killing at a distance

As a one worlder you probably know I rather favor empires.  The Roman Empire did have its Pax Romana.  The Ottomans made us Europeans anxious with their nibbling up the Balkan Peninsula, but I guess they kept peace among the Arabic states, and by all reports, life in their empire wasn't too bad.  Not too good for culture though.  All that good life of the mind went by the wayside.  The Ottomans weren't interested in culture.

I guess I shouldn't say this because my ilk hates colonizations, but maybe that British Empire wasn't so bad.  At least everybody got to have a common language, of course people did get angry with it and rebelled, oh wait, we did too.  You know we get so all-fired nuts about it every Fourth of July about how thank god we successfully rebelled against those awful British, and right across, what is it, the strait of Mackinaw, there is Canada which I think still has the Queen on their money, and free (okay socialized) medicine, something we will never have.

And I have been doing some reading and maybe even that Austro Hungarian empire that ruled over our people wasn't all that bad, just to keep it together they had to allow some freedoms, which you probably didn't get in some country where everybody is alike.  I don't think they ever called Yugoslavia an empire, but it was convenient having those characters under one tinpot dictator. 

Well we were talking briefly about cosmopolitanism, I believe I was for it and I believe you were agin it.  Well you like people, inasmuch as you like people at all, in proportion to how much they are exactly like you, because the more different they are the more you get the impression that they will be taking you over, and if you must be taken over you would probably like it better if the people who took you over were exactly like you.

People are generally all like each other in rural areas, but cities are made up of lots of different kinds of people.  That's why we like to have our rainbow coalitions marching up and down the streets singing Kumbaya.  Well we're not that crazy about it, but as long as we are holding hands we are not trying to stab each other.

I thought the opposition to the crossbow was that it was unfair or unmanly more than because it would end the world.  I think the idea of cowardice is way overplayed but I suppose there is something more cowardly about killing at a distance.  Not so much in that you are not looking your opponent in the eye as the idea that the crossbower in his castle keep (castles did have keeps didn't they?) is not taking nearly as much risk as the guy with the broadsword in the open field.  Of course if the battle goes badly, the guys with the broadswords will creep into his keep and do away with him.

A little more cowardly are the bombers, maybe not so much in WW 2 where they dropped like flies, but against a primitive foe like the North Vietnamese where you could carpet bomb and be home in time for supper.  Not always as John McCain found out, but it did lead to a pretty good political career.  And I know this will sound traitorous, but McCain goes on about how badly they treated him, and no doubt they did, but how would we Americans treat somebody who was carpet bombing us? 

And now we have these guys in Las Vegas flying these drones across the mideast and there is no risk at all.  There is something a little wrong with that.  When it doesn't cost you anything to attack your enemy, it makes you more eager to do it.