i'm writing a book about nazis. i'm compiling a monster reading list
tpaine posted:so like a cockatrice reading list or a behemoth reading list or?
a lion reading list
Impper posted:actually it's just two german bros sitting in a guard tower at a death camp
does one of them fall out of the guard tower?
They printed my testimony this month. We put the little pamphlets behind seats in buses and trains. Or we post them through letterboxes so people can take some small discomfort from our message. Sometimes people who read them come in to be baptised. Agnes comes to show me after worship. She holds up the white rustling thing in front of me. “Hey Darien” she says. “Look Darien. It’s you. You’re in Naff Trumpet” she says. “I can look,” I say. “But you know I won’t see nothing.” “You want me to read it out to you?” says Agnes. “I know how it goes” I say. “I wrote the thing.” I’m being cruel but Agnes pays me no mind. “They put a picture with you too” she says. “Right up at the top by where your name is. You looking very handsome. You want me to read it out to you?” “Go on” I say. “Read it out to me then.”
Before I came to the Lord I was a happy man. I had a good job. I had a good girlfriend. One month after I joined the Nigerian Apostolic Faith of the Father I broke up with my partner of four years. Soon after I started drinking heavily. I would start drinking as soon as I woke up in the morning and carry on until I passed out. When I needed that extra high I would smoke cigarettes. Soon I was smoking 60 cigarettes a day. My drinking and smoking got me fired from work. Throughout all this NAFF helped me a lot. Brothers and sisters from the church would buy me bottles of vodka when I was passed out on the couch. They would even dip into their own pockets to help me when my disability benefit ran out. After months of worship I was blessed with a new and dreary job that pays half my former wages. I’ve had to move into a flat half the size of where I used to live. I’ve also started a mutually unsatisfying sexual relationship with a sister from the Church. In all this I am comforted by the knowledge that God is always incredibly distant and that His intentions are always entirely obscure.
NoFreeWill posted:Impper posted:actually it's just two german bros sitting in a guard tower at a death camp
does one of them fall out of the guard tower?
thats the joke
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deadken posted:heres a bit from my short story w/o commas i guess
They printed my testimony this month. We put the little pamphlets behind seats in buses and trains. Or we post them through letterboxes so people can take some small discomfort from our message.
if you're writing something without commas why are you starting a sentence with "or", it basically turns the period before the capital O into functionally a comma. boo.
The_Schliski posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:The Butt
maybe my resolution should be to spend some time ingesting intoxicants in such a way that i embrace the full brunt of being a 20-something before i fritter it away writing posts on the internet where no one can see. smoke too much. drink too much. enjoy some Butts
... hmmmmm
animedad posted:My New Years resolution is to buy a knife. the new year is a time to get stabby
What type? Bowie, Green River, Bolo, Balisong?
Crow posted:I use alot of comas in my dating
0:25 http://video.adultswim.com/the-eric-andre-show/beyonce-and-jay-z.html
deadken posted:hey b&w if u have a moment 2 critique the thing i wrote about drones + molecularity thatd be useful + appreciated
For all their posturings, China and Japan are economically codependent. Maybe the drones will allow them to have their war and their trade links at the same time. Maybe the result will be something completely different.
this is an interesting point, drone against drone as a masquerade of warfare - it should be obvious to all of us that china and japan's tensions are never going to materialize into a real conflict, particularly because of china's grand adventure towards becoming a genuinely hegemonic force, but drone against drone as part of this grand theater of geopolitics is interesting. i am very hesitant, tho, to believe it could become more than that, the nature of drone warfare in a sense runs counter to that kind of scenario, as i will talk about more ...
