- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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I worked on a project for Rheinmetall for a bit and feel just fine about it. I would never work in advertising though. What a disgusting industry that destroys minds and societies.
I would still prefer defense industry over advertising or fossil fuels for example.
I worked in the analysis tool division of a company that built civilian and military jets when I was fresh out of engineering school.
I didn’t feel too bad about it because I was making commercial aircraft quieter and more efficient with my work. Then, the Iraq war started up and they told me I had to work on the engine for the F22. I started looking for a new job that day.
Now I work in planetary defense and don’t feel guilty about it…
I’m pretty sure “planetary defense” just means more imperial offense.
Technology under capitalism is a force for exploitation, violence, control, etc.
@uuldika@lemmy.ml is right. I hunt and track asteroids. If I’m offending on behalf of an empire with this work, the empire is humanity and the offense is against chunks of rocks in space
ALL ROCK LIVES MATTER!!!
AND MY STONE!
“planetary defense” usually means tracking and maybe deflecting asteroids that are likely to hit Earth.
Yes, I spent the last 20 years developing a very particular kind of chemical agent that is tailor made to dissolve an eight-year-old’s testicles. But I assure you we only intend to use it in self-defense.
I have no idea how the Israelis got seventy of them.
The number of people defending Lockheed Martin here is staggering, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given the apparent makeup of Lemmy’s population
I’ll make this very, very simple: working for a well-known defense contractor who brags about making bombs is bad. Working for Lockheed Martin is unethical.
Working for a large corporation (Microsoft) that funds or supports wars (Israel) is also bad, but not as bad as Lockheed Martin, the company that actually builds the bombs that are bought with the dollars that Microsoft sends to Israel
Working for any company that could theoretically contribute economically to a war is bad, but not as bad as the previous two examples and is more or less unavoidable for working people
Paying any kind of tax (especially in the US) ultimately funds wars, and so isn’t good either, but it’s not as bad as any of the three above options, and no one can avoid it (except billionaires of course)
Im not surprised honestly, and yes its seriously fucked up.
random subject is discussed
instantly thinks about Israel
You can really tell 4Chan is down currently.
Imagine believing that weapons manufacturing is a “random subject” unconnected to zionism. Brain dead.
How is it more related to this than to any other geopolitical conflict?
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department”, says Wernher Von Braun.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apoliticalMaking rockets wasn’t his department either.
The US wouldn’t let Von Braun go testify at Dachau. To this day there’s a lot of whitewashing. But he knew how those rockets were made.
I had a friend in a difficult position, deciding between high pay at Buy N Large or the opportunity to work on insanely cool shit for Death Inc.
Ultimately he chose Death Inc, and the reasoning was along the lines of “This might kill a hundred people, but at least it’ll kill them specifically. I can’t even conceptualize the harm Amazon et al. do on a global scale to entire populations without even trying”.
Made me think. I didn’t have a very good answer to that.
those bombs will kill far more than just a hundred people, far more than he can ever conceptualize. the consequences of those deaths will shape the world more than the extra microsecond an engineer could shave off of an internal Amazon function
The argument the person was saying is that we already have big bombs that do catastrophic damage, the R&D is how do you make those bombs more targeted so they have less collateral damage.
Now whether that will actually lead to less deaths or will just cause the bombs to be used in places they otherwise wouldn’t be used with the same amount of collateral damage is unknown.
But it brings up a bit of a utilitarian dilemma of “is it ethical to work on weapons if it leads to an overall reduction of collateral damage to civilians”
It doesn’t have a necessarily correct answer
Have advancements in precision bombing technology ever led to an overall reduction in collateral damage to civilians? Is that even an argument defense contractors make, or are you just making it up?
Or has every study shown the exact opposite, that “precision” bombs actually cause more civilian deaths?
Yep, in world war 2 without precision bombing we fire bombed entire cities to the ground and one of them was so bad it caused a fire tornado that literally suck people into it! World war 2 had such a problem with imprecise bombing that they are still finding bombs today
yea but nestle
Also, “if I don’t make this thing that will kill a hundred people specifically, they’ll just use something that kills more people with less precision / more casualties.”
Ah good ole ego.
How is precision weaponry “insanely cool shit”???
I mean it’s impressive from an engineering standpoint
Anduril has had many, many recruiters desperately trying to get me to work for them. On the surface, what they make does sound incredibly cool: embedded systems/operating systems for autonomous robotics.
The only problem is those robots happen to be death bots (and Palmer Luckey, who makes me want to stay far, far away).
Technically if you think about it, he’d be saving innocent lives, since non precise weapons have more collateral damage. Might as well make bombs accurate and hit the right targets.
The “right targets” tend to be innocent lives as well. Besides, who said anything about precise weaponry? These days, it’s all about AI, where precision is actually not the goal
Shame that the right targets are often schools, hospitals, weddings, and apartment complexes
If we’re murdering the planet, we might as well do it well! hur dur…
It means you can take out the bride’s party, or the groom’s party.
