Weapons have been banned before, but nukes are the only things that actually don’t get used.

Well, you don’t hear a lot about blinding weapons or biological agents these days.

You could have looked at the first muskets and said "definitely an advantage, but not an insane amount compared to seasoned archers and siege equipment.

That’s a great example. You know what happened after muskets fully took over? The age of absolutism gave way to the age of revolution.

Like, both drones and muskets are real, game-changing innovation, but how they effect the geopolitical equilibrium is a complicated question. I’m reminded of some of the WWI-era designers who though a more deadly weapon would mean a shorter, more humane war. In practice it meant a very different, long-standoff battlefield, and a much slower war.

To that point:

These are cheaper to create, easier to run in undetected, and do far far less collateral damage.

Shells are really cheap, like as cheap or cheaper than a drone, undetectability is valid, but actually favours the little guy, and collateral damage depends. Some shrapnel marks on one hand vs. a localised explosion on the other. You don’t want to shell a big thin-walled tank or pipe, but on a normal building the drone may actually be more destructive.

So basically, this is an interesting development and different from a shell for sure, nobody’s denying that. But, that it favours central, autocratic power does not directly follow.

Hey, weapons have been banned before. (And continuous genocide is kind of just the normal situation globally)

That being said, yes, a fully autonomous, self-supporting army would have massive, terrifying social implications. Few people are talking about it, but it has to be the biggest existential threat we’re facing over the next century or two.

This sounds like it’s just a drone that chases anything that moves wherever it’s deployed, though, not something more nefarious. Against a known, unarmed target shelling would achieve the same thing.

TBF land mines that deactivate themself after a few weeks are a thing now as well.

I guess a market killbot field wouldn’t be too much different during the conflict. It has the same indiscriminate nature for sure, though, and soft targets with no point defences like civilians will be extra vulnerable.

Yeah, let’s hope we don’t make a habit out of this. Landmines are already bad enough.

Just add it to the list of inconvenient religious prescriptions that get “interpreted” away. I’m not even talking about one religion in specific, it’s how the sociology of religious communities inevitably works.

Horses get put in the same bucket, and we’ve had pigs and cows longer than them. Not eating bugs has no emotional dimension at all, but it’s also widely held in the West.

Any kind of really lean meat can cause “rabbit starvation”. Humans just can’t process too much protein.

Like you said, though, many humans are deliciously marbled, or have a fat layer you could focus on.

Also, humans tend to fight back more than we want to deal with.

Unironically it still makes perfect sense.

More because it’s beside the point. Sure, dogs are unique in that way. That’s not why they’re taboo to eat specifically in our part of the world.

Then why are horses also controversial to eat?

Let’s be real, this isn’t a thing where someone sat down and decided morally speaking what our diet should be. It’s a cultural standard, and it’s the same as Hindus being mad that in the West we specifically eat beef.

OP didn’t say “your dog” or “a pet dog”, they said “dogs”.

Dogs can live fine on a vegetarian diet, and pigs will happily eat meat or predate. They’re both highly social omnivores. Most likely, they get the same kind of food when farmed, too.

The comparison gets more difficult to prove with cows, and a lot more difficult for chickens. But, a pig is almost the same animal ecologically, and people have pet pigs that live in their house just like a dog.

Well, there’s quite the headline.

Just as valid as eating a pig.

(However valid you think that is)

“We eat large mammalian quadrupeds, so we’re civilised. They eat large mammalian quadrupeds, so they’re barbaric”

Being mad they eat bugs is basically chauvanism too, but at least it’s taxonomically coherent.

Honestly dog meat is on it’s way out just from Western influence anyway.

Man, imagine being the person at the Pentagon or the FBI in charge of stopping the Israelis from messing with American affairs. Talk about a Sisyphean task.

Well, there’s no real reason to think it was a forced meme, as opposed to just people living it up when they suddenly could, and it started well before the Cold War. When you watch something set in the Old West, and they’re driving cattle east, that’s what it was about. It’s worth saying it was cheap-er in America than Europe or the undeveloped world, with all that freshly “cleared” land to graze on. Still more expensive than plant crops, though.

There’s a few sides to the Soviet shopping thing. Price controls in the USSR meant that the shopping experience was very different in general. You could afford everything, but anything unusual or desirable tended to sell out immediately. There were indeed empty shelves as a result, although on a rotating basis. Later on, as the system was collapsing, that became permanently empty shelves. People in the West tend to conflate the two, and the famines that happened before the space race period, 'cause propaganda. (There also were no one-stop-shops, and everything was behind the counter and collected by staff, but that’s a digression)

On the other end, there just were a lot more food categories in the West, and the USSR itself acknowledged it. There, a new product couldn’t exist until some government boss sponsored a project to create it, and fudge pops or whatever probably weren’t front of mind for what the Union needed. They spent a lot of time copying Western consumer products as a result. When it came to military equipment or civilian infrastructure, where the requirements are more concrete, they did far better.

I’m curious about the opposite statistic now. Presumably, the number of people eaten by chickens wasn’t and isn’t zero.

Which is probably why insectivory hasn’t caught on. If the West could adapt to sushi it could adapt to mopane worms, but in the 80’s or whatever vegetarianism was still a joke. Now it’s influential.