in the deer stand," as we put it? But mostly, I hated how they cheered at the explosions. Not every time, but pretty often.
Even when your car gets hit with an anti-personnel guided missile -- especially when it doesn't impact the cabin -- not everyone inside always dies. Sometimes they exit the vehicle. At times they crawl away, on fire, and then stop moving. Sometimes they jump out and run into the trackless desert. Do you know what those people were called? "Squirters." If you'd ever watched it happen, you'd know why.
I drove to this job through the back of the post at which it was located. I took the same route every time, the long "range road" that ran through the training areas. I had a clear "pattern of life," one which had the target in a vehicle in a non-populated area with no non-combatants present. At times, I would think about the sky.
Good thing nobody else had drones, then. Nobody wants to be a squirter.
I think the conflict in Gaza has thrown up similar observations. It has its own dynamic of course, exacerbated by the religious dimension. But I can't escape the feeling much of what people are reacting to is just the reality of war made unusually visible.
People die, including noncombatants and always have done. Mistakes happen as do atrocities. This is every war. Stalingrad was worse.
The "compassion" we are told we are withessing today from the self-appointed liberal types is actually engineered dopamine hits I suspect. We see people agitated about Gaza and flying their flag, but indifferent about other wars happening today. Even when questioned they cannot be made to care. Gaza is about oppression after all. Every new casualty reinforces the dopamine hit of being on the right side along with one's peers.
I think it is similar to your point. They are told to be sympathetic to the brave Ukrainian but they don't really experience the horror of the drone attack. It is just another video, and it doesn't come with a dopamine hit attached. I too found the spectacle chilling. Inhuman; a crazy word given the inhumanity of war generally.
The obvious escalation will be drone wars. Our drone tech against yours, all driven by machine learning. No lady operator required.
Imagine spending 6 months of your life getting through the toughest military training on the planet, being "badged" as a member of the SAS, only to be Killed in Action by a drone operated by a diversity-hire sub contracter in an Indian call centre.
It's remarkable that all these videos take place on an"oddly featureless Ukrainian landscape." Every piece of footage that I see from this war is like that. A tank with a Z on the side trundling across a field, women with Go Pros on their heads running around in a trench, the camera on a drone homing in on soldiers. It could all have been filmed anywhere in the world.
It's also remarkable how little phone footage emerged from supposedly brutal battles over entire towns and cities earlier in the war, compared with the abundance of video resulting from a few nights of rioting in a western city. Combine that with the farcical premise of this war, that poor Ukraine is giving hell to Russia, a country that could have annihilated it on day one, and you have what looks like a very dubious war. Watching the video evidence for it now, I'm reminded of those action movies in which a lone woman defeats hordes of villainous henchmen in hand-to-hand combat. An intense suspension of disbelief is required.
And I haven't even mentioned that one side is represented by a Jewish actor who always appears dressed in a vaguely militaristic green outfit, like Fidel Castro on his way to the gym. I thought we had learned something by watching Wag The Dog.
A lot of the pro western footage that came out early on in the conflict appeared to be staged or at least heavily bullshitted. Gonzalo Lira did an interesting video on this subject months before his demise, specifically in regards to a Mr James Vasquez. He (Vasquez) got beat up on the subway in NY by some skinny dude shortly after returning I think haha. Most of those style of videos seem to be disappearing nowadays as reality sets in
I have seen many small but convincing evidences that the dog is being wagged a great deal in this conflict. I wouldn't venture to guess the actual state of things, but whatever the case, the portrayal seems at least as important as any military objectives pursued.
A news article from The Sun (yeah, The Sun, I know) tells me 1,200 Russian soldiers were just killed in a day. They have a map illustrating the alleged movement of troops, but the photos are all stock, and basically depict nothing. The caption for one of the two lead photos reads, "Ukranian soldiers take part in assault training."
Odysee has a fair number of “wag the dog” evidences. One that stood out to me was actors in body bags; a guy meant to be dead reaches out to rearrange his body bag in the background of a news report. Many such instances.
I've watched a fair amount of videos of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and I had a hard time expressing the vaguely surreal feeling I got from drone footage of men dying in the mud. But then this article came along and encapsulated it perfectly. As you said, this new means of dealing out death impersonally is just the latest expression of industrialized warfare. And as you hinted, there's a strange parallel between this and the hunter-seekers described in Frank Herbert's Dune series (God-emperor of): intelligent machines weaponized to exterminate humans, leading to extinction in an alternate timeline, which the main character ultimately prevented through radical action, but I digress.