Well, I can’t get into details, but the field is vast.
That’s how the entire “education” process goes. They lure kids with promises of making cool video games or whatnot. Then they brainwash them, teach them helplessness, and exploit their entire life in order to profit from murdering people.
That’s an interesting take. One on one side the death is a haphazard byproduct and on the other it is at least motivated by someone. Somebody has to have a vision for why these weapons need to be used. I’d argue though that in the case of Amazon, wether or not it’s of any priority to them, the suffering would be something worth ironing out over time whereas, for weapons companies, it’s the entire product they sell
I worked gps until i determined The Customer was not interested in reducing civilian casualties.
They wanted the induced fear, priming the next generation ready for revenge, the garuntee of future business.
It should make you think about how your friend is in a brainwashed delusion.
Not quite, no. Not everyone works on the weapons.
This is one of the few reasons I dislike living in the area I do, defense contractors are basically the only ones nearby hiring for engineering roles. Luckily I work remotely, but if that ever changed and I couldn’t find another remote position, I’d probably have to move. I’m not about to sell my soul.
Or, and hear me out, get a job and suck at it.
Found the Boeing recruiter!
I volunteer in my free time so that more Russian occupiers will be eliminated. I’m very proud of myself.
“I refuse to work in defense. I’d rather my work wasn’t used to blow anyone up” is a line I’ve used in multiple job interviews. I like to think the hell I end up going to at least has chilly weather and/or really good AC.
Not all countries are the USA btw. Most countries use their defense budget to actually defend themselves from external very real threats.
USA is the external real threat.
Any superpower is a threat.
Most countries use their defense budget to actually defend themselves
Defend themselves from whom!
From whom!
Potential invaders like Russia or the US. Or in the future: China. But in Europe a nation just 1500 km away attacked it’s neighbor in 2022 and the war is still ongoing.
Or in the future: China.
It’s so crazy to see the Chinese steadily building out a dense web of business relationships and transit networks, from which their industrial and scientific power base commands enormous influence. And for westerners to look at this and conclude “They’re going to start bombing us at any moment! We need to fight back first!”
But in Europe a nation just 1500 km away attacked it’s neighbor in 2022
Europe’s been dropping bombs all over North Africa and the Middle East for the last three centuries. Hell, they’ve been bombing themselves straight through the Years of Lead and the post-Soviet civil strife. If Europeans have anyone to worry about, its each other.
How about you stop with the whataboutisms and stay on topic. As belligerent China has been to it’s neighbors and has illegal police posts in Europe to threaten dissidents, we need to be wary of the PRC.
Your second paragraph is just straight up whataboutism. European wars the past few hundred years doesn’t justify Russia invading Ukraine. Someone doing something bad isn’t a justification to continue bad behavior.
How about you stop with the whataboutism
How about you stop trying to defend genocide, eh? You’re standing on a hill of corpses and you think you’ve got the moral high ground?
Get fucked. Trump’s peeled the mask off your rotten empire. Nobody is falling for this shit anymore.
You were the one who brought up colonial endeavors when I only said we should be wary of superpowers like the US, Russia and China. And when I called you out for deflecting and going off topic, you accuse me of trying to defend genocide. Are you for real?
Hahaha. Have you not noticed the empire struggling to maintain itself?
This is a sarcasm, you idiot fucks. Leave me alone.
Why?
Of all the tools for oppression and murder, advanced weaponry is pretty low on the list for what actually makes the murdering happen. If you work for a company that does any kind of business with any repressive regime (ie most companies above a certain size), the simple fact that you’re working for a cog in enabling the economy of the repressive regime to pay its cops, its soldiers, its secret police and informants and massive bureaucracy, is as much as a contribution as “I was .1% of designing a multirole jet that’s 10% better than the previous multirole jet”
Hell, anyone making steel of the correct grade to go into small arms probably kills more innocent people, by that standard, than your average person working for Western defense contractors.
It almost sounds like you might be suggesting that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism
Something like that. And little ethical work.
If less people worked to make weapons, there would be less weapons made.
How is this a hard concept to understand?
If less people worked to make weapons, there would be less weapons made.
Okay?
How is that relevant?
Do you think that there is a dire shortage of tools for murder, and only the modern defense industry is sustaining the strained supply?
Do you think that there is a dire shortage of tools for murder, and only the modern defense industry is sustaining the strained supply?
Israel, Russia, and Ukraine sure seem to think so. None are producing enough munitions domestically to satisfy themselves.
Less weapons made still means less weapon used.
Israel, Russia, and Ukraine sure seem to think so. None are producing enough munitions domestically to satisfy themselves.
