The Blurred Crusade : Onion skin layers of simulation

I can’t figure out if these guys are being real weapons dealers, or war-porn TV hosts.

(from instructables)

But as a piece of amateur film making, it’s actually pretty good. It isn’t just some kid goofing off in front of a web-cam. They care about what they’re doing.

So um… does this make them stars in a community largely comprising 10 year old kids? There are a lot of these things on youtube…

…and instructables, this one having a follow up flame war in which hockyhere exclaims “i hate u!!!!!”, to which Darth Gecko Man replies “I hate you too.”

Which seems fair enough, but they made friends again further down the thread.

Still, enough about that, how about this:

A compilation of Robots with guns, including CG footage of a nimble little stair-climby-wheely thing shooting cardboard cutouts of people (erm… if it’s digital, why not just shoot the actual people? Rather than simulacra of simulacra?) and a CG superimpostion of some 21st American Roman Centurion patrolling some place filled with brown people living in poverty.

I’m not sure if what’s happening here is “not exposing (our) people to danger” or “not exposing (our) people to the face to face reality of killing”. People don’t like it you see. Killing I mean – they deliberately fire over the enemy’s heads. US/UK soldiers need to be specifically trained to kill reflexively (which is why the Brit fire/kill ration was so much higher in the Falklands war) but they don’t train them to deal with the aftermath, which is why when I was going through my crack phase, about 1/4 of the addicts on the streets were ex-military, and apparently more UK soldiers have committed suicide after the war than actually died in the war.

And there are these weird stories that keep bubbling up… where stay-at-home UAV operaters in Nevada have higher incidences of post-traumatic-stress-disorder than those actually on the ground, and programs to give warbots ethics. There was also an incident where someone invented a multi-legged mine-sweeper… every time it stood on a mine, a leg blew off, but it could keep struggling on… until it was down to two legs, whereupon it just lay there kicking until its batteries ran out. The General (or whatever) considering the purchase rejected it on the grounds that it was “inhumane”.

So on the one hand, we’ve got this massive reluctance in people to kill other people when faced with the reality of it, and coming from the other end, this massive attraction to killing in a fantasy context.

I mean have you heard soldiers talking on the TV recently? There’s this whole language that’s developed that’s based around euphemism… separating them inside their own heads from the reality of what’s happening. It’s fucking surreal… and it doesn’t work – well, not forever. Reality wins.

We need to be careful – eg: that Republican Party Debate which included a massive wankfest where they competed to see who could be the most torturey… and Jack Bauer was actually cited at one point. People think this shit is real… which is to say, they know it’s not real, but the underlying patterns still make up their emotional “moral” decision making. And it all goes swimmingly, but then soldiers keep coming back with their minds in pieces.

The whole premise for the wars that we’ve gotten into in the last 10 years has been fictional. It’s all been a game.