With this proliferation of know-how, technology, and weaponry, warfare is changing. A cheap commercial drone equipped with weapons, guided by another cheap drone packed with sensors, can hit specific faraway targets or conduct surveillance operations. And because they are relatively inexpensive, such aircraft can be deployed at scale.

It’s not just MRIs and cell phones that enjoy innovation. As with medicine, so goes the killing. One thing has remained true — as Günther Anders put it: “our capacity to feel hobbles along behind our capacity to do: we can indeed rain bombs on hundreds of thousands; to regret or weep for them we cannot.”

I wrote an essay on this topic 7 years ago called “Blips on a Radar Screen,” which I put up on the bigger blog.

Currently Reading: Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson 📚

A couple zings and a lot of nonsense.

Paul D. Miller’s analogy in the opening of his piece at The Dispatch this morning is good.

In one of Aesop’s fables, a deer fleeing hunters takes refuge in a cave, only to fall prey to a lion into whose den he had stumbled. The moral: Sometimes safety is an illusion hiding greater dangers.

Let me offer an updated version: The deer flees to the cave knowing the lion was there, hoping to hire the lion to take out the hunter. The lion takes payment, roars at the hunter, and eats the deer. Who got the better deal?

In case it’s not obvious, Miller makes it clear: “deer” is to “conservative Christians” as “hunter” is to “progressive left.”

Quite fitting. I would correct some misleading parts of the analogy, however. All of the deer that I know did not jump into a cave and make a deal with a lion. They carved out their own cave, invited a lion in for protection, and told themselves and everyone else that the lion is not, in fact, a lion but is really a fluffy bunny rabbit being framed as a lion by the hunter.

Anyway, we all know how it turns out with the fluffy rabbit…

Fleeing the conformity of what I viewed as an arbitrarily oppressive world, I’d flung myself into the service of something much more tyrannical: myself.

Jordan Castro’s essay on literature, escape, and addiction from the autumn Plough Quarterly, which I’m just now getting around to, was perfectly timed. About which I will hopefully say more.

“…and I’ll try to take the winning side.”

Two really nice conversations • Last week, I was thinking about Holcomb’s song “Live Forever” (particularly the live version at the Ryman), but it was especially nice to here from Audrey Assad. If you listen, make sure to stay for the short song she sings at the end.

David Dark: “Individuals within large robots speak of individuals within smaller robots freaking out and losing their humanity.”