I’ve had a morbid fascination with executions for a long, long time. I think maybe it started with a hanging on a western show. I don’t know. I’ve written a couple short stories about it (“Just Another Execution Before Noon”) and 4 part painting series.
Part of the fascination is with the guilty and what they go through - perhaps resigned to their fate for their wrong doings, and then the innocent, people killed for their ethnicity or ideological beliefs.
Depending on her maturity level, you might share this story with her. It doesn’t really make anything clearer, but it does sort of address the humanity around it.
ISIS is the one massacring thousands of civilians. We are smacking their gun trucks with drones. Let them try to hold vast areas of desert without vehicles. Groups like the Taliban function best in areas where population is very thin and living at a subsistence level without electricity. Let’s see how they fare trying to capture and hold cities.
Fair enough, cstatman. But might I suggest that a principled humanism, whether articulated in institutional terms or in philosophical terms, rather than an appeal to some essentialist charactature of compassion, guide our visions of and actions toward a better world.
No. Here’s how it will go. We will wage a drone war remotely. Local governments will help us find the targets; we fly the drones and push the buttons and drop the bombs. We will pay for the bombs with deficit spending. In exchange, Middle East, African and South American countries will sell us oil at cut rates, so that our corporations can make money, putting it into the pockets of the rich oligarchs. The oligarchs will pack Congress and the White House with shills to do their bidding, waging more remote wars in the East and West, paid for by taxes collected on the sale of cheap goods manufactured in China and fast food consisting of chemicals extracted from the byproducts of bomb-making and agribusiness mega-farm products. The oligarchs will quietly fund a liberal mass-media entertainment industry, keeping a vocal, rabid, hyper-conservative faction ever-presently causing trouble, to keep us distracted from all the money changing hands and world destabilization. This Neofascism will be dressed in stars and stripes and tie up the Supreme Court with gay marriage cases that are decided in favor of social liberals so that they can claim victory while the real action is happening in heavily fortified military bases and 100th floor board rooms.
I’d have to disagree. Not many muslims agree with what IS are doing. Most muslims would probably wish they would go away, since IS actions make the everyday lives of muslims more difficult.
There’s no ‘huge war’ coming… They’re just going to catch this failed british rapper wannabe tough guy, and bomb the rest of them to hamburger mince.
how can WE, as individuals, help move our supposedly great race? into not killing our children in wars that profit fat old men?