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- cross-posted to:
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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.
To be honest i think its one of these industries that should never be private. Why do we think it is a good idea to have people profit from war in such a direct way?
Because wherever there is a possibility to make massive amounts of money, those with power will push and push and push to be in control of it.
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.
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.
@[email protected] 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
I’m offended on behalf of myself. You are the reason I cannot reasonably assume humanity will die off in a meteor strike that allows nature time to heal.
But then it was a long shot anyway…
ALL ROCK LIVES MATTER!!!
AND MY STONE!
“planetary defense” usually means tracking and maybe deflecting asteroids that are likely to hit Earth.
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)
To add, “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” applies to your labor, as well. The phrase is meant to provide perspective, and shouldn’t be used as an excuse to do whatever.
I’m not particularly happy with everything the company I work for does. Especially the actions of the people at the top. But it’s not notably worse than any other Fortune 500.
Lockheed, though? It’s bad in a more fundamental way.
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?
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.
Same for me, except IT.
Its pretty much either work at The Base or Geek Squad. One of these options pays enough to leave the area.
Am getting a niche going for elderly centric IT help.
All we have is elderly here 🤷 take that over jarheads
Id take the jarheads tbh. They can usually follow instructions and admit it if they don’t know what they’re doing. Civil Engineers were always a fun tech support call, too.
Sounds like good honest work but i don’t think id have the patience for it long term
Fair.
I’m not the smartest tech person. Don’t really have a passion for it, but for whatever reason listening to an elderly prattle has never been draining. If I can turn airplane mode off for those fuckers and write them instructions on how to send an email I’ll take that over actually working lol
Nothing wrong with that; Social engineering is what i would consider an essential skill for customer support, and it can take people far in the field of IT.
Does it pay enough to ever be free one day?
I’ll let you know when I find out.
(Guessing no)
I know which one it isn’t!
Or, and hear me out, get a job and suck at it.
Found the Boeing recruiter!
“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 apoliticalcontext for those who need it:
Making 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.
Military technology has got a near unlimited budget, that means you get tons of cool and technically impressive toys and things to work with
I enjoy watching the breakdowns of the most advanced weaponry and stuff like jet fighters (that we have access to information about), nuclear armaments, and other stuff like that, because they are very very impressive from an engineering perspective
But, of course, I really do strongly hate them for existing in terms of their actual purpose. It would be much cooler for similar engineering feats to be in use for civilian purposes. But I can’t deny that they are amazing from a purely technical perspective
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
It should make you think about how your friend is in a brainwashed delusion.
Not quite, no. Not everyone works on the weapons.
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.
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.
Ah, you’re going to visit Hell, Michigan.
Sounds nice, where do i sign? :)
And which benevolent corporations IS acceptable to work for?
no ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc but… there are companies that don’t make a profit by murdering middle eastern people
That number is shrinking alarmingly fast
I think it’s picking nits, economic destruction can be just as complete as military. People starve all over the world every day. Some people live in slavery to make the shirts Walmart sells, etc.
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.
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.
Which is why they gotta sell all those patriot systems to smaller countries without established military industries.
Buy this gun unless you wanna find out what I do when you don’t.
Pretty sure most countries use their defense budgets to steal the shit out of the population.
2% defense budget is nothing though.
2% of the GPD of a country is a lot when there’s secret budgets without any oversight.
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.
I mean yes there is a sort of “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” dilemma when it comes to working. But just with that dilemma, you don’t just give up, you try to minimize your participation as much as you can healthily do. And I think not working for a corp who’s sole purpose is to develop weapons for killing people is one of those no brainers.
Communists make weapons too tho. It’s kind of a whole cycle.
One, the issue isn’t the production of weapons in of itself. Weapons are used for defense, survival, and recreation which are (in my opinion) ethical. The issue is “defense” contractors like Lockheed are not producing weapons to defend against exploitation, oppression, etc. They are produced for imperialist powers to defend the interests of exploitors, oppressors, and war mongers.
Secondly, I am an anarchist. Statist “communists” are often no better than capitalists to me.
They are produced for imperialist powers to defend the interests of exploitors, oppressors, and war mongers.
And also to oppose the interests of exploiters, oppressors, and warmongers.
From causes as good as anarchists in Rojava to as evil as fascists in Israel.
If you think USA gives a shit at all about Rojava, then I have bad news for you. (oil)
It might be a no-brainer if it was all “We are making orphan crushers for the orphans”, but the defense industry is much more complex than that. For example, would you say that a Ukrainian working for a Ukrainian defense firm, whose sole purpose is to develop weapons for killing people, is evil?
I do think there is nuance to the situation and exceptions. Your example being one. But I would consider Lockheed (the example of the original post) would be the no brainer one. Those weapons aren’t going to defending my family from an imperialist power, they are going to death squads in South America and committing genocide in Palestine.
I do think there is nuance to the situation and exceptions. Your example being one. But I would consider Lockheed (the example of the original post) would be the no brainer one. Those weapons aren’t going to defending my family from an imperialist power, they are going to death squads in South America and committing genocide in Palestine.
But Lockheed-Martin’s equipment is going to Ukraine as well. Are the families of Ukrainians not worth defending? And ‘death squads’ in South America are not particularly likely to be using state-of-the-art US jets and missiles for their murders. And considering the state of things in Taiwan and Europe, if the US doesn’t end up on the side of the imperialist powers, I don’t know how much I would bet that Lockheed-Martin weapons won’t be defending other families from imperialist powers in the near the future,
Considering the strict controls on defense exports, it is far more relevant to question who the US government chooses (directly or indirectly) to support with Lockheed-Martin’s output. When the US is against genocide, as in Ukraine, Lockheed-Martin’s output is used to save innocent lives; when the US is for genocide, as in Palestine, Lockheed-Martin’s output is used for murder. Though even then I would note that it’s not particularly pivotal to the murders committed.
