Tantric anti-personnel drones

I.

Yesterday, I mentioned that the Ukrainians have adapted toy drones to drop hand-grenades on the Russians—the apparatus is jerry-rigged with a syringe to pull the pin and release the grenade. It’s fairly regular to see a video on the timeline—usually set to inappropriately jaunty music by the Ukrainians—that depicts an unsuspecting Russian soldier, curled in a foxhole, as the grenade sails down from on high. The innovation, as noted, is the type that occurs in war—wars stimulate inventiveness; and nobody thought to use drones in quite this way before, as anti-personnel weapons.

I also noted that arms companies have already seen these videos and have begun work on their own streamlined versions, minus the awkward syringe mechanism. The dynamic is the same as in aircraft in WWI: at the war’s start, an observer in an aircraft would lob an opportunistic grenade over the side on a recon mission—by the war’s end you had recognisable bombers with racks and mechanical release mechanisms. Since this war does not directly threaten America—where such things are invented and prototyped (if not manufactured, that would be China)—we are unlikely to see such swift development, even if the war goes on for two years or more. However, in the next war will see fully fleshed-out anti-personnel drones—mass-produced and reliable.

Yet these will not be used in exactly the same way as today’s improvised drones. For a start, the mass-produced version will be calibrated to descend to an optimal height—as determined by Operations Research—and will carry a payload tailored to wound a soldier. Why so? A few weeks ago, a Russian war correspondent, a man who works for the WarGonzo combine, trod on a butterfly mine and was left with a bloody foot—it took at least three men, plus an armoured vehicle, to move him to the rear; and once there he tied up a few surgeons and nurses. This is what butterfly mines are designed to do—one man can take out three others, since nobody is so callous as to leave a lightly injured (toeless) man on the field; plus a vehicle has to be used to transport him, plus there is all the expense and time devoted to his recuperation. If you just killed him, his body could be left almost indefinitely and shipped back in a cheap metal container for a cost-effective burial—to kill him costs the enemy very little, to wound him hampers them very much.

So it is also rational and optimal to wound people, to make the enemy tie up his resources in the rescue—and that is why the finessed anti-personnel drone will be optimised to wound, not kill. Perhaps it will have some neat “AI”, not necessarily complicated, that can automatically identify a man scrunched in a fetal position; perhaps machine-learning—practiced on thousands of images, some taken from actual footage from the Ukraine war—will see through the camouflage that fools a drone operator as he squints at his screen in the low autumn sun; and perhaps the drones will even be autonomous, you might be able to throw up a handful and let them seek out targets by themselves.

Notice that the “evil” involved is diminished when the longer-term view is taken; it might not be nice to maim Ivan—to blind him in one eye with scattered metal balls, or to blow half the fingers off his left hand. Yet if you look at the jerry-rigged drone operators, being apish humans, their imperative is just kill. “Me drop hand-grenade on Russian head. Get him. Get him. Get him before he get me. Kill. Kill. Quick, quick, quick.” Then post it online with a remixed europop soundtrack—about 15 years out of date, because this is Eastern Europe. The men are smart enough to invent the basic drone; but they still utilise it just to kill, stupidly—for the short-term sub-optimal objective; of course, their officers could tell them to aim slightly to the side, aim to maim, but the whole rig is so primitive you cannot be sure you wouldn’t miss altogether. So kill it is—ultimately, that is more “evil” than the final iteration. Ivan would prefer to be alive, even sans fingers.

What this demonstrates is a tantric point. Now, for most people tantra is something to do with sex and not cumming for five or six hours—and that is one aspect to tantra. Yet the real essence to tantra is the dialectical development just described, the way in which “evil” is transmuted into “good” through antagonism. If there were no competition—no wars—then the war methods would retain maximum brutality; it would be maximum—genuinely orcish—stick ’im with sharp thing, gouge eyes, crack skull. Indeed, “evil” is almost synonymous with short-term thought: the more you think about the long-term perspective, the less cruel you become—the less you want to just “drop bombs on man head—do now”. Hence people who want to stop wars or “end the violence” contribute to increased warfare and violence. If you want peace, prepare for war—if you want to be kind, be cruel. The paradoxical reversal of opposite, also essential to tantra, demands such reversals.

