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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
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
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.
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…
B. But each of these observations correspond to a problem with the idea that the roles we choose don’t matter…
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.
If less people worked to make weapons, there would be less weapons made.
How is this a hard concept to understand?
I don’t work for a defence contractor, but i’ll probably be going to hell anyway since I picked up making/racing drones as a hobby specifically so i have some way of raising hell if my country is ever invaded.
At MIT in the 1980's it was called, "Get your fingerprints on the murder weapon."
If I worked for a defence contractor, I would make the most accurate weapons in the world. Why? Because when the people who fired those weapons are up in court and they go "Oh well I didn't MEAN to hit that hospital, the bomb just didn't hit its intended target", the prosecutor can go "Nonsense! Those are the most accurate weapons in the world. They ONLY hit what you intended to hit with as much force as you wanted to hit it with!".
The weapons are gonna get built, I'd rather there be no ambiguity in how they get used. It's not like WW2 where Bomber Command was like "Here's the dockyards we want to blow up, and a bajillion tonnes of bombs to blow it up with", and then the bombers flatten half a city just trying to hit the docks and miss every single time because it's cloudy, or hit an entirely different city because they got lost on the way!. You only have to look at Russia's "throw enough artillery shells at the area until it's completely flat" approach to war to know what happens when you haven't got precision munitions, or not enough of them.
Catching General Dynamics strays
Search for Veridian dynamics commercials from Better Off Ted
Got offered interviews at Raytheon and Lockheed once. Said no immediately. Can't have a good conscience working for these companies.