James Simpkin

Further Education teacher living with my family among the wistful melancholia of the West Yorkshire moorlands. Exploring blogging, vlogging and podcasting as a hobby.

📍 West Yorkshire

Drone Ethics Part 11: Acephalic World Spirit

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone Ethics Part 11: Acephalic World Spirit

As the V2 rockets fell on London in 1944 Theodor Adorno wrote, "I have seen the world-spirit," not on horse-back, but on wings and without a head". What this acephalic weltgeist harboured, Gregoire Chamayou argues in Drone Theory, was the total effacement of any identifiable subject that could be held

Eremitic Warfare

Eremitic Warfare

Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Drone Pilot

Vile Bodies

'This study of the historical technologies of debasement calls for the creation of a political philosophy of scientific practice.'

Language and Death

Language and Death

In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1).

Dopamine All the Way Down

Dopamine All the Way Down

The physical and the mental are different but complementary forms of beauty.

Eating the Masses

Eating the Masses

Political Triangulation and the Populist Reaction

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics

This free pamphlet is my digest of Gregoire Chamayou's excellent 2015 book, Drone Theory.

Drone-Ethics part 10

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 10

Skin in the Game: Drones & War without Warfare

Drone-Ethics Part 9

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics Part 9

Mechanised Atrocity and the Death of the Subject

Drone-Ethics Part 8

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics Part 8

Drones and the Divine Right of Kings: Hobbes vs. Rousseau

Drone-Ethics part 7

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 7

‘Depriving the Enemy of an Enemy’: Drones and the Guevarist Guerrilla

Drone-Ethics part 6

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 6

My Whole Body’s a Weapon: Milgram, Moral Buffering and the Phenomenology of Killing

Drone-Ethics part 5

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 5

Where Hegel Feared to Tread: Dialectics, Drones and the Sacrificial State

Drone-Ethics part 4

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 4

Thanatotactics: Jus in Bello, Clausewitz and the Death Pact

Drone-Ethics part 3

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 3

Virtueless War and the Suicide Bomber

Drone-Ethics part 2

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 2

Orthodox Price Theory and the Death of Protest

Drone-Ethics part 1

Military Tech and Strategy

Drone-Ethics part 1

Necro-Ethics and the Categorical Imperative

Negative Capability and Nihilism as Nietzsche’s Artistic Leitmotif

Negative Capability and Nihilism as Nietzsche’s Artistic Leitmotif

For Nietzsche, far from being the obvious state of existence, nihilism perhaps became an act of faith.

Pointing Towards Christ

Pointing Towards Christ

Prefigurations of Christian Teleology in the Early Greek Thinkers

Kant’s Project in the Critique of Pure Reason and its Implications for Scientific Theories

Kant’s Project in the Critique of Pure Reason and its Implications for Scientific Theories

Our minds are filled with concepts like space and time because they conferred a survival value to our ancestors.

Zarathustra’s Ape

Zarathustra’s Ape

How He Became What He Was

Flag, Forces, Family

Flag, Forces, Family

Labour’s Latest Ideological Iteration

Art against the Cynics

Art against the Cynics

Reflections on Shaun Berke’s Winter and Summer: a memory of nature and culture

Lewis Mumford & Tales from The Loop

Lewis Mumford & Tales from The Loop

Megatechnics and Planned Obsolescence

The Smart Social Contract

The Smart Social Contract

Neo-Feudal Techno-Communism. Part II of a Triptych.