As for shotguns, it's all part of the cat & mouse game of ever evolving warfare. This is also true of jammers which use invisible ammunition to drop the lethal wasps from the sky as they approach. Of course, the drones respond by jumping frequencies, and then the jammers become stronger and harder to resist, and so on. The role of electronic warfare as a balancing factor against drones is well worth considering, although it was not explored here.
Brilliant piece MG. Pinpoints the drone-like soul-less-ness of our culture in which we metaphorically - and with less and less empathy - hover above our own experience, increasingly dehumanised by the mechanisation of consciousness and the robotic perspectives it confers.
Indeed, with every passing decade - our hearts seem fated to become impermeably hardened by the automation of everything! Isn’t it the case that the moment you can see war on TV it becomes just another meaningless reality TV show?
The writing was on the war a century ago when those same soldiers you mention came home from The Somme and could not bear the vacuous jingoism of those on the home front. Only the soldiers knew the degenerate reality. For everyone else it was (Edwardian) show-biz.
Conversely: to hell with hearsay. Nothing reported is real. Life is either a direct confrontation with the reality of one’s situation, the stark personal challenge of its joy and pain - or it is just so much voyeurism - indeed, porn of one kind or another, making literal and/or metaphorical wankers of us all.
Well said, Morgs. I suspect very soon, at the Section level (infantry fighting units, 3 of which make a Platoon) there will be an anti-drone role. Much like that of the anti-armour role and, yes - a shotgun is probably the most useful tool of said soldier. He will probably be equipped with some sort of optical device to pick-up said drones well before the Mk I eyeball can as well. At least that's what I'd be doing if I was an officer in command, which I certainly won't be anytime soon for this version of the West we find ourselves in. As to AI, the Israeli's seem to be making great use of a software which I think is called Lavender (correct me if I'm wrong). From my understanding this AI software scans social media, etc, and finds targets to kill. Your uncle is a Hamas fighter? Say goodnight valentine, Lavender has found you and deemed you as connected to said threat, targeted your location and a bomb is soon on its way. Scary stuff, but is the inevitable result of modern warfare unfortunately. If you would like to witness the un-censored footage of modern warfare, I will direct you to theync.com - please keep in mind there is a huge amount of degenerate 'gore porn' on there, but when studying modern warfare it is quite useful. Again, this website is not for the feint of heart and I would recommend only using it when necessary. Enjoy your weekend mate and keep up the fire, brother.
There's something sadistic and cruel that lurks in all human hearts. Civilization and cultural attitudes have buried it pretty deep in most of us. A nice liberal sanctioned war grants permission for some to delight in those dark impulses. It makes you wonder if the war porn voyeur would start publicly torturing small animals tomorrow if the liberal media signaled it was permitted.
Really missed a trick with the title there. ‘The Danse Macabre’ came to mind while reading your article. Interesting observation regarding the dark comedy of this new era of drone warfare. Cheers. 👍🏻
I was in the Marine Corps and saw my fair share of combat.
I tell you this not because of anything that has to do with modern warfare or drones.
But because I am one of those adults that is terrified of wasps and behaves in the exact manner you describe. Your old man, Mr. Morgoth, does sound like a psychopath lol.
For everyone else: “A little piece of advice… you see a wasp… you do what we do…. run. Run your ass off.”
I think this essay ties in somewhat with your YT talk on Machiavelli and the use of mercenary troops and fortresses. What happens when western countries have to defend themselves against a resurgent Russia (or China)? Third world migrants will be even worse troops than European mercenaries 500 years ago. I don't see how America and Western Europe will be able to wage war with their own native peoples completely alienated from their governments.
To every new technology there is a counter-technology. Even the nuclear bomb will have it's neutralizer.
This article is amusing, precisely because it may be read in the future as "how people thought drones would be the end of us". It may gather a few chuckles from the youth, and a few grandpas among us will remember these times of great uncertainty. I bet the 1910's were full of such articles that provoked similar reactions in the 1980s.
Bless you Morgoth, you are a great writer. I would love to read a book by you on any topic really (as long as its not gardening).
Artists and writers in the late 19th century feared the 20th century; they foresaw that it would herald the rise of the machine. Thomas Hardy saw the rise of the machine as the death knell for the pastoral life; machines negate the need for humans to toil the land. Tolkien saw firsthand the horror of mechanised warfare. In the 21st century we have the drone - the hunter is now the hunted. Soldiers in trenches, walkers disobeying Covid law in the middle of nowhere, no one is safe from the eye in the sky. I recently had the misfortune to see the film ‘Civil War’. The thing that didn’t make sense the most about that depiction of a war (and there was no shortage of choice) was the total absence of the use of drones….as you say, this machine is how war is waged now.