Ultimately, the interchange between opposites diminishes “evil” to a tiny grain—it can never be fully extirpated because then nothing would happen; so there must always be some evil, just not more evil than necessary. In this interplay, you find that everything is perfect—the whole is the interplay between good and evil, as the two sides contend they perfect the whole; no evil a true loss, no good a true boon.

Hence the war has also begat big-ass anti-drone (BAAD) guns—these guns look like something from Starship Troopers; well, by the next war they will be the size of a small rifle—then the size of a sidearm, cheap enough for everyone to have one; eventually, the BAAD will be miniaturised so it can just be sown into your uniform. This is the defensive dialectic that reacts to the spontaneous innovation found in home-made war drones—every offensive innovation is countered, then the counter-measure countered (perhaps drones designed to operate from a greater height, just drop like eagles on their prey).

People who advocate for arms control conventions, peace treaties, and similar forms of interference increase the violence and cruelty found in war; just as the Ukraine war started under “peaceful” Biden, not “warlike” Trump. Hence it was early forbidden to use tear gas or knock-out gas in war; in other words, international conventions banned armies from developing non-lethal gases. In war, you need to incapacitate your opponent—the most popular way to do this, has been for sometime, is with a bullet. Yet if you could do it with a non-lethal gas, same difference—better actually, you could take out hundreds, possibly thousands, of men at once. Yet, of course, arms control conventions have prevented armies from fully exploring the possibilities in this area; and so they have made war more cruel than is necessary.

Hence, paradoxically, people who say they are “good” and “peaceful” promote the most cruel wars possible—they interfere with the natural evolution, not necessarily in the Darwinian sense, found in war. In this sense, “evil” is that which wishes to stop the fluid movement. Big wheels keep on turning….Carrying me home to see my kin…

II.

The error that can occur with this view—a degeneration—lies in its reduction to a purely material process; hence this view can explain drone developments and the way war is finessed from a stab in the guts to a nuclear equilibrium that guarantees long stretches of peace—yet it is not just a material process. Marx was inspired by Hegel, and Hegel’s view is tantric—being based on kabbalah, tantra’s fragment in the West—but Marx reduced the dialectical interplay to a material process; similarly, Hegel also erred—although his philosophy was not materialist it still worked in the Cartesian context all modern philosophers work within, hence it was dominated by number; and Hegel’s “God”, the Absolute, to which all processes work out from and back towards, ultimately amounts to an abstracted number—and so his “tantra” also constitutes a degradation.

The interplay does not stand alone; rather, the material dialectic we see in drone development is a mirror for a divine interplay—and this is what tantric sex is really about. The idea that you “get out” from tantric sex a longer orgasm or sustained sex is itself a perversion—tantric sex is a spiritual operation that interrelates the masculine soul to the universal soul found in women (women do not have individual souls, they are one spiritual entity without differentiation). People who think about it as Westerners do have “gaining mind”—they think “what can I get out of it?” or “what’s the point?”. There is no point. Material actions, all material actions, only reflect an interplay at a higher level—an interplay that originates in pure undifferentiated light, a qualitative state, that splits in order to know itself.

There is an old Chinese parable about a farmer that goes as follows: a farmer has seven fine horses, the neighbours say, “How lucky!”—the farmer says, “We’ll see”; the farmer’s eldest son breaks his arm riding a horse, the neighbours say, “How unlucky!”—the farmer says, “We’ll see”; the recruiters for the army come to take eldest sons for the war but they reject the farmer’s son because his arm is broken, the neighbours say, “How lucky!”—the farmer says, “We’ll see”; the plague comes and the eldest son catches it and dies, the neighbours say, “How unlucky!”—the farmer says, “We’ll see...” The parable is not about stoicism, it actually encompasses tantra and the Tao—the enlightened man is not partial to good or evil as they interchange, he understands the whole; and so he only says, “We’ll see.” And we will.