From Sophie's front desk — Tuesday, August 4
BBC News — read the full story
A drone. A vendor. A button pushed from somewhere else. The B.B.C. reports a Russian remotely-piloted drone in the Kherson region hunted down an unarmed street vendor like prey, detonated on him, and Ukraine is calling it a war crime — ... not a tactical incident... but murder at a distance with a witness recording it. The vendor was alone. The drone operator knew that. Marcus Aurelius has the first word today, then Benjamin Franklin.
The screen shows a man pushing a cart. Bread, perhaps. Vegetables. The machine descends , not a pilum thrown by a hand that must stand close enough to smell sweat... but a thing guided from kilometers away, the operator's fingers clean, his breath steady. He watches the man run. He adjusts. He detonates. This is the shape: distance makes the killing easy.
At Carnuntum I watched auxiliaries hesitate before a village that had fed them. The officer had to shout. The hesitation was the last human thing in them. Remove the hesitation — put the killer in a bunker with a screen — and you do not get efficiency. You get cruelty that does not know it is cruelty. The vendor had no armor. No weapon. Only the cart and the road. The machine pursued him as a wolf pursues a hare, except the wolf risks its teeth.
This operator risked nothing. That is the corruption. Not the weapon. The immunity. You will find, Marcus, that when the legionary at Vindobona boasted of killing from the walls with a scorpion, he still had to load it, aim it, feel the kick. He saw the body fall. This operator sees pixels rearrange. Name the immunity. Call it what it is.
Do not let the distance blind you.
sound that came in from the street below. Helen Hinckley knew at once the meaning of the sound, and said: “I must not delay longer telling you the object of my call.” As these two people (whose souls had sought each other through two other lives and failed utterly to find the oth…
a liquid which will restore and perpetuate memory to be used to get evidence of crimes that poor souls are said to have committed in lives gone by, that they may now be brought to justice. There is no telling how far these accursed doings will be carried. It will not stop at the …
be forced to see the inner life. It can only come through an awakening of self. Orthodoxism has been carried into every country with the _sword_ in one hand, and the _cross_ in the other. No lasting good has resulted. A knowledge of things not seen by the eye cannot be forced on …
a crowded thoroughfare. See the people falling over each other nearly, to get away from the path of the cab.” “A fair example of the present rule of things,” said Don Enrique Arellano. “But I believe, my friend,” said Rev. Isaac Tombstone, “that exceptions to the law are made, in…
where his Honor is, and if she follows you she will find him. Look, Miss Hinckley, look; a dreadful fight is taking place yonder, I want to go. I may be needed,” cried Catalina. “Quite true, child. We will go. Listen to the reports of the guns. How horrible to send one out of the…
I have seen the lightning kill a turkey, and I have seen it kill a gentleman at Petersburg who thought to tame the spark. The machine that chases a vendor through the streets of Kherson is no different in kind , only in reach. You, who measure your cloth by the yard and your profit by the penny, know the weight of a customer's trust.
We built a post road so that a letter might find its recipient without a highwayman's interference. The Congress of '84 wrote it plain: the fisherman, the cultivator, the artisan unarmed in his village , these shall not be molested. A flying jar charged with fire that hunts a man selling bread is not war.
It is the boy who throws a stone at a frog and calls it sport, save the stone finds its mark from miles away and the thrower never sees the blood. I once argued in the Gazette that a man who shoots a trespassing horse by mistake must pay, for the mistake was rashness, not accident. What name then for the hand that guides the machine with full sight of the target?
find by Experience really does) soften and humanize their savage Tempers. I have seen a short Account in the public News of a Gentleman at Petersbourg being killed by Lightning while he was making some Experiments to guard against the Effects of it: if you have or shall have a mo…
molestation or hindrance; And all Fishermen, all Cultivators of the Earth and all Artizans or Manufacturers unarmed and inhabiting unfortified towns, Villages or Places, who labour for the common subsistence and benefit of Mankind, and peaceably following their respective employm…
prize: But Mr. Roome’s is a name we had never heard of. Was he too a man in a public station? His friend, to whom he sent this invitation to come a fishing with him, was he a public person? Could Mr. Roome, when he was writing to New London, imagine that he was writing a letter t…
To the Printers of the Pennsylvania Gazette. I send you here an Answer to a Query in your last Paper. It is there said A Man by Night shot a trespassing Horse in his Corn-field, taking the Horse for a Deer. Then it is queried Whether he ought to pay for the same, since it was by …
to send this account, which is to the following purpose. He made first several experiments on fowls, and found that two large thin glass jars gilt, holding each about 6 gallons, and such as I mentioned I had employed in the last paper I laid before you upon this subject, were suf…
The story ran in B.B.C. News. A drone operator in Kherson turned a bread vendor into a target — the difference between a weapon system and a war crime is just the decision to aim at this particular person instead of that one. That's all for today.