also, there's a degree of baggage there that makes that proposition problematic, like for example the u.s. certainly has qualities to its defense forces that would be basically incompatible with drone against drone warfare, specifically that their drone systems are basically a very reluctant necessity, because they are actually effective and more importantly cheap to develop. neither of these things the orthodoxy of the military systems of the u.s. are particularly interested in because their defense forces are inseparable from the military-industrial complex that benefits small groups of private investors, if they want to play fight they will send some pretty new f-35s to their aircraft carriers in the persian gulf. drones are too cheap, too versatile, not pretty enough, to show off at the masquerade ball... you mobilize a drone when you actually want to get something done (that something being inducing a permanent state of surveillance and terror on a civillian population). china could be something different tho, as they have significantly less mitigating factors in the way of genuinely creative and useful technological development
It’s not just in East Asia. Hezbollah is building its own drones and flying them into Israeli airspace.
see what's interesting about this, and i haven't seen anyone really call attention to this, but the hezbollah claimed that their drone was able to retrieve sensitive logistical information through its incursion of israeli airspace, which the zionists of course dismissed out of hand ... except a month or so later the palestinian resistance struck further into the zionist entity than they had ever managed before, including islamic jihad hitting tel aviv itself with the fajr-5, altogether an enormous victory against israeli agression which destroyed the possibility of a ground invasion being mobilized...
ok but anyway, i actually basically disagree with the main point of your piece -
Drones don’t just operate according to smooth rather than striated space, they obliterate space altogether.
well, no, they don't. they're actually relatively ineffective at doing so. if you want to obliterate space, you call in an air strike and level a city, as simple as that. the problem is, and this is the problem we have seen really clearly with the failures of the u.s. or israeli invasions of the past, that's not actually effective warfare. you start leveling cities and you practically radicalize every survivor, the families and friends of every martyr. you start leveling cities and even hollywood actors start feeling comfortable denouncing you. you start leveling cities and even your pals at the u.n. look at you with narrowed eyes. the obliteration of space unfortunately comes with the obliteration of civillians, that is, pictures of corpses you can't help feeling for when they inevitably end up on the news, as opposed to the retroactively determined combatants you rightly point out are the consequences of drone attacks. but they are able to produce these combatants precisely because they do not actively consume space, by avoiding this they carry the air of discernment and precision through which the slaughter of innocents is mystified into an aqueous haze
drones are so effective not because they obliterate striation but because they find a way to exist within it. asymmetrical warfare is a process fundamentally relying on legible vs. illegible planes, the successes of insurgent groups are based on their ability to melt into the complex striations of the home turf, whether this be labyrinthine urban space in southern lebanon or dense forest in the naxal corridor. conventional warfare has absolutely no way of dealing with these complications besides destroying the playing field completely, obliterating the space of conflict. but as i mentioned before, that's not how asymmetrical warfare works, the insurgent groups want the conventional military power to get frustrated and wipe the cards off the table because it means they managed to creep their way into their heads, and every spectator can see how blustering and infuriated that military power now looks...
that's where things like the idf burrowing their way through palestinian homes comes in, they are not obliterating striations but reconfiguring them, the illegibility of urban striation starts to fall apart when you begin to carve your own pathways - and then it's the insurgent group that starts to lose their understanding of the intricacies of spatial politics, an area they once understood could now be a tunnel, a lair for a zionist worm ...
which is also where drones come in, insurgent strategies at their base rely on human confusion, human exhaustion. nothing could circumvent that more than the inhumanity of a swarm of autonomous flying death machines. space is made legible by the surveillance capabilities of these robots, even if that is not even practically true the assumption that these drones allow a precision and awareness, that we can be effective participants in the logic of striation rather than the devourers of space, that we know what we are doing, gives the ability to retroactively condemn the victims of imperialist agression as agressors themselves. the real threat of drones is not that they will flatten striation but that they will let us understand striation, disarming the revolutionary militant of their illegibility. what is a terrifying prospect to me is not necessarily the unmanned drone capable of firing a missile and destroying a building but a profane swarm of mechanical insects with a thousand eyes
and all this without mentioning something that is really important, that drone warfare actually creates maybe the biggest striation possible. the divide between a technician in nevada and the unmanned drones in pakistan is almost an unimaginable divide, it's exactly this wall that makes drone warfare so inhuman in its practice, how could anyone possible feel the ethical culpability that comes with slaughtering an innocent person when the whole process is reduced to something more resembling an xbox game than anything else... the imperialist comprador bourgeois have no interest in anything but developing striations, is there any better example of this process than a palace or a prison?
