“Depraved Idea” American as Apple Pie

"What started as a depraved idea has apparently become a sickening
reality"

The above sentence could have been written by Hunter Thompson. It
is a testimony to his lasting affect on journalism that it in fact appeared
on a South African news site in reference to the legal introduction
of remote control hunting of imported exotic species, in Texas, logically
enough.

The story is back
in the news because the first actual kill, of
a creature called a feral hog, took place last week. Apparently, a
lot of people
are quite upset. What’s the big deal? Get over it, we say! What
could be more American than remote control killing? Our entire military
strategy
and
tactics
over the past 50 years have been based on that principle above all else.
It is any wonder ordinary citizens are dying to get in on the action?

San
Antonio – Hunting wild animals is nothing new in Texas. But a new company
called Live-Shot.com has added a modern, controversial twist to the primal
desire to kill: Internet hunting.

Now anyone with a computer and a modem can log on and fire real weapons.
Howard Giles did it a few weeks ago, becoming the first known Internet
hunter to bag
a wild hog by remote control.

Giles was sitting behind his computer in San Antonio. The pig was munching
on corn about 100km away in the Texas Hill country.

"
He was a beast," said Giles. "I felt like I was there."

Though Texans wear their love of guns and hunting proudly, the idea of Internet
hunting has generated plenty of criticism. A Republican representative in the
Texas Legislature, Todd Smith, himself an occasional hunter, has offered a
bill to ban the practice.

"I don’t think we should be able to kill God’s creatures with the click
of a mouse," Smith said.

Why the hell not? We kill insects with aerosol spray. We kill
mice with poison and traps. and everyday we kill millions of cows and
chickens in mechanized death camps where highly regimented, short, hormone-enhanced
lives are likewise ended with the click of a mouse button.

And what about hunting deer, duck, or boar with guns, or shooting
gophers, woodchucks and other varmints, just for fun? What’s the difference
between
pulling a trigger and clicking on a mouse, other
than
a few generations
of technological
development?

Obviously, killing via computer would be less viscerally satisfying,
and in the long run it remains to be seen whether virtual killing, however
good the screen resolution and surround sound, will quell the blood lust
buried deep in our genes without the smell of gunpowder and animal shit.

But the real world is a dangerous place these days,
even for armed and aggressive pastimes like hunting. People
get gored, even killed, by wild
animals every year. Not to mention rabies, anthrax and lyme disease.
Plus, tramping around in the woods with a bunch of other intoxicated
and heavily
armed
paranoid
schizophrenics can be dangerous in and of itself. Remember the
case of the Hmong immigrant who holed up in a tree blind and wiped out six fellow
(but non Hmong) hunters before he was shot down like the rabid hyena
he was?

So we think its a great idea to allow patriotic Americans who pass
stringent security and solvency checks to participate in a great American
tradition
like hunting, from the privacy of their homes. Think of it.  Without hunting, the entire middle of
the United States would be covered with buffalos and Indians!

Killing
by remote control is only one of the many talents and skills which our armed
forces and global peacekeepers will need in the coming decades, as military
methodology becomes more high-tech. Why risk our most precious
resource, our sons and daughters, if we can accomplish the same thing
by remote-control, running our weapons of war and engines of destruction
from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

In the future, all of our battles will be fought this way. Top gamers
and proven remote control killers will be highly recruited agents of
the New Armed Forces. Right now the military is working on remote-control
killing machines which can be directed by operators anywhere on the
planet. Warfare will become a cottage industry: individual fighting
machines could
be remote-controled
from
battle
stations in suburban
duplexes across America, run in shifts 24-7 by the most capable and vicious
American virtual killers, regardless of age, sex, religion or geekiness
quotient. And when our fighting men and women get off their shifts at
the VR weapons consoles installed in their studies, they will have their
loving families and all of their creature comforts around them to lessen
the culture shock of killing for a living.

from iol