The correct target for ire in this, other than perhaps capitalism in general for creating a significant disconnect between social responsibility and firms of all industries, is the US government and where it funnels this equipment. The firms themselves are amoral but unexceptional, both in consequences and in nature; and the people who work at them (other than at the highest decision-making levels) are no more immoral than any other cog in the capitalist machine.
With Lockheed you are forced to choose between being complacent with it because they supply Ukraine’s defense against occupation by an imperialist power or outright oppose it due to its supplying towards the Palestinian genocide. The genocide is a dealbreaker in any capacity for me. Even ignoring the genocide, the bad outweighs the good to me by a longshot. I oppose it just like how I oppose McDonald’s, Amazon, Starbucks, and more.
With Lockheed you are forced to choose between being complacent with it because they supply Ukraine’s defense against occupation by an imperialist power or outright oppose it due to its supplying towards the Palestinian genocide. The genocide is a dealbreaker in any capacity for me.
But then, is that not just enabling one genocide in exchange for another? Palestinian genocide is a dealbreaker, but Ukrainian genocide is an acceptable price to pay? (I’m not actually accusing you of accepting Ukrainian genocide for not supporting Lockheed-Martin - honestly, fuck Lockheed-Martin as a company - just highlighting that the argument necessitates accepting utilitarian consequences that run contrary to the anti-genocidal goal of the principled stand)
My point, though, is more that Lockheed-Martin is more than a no-brainer. There is consideration to be had. These firms are amoral, but that means that they are capable of enabling good as well as enabling evil.
If your choice is designing tractors, which will be sold to farmers recovering from a genocidal civil war in Sudan as well as genocidal colonists in Israel to consolidate their land gains and draw a profit with which to imperialize more, or designing warplanes, which will be sold to those resisting genocide in Ukraine as well as those perpetuating genocide in Israel, which is the moral choice? I don’t think it’s a no-brainer to say that the weaponry is the more immoral of the two. I’d say that the core immorality is selling to the genocidaires at all - which would not be specific to either industry.
And the core of the objection is against the idea in the meme that people who work at these firms as engineers are in some way more immoral than the rest of us working for soulless genocide-enabling corporations that provide the tools and funding for genocide.
Even ignoring the genocide, the bad outweighs the good to me by a longshot. I oppose it just like how I oppose McDonald’s, Amazon, Starbucks, and more.
I mean, I wouldn’t argue with that. But I also wouldn’t put much moral weight on whether someone chose to work at one of those places in anything but a pretty high executive capacity.
The reason why I put Palestine over Ukraine is because Palestine is a genocide right now, while Ukraine isn’t. Ukraine is two capitalist states fighting.
I do still also think working for a defense contractor like Lockheed is wrong as working for them is far more direct of a hand in death than most other jobs. And I wouldn’t say they are immoral, they are chasing money (which in of itself is immoral) and chose to do it through profitting off of war. They may do good sometimes but it is not out of the goodness of their hearts, its to profit off of killing each other. And just as I do with elections, if the game is pick a lesser evil I will not play.
And with the McDonald’s et al yeah I wouldn’t shame those working there, I lost track of my point. Was just trying to say I take action to oppose them, just like I would with Lockheed if I could (I don’t live near one and I cant buy their stuff to begin with lol).
I won’t deny its more complicated than I gave it credit for, but I think Lockheed is indefensible of a corporation. Working for them is a deal with the devil. There are reasons why I wouldn’t shame someone for working there, but they are exceptions and not the rule.
The problem of manufacturing weapons would be significantly less controversial of LM (for ex) had even a few scruples.
Defending yourself is fine.
Making tools to defend yourself is fine
Making tools for people to defend themselves is fineMaking and selling those tools for use in attacking is not fine.
Profiteering from harm is not fine.\This person really thinks that the USA is ending genocide in ukraine. wow.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-trump-war-zelenskyy-putin-7fe8c0c80b4e93e3bc079c621a44e8bb
But Lockheed-Martin’s equipment is going to Ukraine as well.
Yes the MIC fuels war and death everywhere. They’re profiteers, not heroes. Do you celebrate the weapons sold to russia as well? It’s all the same capitalists profiting.
When the US is against genocide, as in Ukraine,
The USA is not against genocide in Ukraine. Imperialism is a direct cause of the genocide. Grow up.
The firms themselves are amoral
jfc. Is Elmo amoral? Is Bezos amoral? And you think the MIC is somehow amoral? How much corporate propaganda have you been drinking?
We are making orphan crushers for the orphans
What do you think the MIC does?
would you say that a Ukrainian
I don’t live in Ukraine. Is that how far you have to go from USA to justify this BS?
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”.
I’ll go even farther. Have you voted in the last 50 years? Guess what you help elect the president and chief commanding death at the end of the bayonet and the from the top of the drones.
And if you haven’t voted (but been able to), you are likewise guilty for allowing the candidate who became president and CiC to commit their crimes (instead of the crimes the other candidate would have committed).
The only way forward is to improve society as a whole.
Hmm if all the candidates will both be responsible for killing people, are the people who didn’t vote responsible? Technically the only innocent people would be the ones who stop the candidates from being elected. but I’ll drink to improving society as a whole.
Hmm if all the candidates will both be responsible for killing people, are the people who didn’t vote responsible?
You’ll be responsible for different sets of people being killed.
There’s no option for innocence, as much as folk wish there was.
Kill the killers is the best option until we gaze to long and deep into the abyss…
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