blinkandwheeze posted:also, there's a degree of baggage there that makes that proposition problematic, like for example the u.s. certainly has qualities to its defense forces that would be basically incompatible with drone against drone warfare, specifically that their drone systems are basically a very reluctant necessity, because they are actually effective and more importantly cheap to develop. neither of these things the orthodoxy of the military systems of the u.s. are particularly interested in because their defense forces are inseparable from the military-industrial complex that benefits small groups of private investors, if they want to play fight they will send some pretty new f-35s to their aircraft carriers in the persian gulf. drones are too cheap, too versatile, not pretty enough, to show off at the masquerade ball... you mobilize a drone when you actually want to get something done (that something being inducing a permanent state of surveillance and terror on a civillian population). china could be something different tho, as they have significantly less mitigating factors in the way of genuinely creative and useful technological development
isnt this basically what brechter/dolan wrote in his drones thing? yeah dones arent pretty and dont fit into the fetishisation of the military... i think what we might be witnessing with the china/japan thing though is a decoupling of war from actual violence, maybe a reappearance of the kind of ceremonial warfare that happened a lot in precolombian mesoamerica. i wrote about the israeli attack on gaza last year that it was a war fought not so much for actual victory in any sense but to be interpreted and i think thats a pattern thats increasingly repeating itself. not that violence will go away of course, its just being decoupled from the structures of conflict
see what's interesting about this, and i haven't seen anyone really call attention to this, but the hezbollah claimed that their drone was able to retrieve sensitive logistical information through its incursion of israeli airspace, which the zionists of course dismissed out of hand ... except a month or so later the palestinian resistance struck further into the zionist entity than they had ever managed before, including islamic jihad hitting tel aviv itself with the fajr-5, altogether an enormous victory against israeli agression which destroyed the possibility of a ground invasion being mobilized...
this is really interesting... one thing i wanted to talk about but didnt end up fitting in was the incidents where insurgents in iraq and afghanistan hacked in to us drones and downloaded their information... shoulda really as it does feed into my point about the drone programme being an autonomous warmachine
ok but anyway, i actually basically disagree with the main point of your piece -
Drones don’t just operate according to smooth rather than striated space, they obliterate space altogether.
well, no, they don't. they're actually relatively ineffective at doing so. if you want to obliterate space, you call in an air strike and level a city, as simple as that. the problem is, and this is the problem we have seen really clearly with the failures of the u.s. or israeli invasions of the past, that's not actually effective warfare. you start leveling cities and you practically radicalize every survivor, the families and friends of every martyr. you start leveling cities and even hollywood actors start feeling comfortable denouncing you. you start leveling cities and even your pals at the u.n. look at you with narrowed eyes. the obliteration of space unfortunately comes with the obliteration of civillians, that is, pictures of corpses you can't help feeling for when they inevitably end up on the news, as opposed to the retroactively determined combatants you rightly point out are the consequences of drone attacks. but they are able to produce these combatants precisely because they do not actively consume space, by avoiding this they carry the air of discernment and precision through which the slaughter of innocents is mystified into an aqueous haze
i suppose i was thinking of space less in terms of the urban fabric as geopolitics and so on. i guess what i'm saying is that with drones you don't need to level cities, drones function according to a despatialising principle that doesn't need to smooth out the urban space because it's indifferent to space altogether. a drone strike can hit a mountain encampment or an urban hideout, it doesn't make any difference. when it does attack an urban area, the exact same procedures are followed: those in the strike area are identified as militants, etc. the use of drones in cities isn't really urban warfare at all, it's kinda the same thing negarestani talks about w/r/t the desertification of the city. they don't need to smooth out space, they operate on a plane antagonistic to space altogether.
drones are so effective not because they obliterate striation but because they find a way to exist within it.
