Not everyone has the luxury of and, hence, the unique issue responsibilities associated with, being a single issue voter, so it is likely that they think more in terms whether, and when, speaking-out will accomplish whatever the goal is, which is political matter having to do with numbers and timing more than the righteousness of a given position.

you have a peace sign as your avatar and you won't condemn indiscriminate droning? Am I missing something here, or is the hypocrisy as thick as a mattress here?

Americans, even some duers, have largely bought into the idea that drone attacks "keep them safe" from all those evil terrorists, and don't see a thing wrong with it. If a few innocents get killed, well too bad, its unfortunate but sometimes necessary as a result of targeting the terrorists. We are Americans damn it, rulers of the world! If protecting us means it will get messy sometimes, then by the glorious red white and blue colors of our flag, so be it. <sarcasm>

be effective on this issue, that is the priority, to succeed in changing what is happening, apparently at the expense of popularity amongst certain subsets who appear to place much higher priority on something other than whether their advocacy will actually succeed ON THE ISSUE. To insult, with so much emphasis on over-generalizations about the putative "opposition", to the exclusion of other explanations for the question . . . and, thus, to insult those who place success on the issue ahead of OTHER priorities appears to support a hypothesis that the advocacy is about something other than achieving change on the issue.

until some magic time comes that the wind changes is not the formula for success if the goal is to end or even severely limit the practice.

That isn't creating change, it is a cry out to punt on the issue and be quiet with no actual advance or even efforts toward advancement. I don't see how you are granting yourself this illusion of the moral high ground and that people speaking out on the issue are some how against succeeding and those with mealy mouths and the punters are actually serious about advancing the ball.

You are literally encouraging the trend while chastising those who aren't and then going above and beyond and arguing the zip lipped, hand sitters and I guess even the cheerleaders are sore serious about changing the situation. It doesn't even begin to make sense.

Of course we try to kill the enemy.

Ah, the good old days, eh?

Perhaps I prefer not creating more people who hate what the US stands for because their families were killed by remote control.
Perhaps I prefer working to solve the problem and not promoting future wars and more of the same down the road.

I'm however baffled why you might think it fruitful, in the pursuit of peace, to waste time advocating against a particular kind of sword.

Conflict does not cease when one brand of sword falls out of favor. The successful approach has always been to remove the suffering that brings business to the swordmakers. You and others are hammering at the issue clumsily, and almost completely backwards.

to oppose the use of a weapon of indiscriminate destruction on unarmed civilians in a sovereign nation with which we have no active military conflict declared? How interesting.

Drones are shiny and new (to most). And it's fun to sound clever about them.

But you're taking an irrational approach not unlike the TSA, in terms of focusing on a weapons system -- in this case Predators and Reapers -- that have killed the fewest number people of anything we've ever fielded. If you want to get angry about a weapon that kills a lot of people, I'd pick maybe the M230 chain gun -- the one mounted on Apache helicopters. Or the M16 rifle, carried by about every soldier over there.

Or, if we want to get real about things, get angry about how we use the US dollar. You want to kill a lot of people abroad, that's the tool to do it.

But it's a path to pontification, not peace. If you can name a single time in history when public criticism of a particular weapon -- or even a policy that governs use of a particular weapon -- has led to fewer people in the relevant conflict dying (much less peace), I'm all ears.

So yeah, clumsy and backwards.

1) "Everyone prefers peace." No they do not. Why do you think we have such a large and well funded MIC?

2)" I'm however baffled why you might think it fruitful, in the pursuit of peace, to waste time advocating against a particular kind of sword." So why not use nukes, they are, after all, just one "sword" we have in the tool box? Just because a tool is available does not mean it should be used. While conflict does not cease when one brand of sword falls out of favor, we have learned that it is better not to use some swords at all (nukes), or in the ways we used them initially (helicopter gunships).

3)"The successful approach has always been to remove the suffering that brings business to the swordmakers". The current policy regarding the use of drones is actually CAUSING the very suffering that brings business to the sword makers, if you can't see that I don't know what to tell you.

I guess that was before he learned to love the drone, eh?

American interest will most US citizens stop and ask how could it have (armed drones) gone this far? Not until there's a major privacy invasion against some "important" citizen will people stop and ask how could it have gone this far?

below from: http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/30/11949657-report-obama-embraces-disputed-definition-of-civilian-in-drone-

The (New York Times) investigation also reveals that more than 100 U.S. officials take part in a weekly "death list" video conference run by the Pentagon, at which it is decided who will be added to the U.S. military’s kill/ capture lists. "A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the CIA focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes," the paper reports.

But according to at least one former senior administration official, Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is "dangerously seductive." Retired admiral Dennis Blair, the former US Director of National Intelligence, told the paper that the campaign was:

"The politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term."
-------

Even if the President is re-elected, other men or women will become the next leader. Will their obsession be as seductive or more so? With little public or congressional debate, drones are a slippery slope.

This excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45" is a must read.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

(yeah, Jack Sparrow's--you know, how it points to whatever you want...)