I think our future will be characterized by remote control of the type you suggest. Drones discovering you outside your approved zone and the inbuilt loudspeaker shouting at you.
Nice and efficient, until it is shot down of course.
Absolutely - we need to get a bigger drone than the enemy’s, big enough to take their’s out of the sky!
All you need is an air rifle or even a paint gun. The paint guns are probably the way to go. Render them blind.
Most are apathetic. What we really need people to understand is a tiny handful can stop anything. The authorities are often quite nervous about how policies are perceived. Any bad publicity tends to stop them.
Definitely. Sadly so many people have been conditioned into compliance. Legislation for the introduction of a Digital ID system is currently going through Parliament here in Australia. The Australian government tried to introduce a similar scheme years’ ago but protests stopped it. There’s barely been a whimper this time round. All the media are on board, it’s just people on the fringes like myself (people with no power whatsoever) that are objecting. And a few brave MP’s who have voted against it….It’s like most people just don’t care.
The media really is a disgrace. I often wonder what is going through their minds. Do they somehow believe they alone will be spared? They can't all be true believers.
I know. The media here in Australia is particularly bad. Last month, when the Catholic Bishop in Sydney was stabbed by a Muslim during mass, all the media could do was talk about how the Bishop was against the Covid vaccine and transgenderism. They are sickening beyond belief.
The only true thing about the meme appears to be that drone operators cam be slight and unable to fight their way out of a wet paper bag in real live. Drones, at least those used to kill individual soldiers, have to be controlled from close to the front, not some office block in the strategic depths. There is a recent video in which one such command center was overrun by advancing Russians. Like snipers, or guys carrying flamethrowers, drone operators have not much to look forward to when caught.
As to it feeling more odd than mass deaths through more traditional weapons, I agree that it is the individual aspect, one man killing another without risk to himself. We see similar in the Gaza conflict. The Hamas fighters killed individual people, the Israeli pilot turning an entire Palestinian family, grandmother to infant, into red jelly on a wall bombs an anonymous building.
On a side note, what the Russo-Ukrainian conflict revealed is that there is a shocking number of psychopaths on the Internet.
I don't think they are psychopaths. I suspect in real life, face to face, we'd see much less of their psychopathy. Many would be nervous cowards in real life.
I suspect it is a form of pornography. I think it excites them. That is to say, they are not indifferent, which we would expect if they were psychopaths. They are enmeshed in visual pornography. They are lost.
Yeah, the people I know in real live who are totally buying into the black and white view of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict pretty much fit your description. I think an additional aspect is that people in western societies nowadays have to suppress prejudices and resentment against other ethnicities so much that once they are allowed to hate someone they do so with extra gusto.
When I was much younger I certainly bought into the official story about the breakup of Jugoslavia and baby murdering Iraqis. But many people do not seem to have learned a more nuanced approach since.
Concerning your other post. Kevin Batcho's second to last piece goes into how the indoctrination of Western society to always take the side of the underdog backfired in the case of Gaza.
I participated in drone warfare, long before it became fashionable. We even insisted on the terms "UAV" or "UAS"; "drone" was for the ignoramuses in press.
While most of the drones being used in Ukraine are controlled near the front, it is not true that only such drones are used to kill individuals. Indeed, America's pioneering work in developing armed UAVs was directed at the capability to kill individuals thousands of miles away.
The commenter who said that drone footage is like pornography hit the nail on the head. We considered it a sub-genre of "war porn," shocking gore and violence enjoyed by those not presently at any risk.
The operations center was usually occupied by people directly involved in conducting, well, the operations in question. But when word filtered through the building, by mIRC chat or, later, MS Communicator, that a strike was imminent, people would filter into the back of the (stadium-seating) hall.
I was three rows from the front, but I still hated this. I called it the "peanut gallery" and referred to its occupants as "strap-hangers." Where were they during the long hours "in the deer stand," as we put it? But mostly, I hated how they cheered at the explosions. Not every time, but pretty often.
Even when your car gets hit with an anti-personnel guided missile -- especially when it doesn't impact the cabin -- not everyone inside always dies. Sometimes they exit the vehicle. At times they crawl away, on fire, and then stop moving. Sometimes they jump out and run into the trackless desert. Do you know what those people were called? "Squirters." If you'd ever watched it happen, you'd know why.