this really. the difference really is whether it's a matter of existing within striated space or above it.
space is made legible by the surveillance capabilities of these robots, even if that is not even practically true the assumption that these drones allow a precision and awareness, that we can be effective participants in the logic of striation rather than the devourers of space, that we know what we are doing, gives the ability to retroactively condemn the victims of imperialist agression as agressors themselves. the real threat of drones is not that they will flatten striation but that they will let us understand striation, disarming the revolutionary militant of their illegibility.
yeah this is true; i hadn't really looked at drones in their surveillance capacity rather than their offensive capacity. something i'll have to consider.
and all this without mentioning something that is really important, that drone warfare actually creates maybe the biggest striation possible. the divide between a technician in nevada and the unmanned drones in pakistan is almost an unimaginable divide, it's exactly this wall that makes drone warfare so inhuman in its practice, how could anyone possible feel the ethical culpability that comes with slaughtering an innocent person when the whole process is reduced to something more resembling an xbox game than anything else
here i disagree though. the divide between the technician and the drone isn't a striation at all, it doesn't impede any flows, it doesn't set up any boundaries. as you point out, it's precisely this distance that allows morality to be superseded. i think i wrote that drones replace space with distribution: drone and controller are both distributed on a plane of immanence. in actual urban warfare space is the field of contest, it's essential, but with drone warfare space stretches to the extent that it becomes redundant
*space without the rigid notions of distance necessarily
For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.
ANZEIGE
The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.
Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.
"These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.
"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
blinkandwheeze posted:
Cool post dude. I get the impression that you've probably read this but i just finished it and this chapter in particular seems relevant.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=7b9g9wmisjIC&lpg=PA303&ots=s5kRbhXgNm&dq=hollow%20land%20chapter%20air%20control&pg=PA237#v=onepage&q=hollow%20land%20chapter%20air%20control&f=false
Gaza seems to be the labrotory for all sorts of shit these days including drone warfare, and reading that chapter I couldn't help but think that the real story with drones in the next few decades is going to be their domestic use.
The Chicago PD within the next 5 years will be travelling to Israel to see how they "manage" Gaza, in order to apply the lessons to the south side of that city, i guarantee it.
in imperialist countries in paticular the cops do want to be "the peoples" pals if they can because that is all part of the social democratic package
technologically that can involve drones obv cos they are persistent to the point of magical but its just dangerous to invoke gaza in capitalism quest for security forces technology cos it makes people imagine the spreading of an occupation style relationship which is a product of imperialism pushed to the edge not acting everyday when really different aims are behind integrating technology which just happens to be invented at the edge of imperialism
(thats a position taken form northern ireland by the way since riot tactics from their have been exported to all over the UK but capitalism did in the end understand not to export the brutality to the same extent and because of that early ranting ended up misplacing how capitalist security forces shape themselves re society though obviously that brutality does come to the fore with starling well trained efficiency when its needed)
Edited by SovietFriends ()
I guess the difference between northern ireland and gaza or chicago is that the warring parties in Ulster are the same race.
idk what stats would shed light on this... maybe 'value added' manufacturing in $ ?
http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/WorldStats/WDI-value-added-manufacturing.html
SovietFriends posted:(thats a position taken form northern ireland by the way since riot tactics from their have been exported to all over the UK but capitalism did in the end understand not to export the brutality to the same extent and because of that early ranting ended up misplacing how capitalist security forces shape themselves re society though obviously that brutality does come to the fore with starling well trained efficiency when its needed)
i guess brasil & the favelas is another branch of this; lots of eyes on them for 2014 & 16
Bells to cut off the food supply. America is forced into a guerilla war and the climactic battle is in Arizona where america wins by killing literally 2 million Chinese troops and putting their bodies in the Grand Canyon. The day they achieve this becomes known as "Freedom Day" and that's the name of the movie.
drwhat posted:that sounds great, i'd like you to do some research for the lead role now by getting inside of this shipping container for the next six months
sorry, i'm not chinese