Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare
While speculation is deemed central to humanity’s evolutionary process and humans’ authenticity, Star Trek makes the argument that the absolute operates as a progressive dialectic. Therefore, when we speculate and garner knowledge we are fulfilling the promise of the absolute, which is rational and leading humanity towards a classless society, free of gender/ethnic biases. We speculate and achieve this knowledge in spite of the risk of death – sometimes in spite of romantic love. Therefore, analytic philosophy, and its fear of error, is misplaced because humans’ existentially fear lack of knowledge of the absolute more than they fear error and the death that can result from error.
Contemporary shifts in technology are celebrated for empowering human rights defenders and generating prosperity, but they also enable new forms of human rights violations. This article traces the evolving legal and regulatory challenges posed by drones across two distinct waves of debate. The first involved questions about the legality of weaponized drones in foreign airspaces. The second has centered on the domestication of the technology in American and European airspaces. This article argues that the legal gaps exposed in both waves are not an inevitable side effect of drone technology but are the result of key actors opportunistically using new capabilities to exploit existing rules or even to produce new ones—a process known as lawfare. This linkage between technology and lawfare is important because the drone debates encapsulate many of the core challenges surrounding emerging technologies such as algorithmic decision-making, autonomous vehicles, and big data. Lawfare over unpiloted aircraft is a prelude to the struggles ahead.
This chapter begins with a treatment of the state and politics within the Federation—where the governing norms are fairness and equality. The overall analysis and conclusion offered in this chapter is consonant with Karl Marx’s view that a repressive modern state apparatus is directly, solely a function of entrenched class hegemony, oppression.
One of the means that Star Trek uses to convey Empire (as opposed to Federation) is technology. As such Star Trek makes the explicit claim that particular technological regimes will exist within Empire which would not ostensibly exist in Federation. The technologies of empire are evident in Star Trek through weapons of mass destruction and torture. In laying a claim that the politics of technology is decidedly different in Empire from that of Federation, Star Trek allows us to identify a “politics of intersubjective agreement” in contradistinction to the “politics of justice.” One conclusion of this analytical comparison/juxtaposition is the U.S. in the contemporary era could be viewed as operating within a politics of empire.
This book is a personal account by one man who left the priesthood and transitioned into a successful career as an academic. It is no fairy tale, however, as it details the problems he encountered first in the religious and then in the secular world as he grew to become a lover and a parent. Enhancing the story are a collection of poems by the author and other writings by him or about his work.
The creators of Star Trek dedicated virtually an entire series (Voyager) to show how pragmatism and neo-pragmatism lead to undesirable/unstable/catastrophic outcomes. Conversely, the series depicts how ethics and principles are key to (yes!) achieving success in the face of dire/difficult circumstances.
On the evening of November 4, 2008, Illinois senator Barack Obama addressed a crowd of 125,000 supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park. “A new dawn of American leadership is at hand,” Obama told the gathering, shortly after the formal concession of his opponent for the presidency, Senator John McCain of Arizona. “You understand the enormity of the challenges we face—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century,” he said. “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America—I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you—we as a people will get there. Because of what we did on this day, at this moment, change has come to America. This victory belongs to you,” he stated, adding that “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It’s just a chance to make that change.”
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones,” as part of the United States’ (US) targeted killing (TK) program dramatically increased after the War on Terror (WoT) was declared. With the ambiguous nature and parameters of the WoT, and stemming from the postulation of numerous low-level, niche-, and other securitizations producing a monolithic threat, US drone operations now constitute a vital stitch in the extensive fabric of US counterterrorism policy. This article employs the theories of securitization and macrosecuritization as discussed by Buzan (1991, 2006), and Buzan and Wæver (2009) to understand targeted killing, by means of weaponized drones, as an extraordinary measure according to the Copenhagen School’s interpretation. An overarching securitization and the use of the “security” label warrants the emergency action of targeted killing through the use of drones as an extraordinary measure. We argue that the WoT serves as a means of securitizing global terrorism as a threat significant enough to warrant the use of drone warfare as an extraordinary use of force. By accepting the WoT as a securitization process we can reasonably accept that the US’ response(s) against that threat are also securitized and therefore become extraordinary measures.
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