It would’ve been better if you cropped out the useless comment
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.
We’re all guilty and we should all go on strike
Defense contractor… Strike… I see what you did there
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.
there is a misunderstanding of the MIC, they profit of weapons, not death. they dont like war, it means instability, supplychains get stressed and stuff gets expansive, asswell as their stuff gets destroyed and may shows ineffective. they like the idea of war. they want country A and B have and armsrace and get the expansive fancy stuff but never fire at each other. nor every corpo is vault tec.
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.
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
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.
I’d say depends on which one and what lobby work they have done. If it is from the US or Russia, it is probably a big no-no.
If it is a European or South American defense contractor or weapons manufacturer, it varies.
I completely lost respect for an intern when I found out he was going to a weapons company next.
damn it’s true
Not all countries are the USA btw. Most countries use their defense budget to actually defend themselves from external very real threats.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if you look at the actual reality of what happens, those bombs are still used to kill civilians with no repercussions.
Bombs are going to be used to kill civilians anyway. Would you rather their deaths be intentional or accidental? Either way a bomb is going to go off, the best you can do is ensure the bomb hits where the person dropping it intended. That way, if it’s a civilian, the person dropping the bomb has no deniability because they hit exactly what they intended to hit.
Nah. I just won’t help bomb civilians at all. I can’t always control whether others help bomb civilians, but I can always control whether I help bomb civilians. Civilian deaths are 99% intentional. They are decided before the bomb is deployed. You will make the bombs knowing they will be used immorally.
Not always immorally. Sometimes they kill Russians (soldiers).
The education system functions to indoctrinate, privilege, and filter.
If there’s one thing that I learned from grad school, it’s that talented people will be made dependent and subservient to death and doom for money… But more importantly because that’s the social system they’ve been funneled into. They don’t see any alternatives.
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.
Would it be like a spectrum with weapons being a cardinal sin, and cotton swabs and morphine a thing you can only do on lent? Would weapon makers be in a lower circle, logistics in the middle, and those on the periphery of the military apparatus go to purgatory?
