wretchard:

Not Keyser Soze again! The last time you brought up Keyser Soze, a second rate hack writer with his own blog made a special post comparing me to Nazis.

Seriously, the most dangerous weapons in modern times aren’t guns. They’re ideas.

Every weapon has an engineering design. Once one gets an accurate design for a gun, one can replicate it. CAD, or “computer aided design”, is simply a language for modern engineers and each design is an idea. And that idea can usually be turned into reality.

In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina’s aunt had a magical typewriter where anything she wrote down on it later came true. The internet can be like that.

”I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t need to kill anyone. I think it. I have it here [points to head].” – Charles Manson

The most important weapon in the world is imagination. And it is easier to foster one’s imagination within a culture of freedom than within a cultural straitjacket. Our enemies live within a cultural straitjacket but attempt to use our ideas as weapons against us. The real question is whether we can generate ideas at a faster clip than our enemies can use them against us.

I agree with you that drone assassinations are dangerous on many different levels. The physical technology is nowhere near as dangerous as the lack of federal bureaucratic architecture to control it. The question is whether the federal government or foreign governments decide to use robot drones to kill American citizens on American soil. Even members of Obama’s ruling coalition had better stop to consider the precedent these drone killings are setting. If they don’t, others will.

Here’s a question for the Club. Is it better to write scenarios or science fiction stories that terrorist may use to attack us with, or is it better to keep quiet about these things so the terrorists don’t use these ideas against us? In other words, how far should we engage in self-censorship when we know our enemies are using our ideas against us?