In the case of Russia and Ukraine, the reason they need to produce more munitions is to prevent the opposition from having the advantage in the war. If both sides were totally stripped of munitions by tomorrow, you wouldn’t see a cessation of the war, you’d see a continuation of the war simply with less advanced tools, such as in the civil war in Sudan. And Russia has already demonstrated that it has no shortage of men who are willing to murder people with knives and sledgehammers.
Don’t really know what you think “No more munitions!” is going to achieve here. Certainly don’t know what shunning the Western MIC is going to do here, except expose more Ukrainians to Russian genocide.
Israel isn’t producing enough munitions to satisfy itself because it knows it doesn’t have to when the US is willing to subsidize their genocide.
Less weapons made still means less weapon used.
No, it means less of that particular weapon used.
So do you work for a defense contractor or do you just have great respect for the act of killing in general
Sorry for having the radical idea that mass violence predates specialized weapons industries. Or the radical idea that countries should be allowed to defend themselves against genocidal aggressors. Whichever of the two you’re objecting to.
It is pretty radical to argue that a small contingent of Zionist Israelis would be successfully eradicating the people of Palestine if both sides just had sticks, so the U.S. should just keep manufacturing and selling MK-84 bombs. Or we can talk about how absurd a claim it is that the arms industry is looking out for the little guy—you know, the group that can pay for less of their product? Thank god for arms manufacturers—that’s probably what Uyghurs think when they’re stopped at checkpoints by military police
But you are literally arguing in defense of America, which is funding genocide, so now you are just straight up lying
Defending defense contractors isnt as cool as you think it is, Jesus would be ashamed.
First, props for backing a bonafide unpopular opinion so unflinchingly. (A) discusses your argument. (B) challenges it.
A. I liked your direct approach to this position, and think you raise some important points. In particular…
- It’s important to acknowledge that we all serve this machine in some capacity by our engagement with the free market. But why?
- Economists call these markets efficient (i.e., pareto efficient) because of how quickly they achieve equilibrium/zero-sum states in response to change.
- That efficiency is the curse no participant can outrun, because anything short of complete absence from the market necessarily furthers its result, which always includes violence. In other words, no one’s hands are clean.
- Appearing closer to acts of violence often has little to do with magnitude of influence or actual violence produced. How so?
- Suppose we define violence quotient (VQ) for the roles of market participants, some formula to rate the lockheed engineers and steel workers of small arms manufacture, etc.
- We could measure VQ in lots of ways — e.g., by the count of people hurt, the severity of suffering, the degrees of causal separation between the violent act and the role behind it, etc.
- For each case, it seems we can always find a role further from the violence with higher VQ — a much greater hand in the violence — to the extent that we have old tropes contrasting the direct-but-limited violence of the simple-minded goon and the detached yet far-reaching avarice of the ruthless kingpin.
- So it’s true that working on a small piece of an incremental improvement to some military technology isn’t technically going to be easily traced to much bloodshed, comparatively.
B. But each of these observations correspond to a problem with the idea that the roles we choose don’t matter…
- While the principle of efficiency makes all of us morally culpable — again, because we drive the market onward by merely living in it — by the same token this machine tells us what it wants most, and does so quite unambiguously: by naming a price.
- Concretely, for any two roles considered, you can bet that whichever offers greater personal benefit is the choice that further maximizes overall productivity, accumulation of capital, and ultimately violence.
- This heuristic is mostly useless to the individual (since a strategy of deliberately minimizing personal benefit is like trying to use your body to slow a speeding train… you’ll only slow it down about one human’s-worth).
- But when many individuals coordinate to decommission machines like ours by agreeing to make small survivable sacrifices, they achieve collective action, which has halted many a train.
- What delays collective action, however, is choosing instead to look out for number one, to defect against the social contract.
- And that is the social problem OP describes. So one might then ask why is it a breach of the social contract?
- Ultimately it’s the symbolic value of the choice that’s so disappointing.
- It’s obviously not the “VQ” of your military-industrial job, how close to the violence you work, or any such utilitarian metric.
- It’s not even the individual intent. Most Americans still at least pay lip service to the individual “pursuit of happiness” idea.
- In the end, it’s simply that a person chose the money in spite of everyone’s misgivings about what these contractors represent and purvey in our world, because each defection, however minor, makes the victory of collective action feel just a bit further away than they once hoped.
deleted by creator
- It’s important to acknowledge that we all serve this machine in some capacity by our engagement with the free market. But why?
I agree: Everyone is terrible.
Plus you have deterrance weapons like the F22. It hasn’t actually killed anyone, because no one has challenged it. That sort of weapon can keep wars from starting, since they’re less likely to win.
Hooray for worthless planes that have never been used on our impoverished enemies! Build more bazillion dollar planes!!! smh.
Would you rather they be used? Best case scenario is that they prevent the battle from happening.
