Archive for the ‘War’ Category
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7
Nov
2011
Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (Aphex Remix)
Very unsettling.
From its vimeo page:
see original version, conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki himself, performed just before this performance, here = youtube.com/watch?v=SFoTqF-gGxA&feature=related
see the other Aphex Twin edits for this show here = vimeo.com/album/1735255
see all other performances from the show here
youtube.com/user/fixedmachine#grid/user/CFB3F7A0029A764CLive visuals by Weirdcore.
gfx programming by weirdcore & andrew benson
3
Dec
2010
Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet
I rather like the “A”, “Amer-kawh”, “and”, “for” and “great” bits.
17
Jul
2010
For a soldier he leads a very fine life and he always is blessed with a charming young wife
Paul Brady’s legendary 1977 recording of the old Irish anti-recruitment song Arthur McBride:
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1
Jul
2010
Torture and the media
Abstract from Desai, Pineda, Runquist, Fusunyan et al. (2010), emphasis mine:
The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been
the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers
with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and
sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early
1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered
waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was
torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on
the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By
contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to
waterboarding as torture.The New York Times called waterboarding torture or
implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so
in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as
torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding
torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more
likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is
the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with
a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or
implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States
was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in
91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only
11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.
12
Jun
2010
Rise of the Robots
A good, short blog post from the wonderful ginandtacos blog on the increasing prevalence of unmanned vehicles in war, ending with a very sobering thought:
Won’t it be great when the military can send in the tanks without having to put crews in harm’s way?
Yes and no. The fewer casualties, the better. But what becomes of our reluctance to send the military galavanting around the sordid parts of the world once American casualties are taken out of the equation? We have almost no restraint as it is. I shudder to think of how easily Presidents and legislators will make the decision to go to war when the attitude of “We can just send robots to do it!” becomes entrenched. We saw what the advancements in design of cruise missiles in the 1980s did to the Executive Branch; if someone’s acting up, just lob a dozen Tomahawks at them from a few hundred miles away. It became the easy way to intervene without actually making a commitment or putting Americans at risk. Collateral damage isn’t much of a deterrent to our political class. UAVs are another step in that direction, a step toward a future with more remotely operated and even autonomous means of doing the dirty work.
It’s great that technology allows more American soldiers to come home alive and in one piece, but if we remove the U.S. body count from the decision-making process the only restraints on waging war will be common sense, morality, and logic. Yeah, let’s start taking bets on how well that works.