I drove to this job through the back of the post at which it was located. I took the same route every time, the long "range road" that ran through the training areas. I had a clear "pattern of life," one which had the target in a vehicle in a non-populated area with no non-combatants present. At times, I would think about the sky.
Good thing nobody else had drones, then. Nobody wants to be a squirter.
Fascinating.
It's not my proudest memory.
In a sense, I was fortunate that I had had the experiences of being shelled and shot at a little before being assigned there.
Imagining oneself as Zeus throwing thunderbolts deforms one's character. To say nothing of clapping and whistling for him.
This is a reason that I don't like discussing war with my countrymen, though my own sins are more grave.
Surely you are right, I was thinking mostly about those tiny first person drones.
And the later part of your post just makes me want yo take a long walk with my dog and forget about the world for a while.
I think the conflict in Gaza has thrown up similar observations. It has its own dynamic of course, exacerbated by the religious dimension. But I can't escape the feeling much of what people are reacting to is just the reality of war made unusually visible.
People die, including noncombatants and always have done. Mistakes happen as do atrocities. This is every war. Stalingrad was worse.
The "compassion" we are told we are withessing today from the self-appointed liberal types is actually engineered dopamine hits I suspect. We see people agitated about Gaza and flying their flag, but indifferent about other wars happening today. Even when questioned they cannot be made to care. Gaza is about oppression after all. Every new casualty reinforces the dopamine hit of being on the right side along with one's peers.
I think it is similar to your point. They are told to be sympathetic to the brave Ukrainian but they don't really experience the horror of the drone attack. It is just another video, and it doesn't come with a dopamine hit attached. I too found the spectacle chilling. Inhuman; a crazy word given the inhumanity of war generally.
The obvious escalation will be drone wars. Our drone tech against yours, all driven by machine learning. No lady operator required.
Imagine spending 6 months of your life getting through the toughest military training on the planet, being "badged" as a member of the SAS, only to be Killed in Action by a drone operated by a diversity-hire sub contracter in an Indian call centre.
It's remarkable that all these videos take place on an"oddly featureless Ukrainian landscape." Every piece of footage that I see from this war is like that. A tank with a Z on the side trundling across a field, women with Go Pros on their heads running around in a trench, the camera on a drone homing in on soldiers. It could all have been filmed anywhere in the world.
It's also remarkable how little phone footage emerged from supposedly brutal battles over entire towns and cities earlier in the war, compared with the abundance of video resulting from a few nights of rioting in a western city. Combine that with the farcical premise of this war, that poor Ukraine is giving hell to Russia, a country that could have annihilated it on day one, and you have what looks like a very dubious war. Watching the video evidence for it now, I'm reminded of those action movies in which a lone woman defeats hordes of villainous henchmen in hand-to-hand combat. An intense suspension of disbelief is required.
And I haven't even mentioned that one side is represented by a Jewish actor who always appears dressed in a vaguely militaristic green outfit, like Fidel Castro on his way to the gym. I thought we had learned something by watching Wag The Dog.
A lot of the pro western footage that came out early on in the conflict appeared to be staged or at least heavily bullshitted. Gonzalo Lira did an interesting video on this subject months before his demise, specifically in regards to a Mr James Vasquez. He (Vasquez) got beat up on the subway in NY by some skinny dude shortly after returning I think haha. Most of those style of videos seem to be disappearing nowadays as reality sets in
I have seen many small but convincing evidences that the dog is being wagged a great deal in this conflict. I wouldn't venture to guess the actual state of things, but whatever the case, the portrayal seems at least as important as any military objectives pursued.
A news article from The Sun (yeah, The Sun, I know) tells me 1,200 Russian soldiers were just killed in a day. They have a map illustrating the alleged movement of troops, but the photos are all stock, and basically depict nothing. The caption for one of the two lead photos reads, "Ukranian soldiers take part in assault training."
Odysee has a fair number of “wag the dog” evidences. One that stood out to me was actors in body bags; a guy meant to be dead reaches out to rearrange his body bag in the background of a news report. Many such instances.
I've watched a fair amount of videos of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and I had a hard time expressing the vaguely surreal feeling I got from drone footage of men dying in the mud. But then this article came along and encapsulated it perfectly. As you said, this new means of dealing out death impersonally is just the latest expression of industrialized warfare. And as you hinted, there's a strange parallel between this and the hunter-seekers described in Frank Herbert's Dune series (God-emperor of): intelligent machines weaponized to exterminate humans, leading to extinction in an alternate timeline, which the main character ultimately prevented through radical action, but I digress.