Not so sure about the deterrence argument. My point is just that defense industry firms are not particularly core to the problem of people murdering each other, and certainly not the workers therein, any more than farmers are guilty of feeding murderers if their client sells to a genocidal state.
There’s a big difference between making steel vs knowingly making weapons that are themselves illegal or being used in genocide.
knowingly making weapons that are themselves illegal
Beg pardon
or being used in genocide.
Of course, making other materials to support genocide is much more moral.
Anyone involved in the production of white phosphorus weapons, cluster bombs, or depleted uranium munitions are knowingly participating in a war crime. Everyone from the assembly line workers to the designers to the executives needs to be locked up.
Yes, there are other non-weapon items we also need to sanction Israel to prevent access to, such as bulldozers.
Anyone involved in the production of white phosphorus weapons, cluster bombs, or depleted uranium munitions are knowingly participating in a war crime. Everyone from the assembly line workers to the designers to the executives needs to be locked up.
WP is legal for use as an incendiary and smokescreen, cluster bombs are not banned by the US, DU is not illegal by any treaty I’m aware of.
Yes, there are other non-weapon items we also need to sanction Israel to prevent access to, such as bulldozers.
Nothing should be going into Israel from any civilized country, if we were actually discussing questions of morality and interaction through one’s labor for internationally trading firms.
Continuing to sell white phosphorus to those who have openly deployed it against civilians is an act so immoral, we should be rioting to bring these manufacturers in.
I mean, I agree that selling weapons to war criminals is horrific. But the manufacturers aren’t really at the heart of the problem so much as the US government. There are strict export laws regarding the defense industry. They aren’t exactly jumping to sell WP to Russia (statement may be subject to change considering the Trump administration). They’re acting in accordance with the desires of their biggest customer, the US government, which is currently (and has been for quite some time) supporting war criminals in Israel.
Ridiculous defense of immoral military contractors, and paired with Russiaphobia instead of mentioning the US allies actually deploying the white phosphorus on civilians. Classic astroturf.
Yeah, I think they’d argue for DU instead of against it. They’re not using that against people they’re using that against war machines.
There was controversy during the Gulf War about DU munitions from 20mm autocannons. 30 years of study has disproven some of the initial scares, but concerns remain about DU dust from such shells possibly being widely dispersed enough to cause health problems (though not radioactivity-related health problems).
Tank DU munitions are generally regarded as safe anymore, though.
OK, I guess we should stop harvesting wheat and making flour because it could possibly be used to support a genocide, but don’t even bother thinking about stopping the manufacture of the bombs being dropped.
Or maybe the problem isn’t “Weapons are being produced”, it’s “Authoritarian regimes are being traded with”.
Why not just murder people yourself directly? With a knife maybe? It’s pretty low on the list for what actually makes murdering happen. If you work for any company under capitalism, then they’re going to be collaborating with evil regimes and whatnot. You’re just enable the cogs. Why not be a useful cog for your masters?
Hell anybody selling lemonade is just feeding the troops of genocide. So you might as well just murder people yourself. It only makes sense.
\s duh… Seriously tho this post is beyond sociopathic brainwashing.
We’re all guilty and we should all go on strike
Defense contractor… Strike… I see what you did there
And which benevolent corporations IS acceptable to work for?
Maybe “work” is the actual problem. Maybe people shouldn’t waste their entire lives serving murder profiteers. Maybe it’s always been a garbage slaver system.
Of course it is, but I think it’s only marginally better than Walmart. I mean after all, Walmart IS a force for good in the world, right?
Working for Social media companies or health insurance companies isn’t any better as far as destroying the world and mass murdering people by proxy
I haven’t seen Lemmy destroy anything.
Idk, just one glimpse of the fediverse chick was enough to shatter my world.
Yeah but profiting off of starvation, homelessness or sickness is slightly less concerned with destroying human life efficiently, more so extracting value from suffering. Far harder to wiggle your way out of a bomb dropping on you. In that way, defense contractors are especially gross imo. I guess you could argue being blown apart may be more humane though idk
I’ve seen people die in the extract profit from suffering system. If I had to choose I’d choose the quicker option. I mean at the end of the day we’re all stuck in an unethical system of oppression.
With the amount of classified information that goes into weapons manufacturing, where your just making doo-dad#1, it’s understandable some people wouldn’t even know their doing something wrong.
Makes me think of the, “when does life begin” debate. When do random parts become a weapon of mass destruction?
I’m unable to get any info on what my grandpa did after leaving active duty and going to work for LM on government contracts. I have paperwork mentioning him, and it’s alllllllll still sharpied out almost 70 years later. Dude was a logistics engineer, he basically organized warehouses, yet apparently was so important to the nuclear sub program (Mare Island in the 50s & 60s tells me that much) apparently that I’m not allowed any further info
It’s entirely possible he didn’t know what he was working on, I only have guesses because of other shit we know from decades after his death