As for shotguns, it's all part of the cat & mouse game of ever evolving warfare. This is also true of jammers which use invisible ammunition to drop the lethal wasps from the sky as they approach. Of course, the drones respond by jumping frequencies, and then the jammers become stronger and harder to resist, and so on. The role of electronic warfare as a balancing factor against drones is well worth considering, although it was not explored here.
Brilliant piece MG. Pinpoints the drone-like soul-less-ness of our culture in which we metaphorically - and with less and less empathy - hover above our own experience, increasingly dehumanised by the mechanisation of consciousness and the robotic perspectives it confers.
Indeed, with every passing decade - our hearts seem fated to become impermeably hardened by the automation of everything! Isn’t it the case that the moment you can see war on TV it becomes just another meaningless reality TV show?
The writing was on the war a century ago when those same soldiers you mention came home from The Somme and could not bear the vacuous jingoism of those on the home front. Only the soldiers knew the degenerate reality. For everyone else it was (Edwardian) show-biz.
Conversely: to hell with hearsay. Nothing reported is real. Life is either a direct confrontation with the reality of one’s situation, the stark personal challenge of its joy and pain - or it is just so much voyeurism - indeed, porn of one kind or another, making literal and/or metaphorical wankers of us all.
Well said, Morgs. I suspect very soon, at the Section level (infantry fighting units, 3 of which make a Platoon) there will be an anti-drone role. Much like that of the anti-armour role and, yes - a shotgun is probably the most useful tool of said soldier. He will probably be equipped with some sort of optical device to pick-up said drones well before the Mk I eyeball can as well. At least that's what I'd be doing if I was an officer in command, which I certainly won't be anytime soon for this version of the West we find ourselves in. As to AI, the Israeli's seem to be making great use of a software which I think is called Lavender (correct me if I'm wrong). From my understanding this AI software scans social media, etc, and finds targets to kill. Your uncle is a Hamas fighter? Say goodnight valentine, Lavender has found you and deemed you as connected to said threat, targeted your location and a bomb is soon on its way. Scary stuff, but is the inevitable result of modern warfare unfortunately. If you would like to witness the un-censored footage of modern warfare, I will direct you to theync.com - please keep in mind there is a huge amount of degenerate 'gore porn' on there, but when studying modern warfare it is quite useful. Again, this website is not for the feint of heart and I would recommend only using it when necessary. Enjoy your weekend mate and keep up the fire, brother.
There's something sadistic and cruel that lurks in all human hearts. Civilization and cultural attitudes have buried it pretty deep in most of us. A nice liberal sanctioned war grants permission for some to delight in those dark impulses. It makes you wonder if the war porn voyeur would start publicly torturing small animals tomorrow if the liberal media signaled it was permitted.
Really missed a trick with the title there. ‘The Danse Macabre’ came to mind while reading your article. Interesting observation regarding the dark comedy of this new era of drone warfare. Cheers. 👍🏻
Ha yes, indeed.
People degrade themselves when they watch video of these young lads getting blown up.
I was in the Marine Corps and saw my fair share of combat.
I tell you this not because of anything that has to do with modern warfare or drones.
But because I am one of those adults that is terrified of wasps and behaves in the exact manner you describe. Your old man, Mr. Morgoth, does sound like a psychopath lol.
For everyone else: “A little piece of advice… you see a wasp… you do what we do…. run. Run your ass off.”
The Rise of the Machines is just another reason to keep the shotgun handy. Keep up the good work Morgoth!
I think this essay ties in somewhat with your YT talk on Machiavelli and the use of mercenary troops and fortresses. What happens when western countries have to defend themselves against a resurgent Russia (or China)? Third world migrants will be even worse troops than European mercenaries 500 years ago. I don't see how America and Western Europe will be able to wage war with their own native peoples completely alienated from their governments.
I've just finished a two hour conversation with Frodi Mijord on the geopolitical situation and I'm hoping to have it up here soon.
To every new technology there is a counter-technology. Even the nuclear bomb will have it's neutralizer.
This article is amusing, precisely because it may be read in the future as "how people thought drones would be the end of us". It may gather a few chuckles from the youth, and a few grandpas among us will remember these times of great uncertainty. I bet the 1910's were full of such articles that provoked similar reactions in the 1980s.
Bless you Morgoth, you are a great writer. I would love to read a book by you on any topic really (as long as its not gardening).
Thanks and it'd be a dark fantasy....