Submitted 21 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/a79b9b64-f5a7-452c-a647-72ba9494b2ce.jpeg
Hey! Thanks bro. I’ll be nice and cool by my pond. Im Canadian and I was working for a US defence contractor. I was in their industrial sector and worked in Europe, never touched a defence product and wouldn’t be allowed to. But every time the quarterly numbers came out and number went up. I couldn’t help but feel responsible for steering them profits.
I’m unemployed and the happiest I’ve ever been
Do you ever imagine your pond is colored red, symbolizing the blood of millions of innocent lives taken by your industry?
Do you wonder how many of your industry’s victims dreamed of having a nice, quiet, peaceful life by a pond?
The aerial work platform industry? Yeah I mean people do die working at height, I was there actually to help specifically prevent that, as I was a product safety engineer.
So yeah sometimes I think about the people who went home to their families at the end of the day because of that.
I literally said I wasn’t in the defence division, never touched a defence product, and literally didn’t even work in North America.
Then I told you I quit my job because I couldn’t do it anymore.
And you’re gonna come here and give me a bunch of shit for it?
I don’t even have to guess, you’re pretty obviously a rabid leftist. Which is fine, I am too. But don’t you think it’s funny how I know that just because of how absolutely fucking unhinged your comment was
Sadly the job security in weapon manufacturer is pretty good. Least it was when I worked in one 15 years back. Pay was shite though.
My university is practically owned by weapons manufacturers which sucks. Idk if that’s the norm or not
Tools don’t kill. It’s the ones wielding the tools that do.
A black home bomb is harmless until someone uses it to wipe out an entire solar system.
Yeah, but we all know what those bombs do, so many don’t participate in building them.
I dunno. I would love to make things go boom.
Fire is cool af. It’s our signature weapon.
But you are fully aware who’s wielding the tools you build…
Ok, Mr. Hitler, I’ll give you this truckload of bombs, but you have to pinky promise that you won’t drop them on Britain.
Dangit, he dropped them on Britain, didn’t he? Oh well, not my fault. Guess I’ll go get him another truckload of bombs, he’ll be needing them now.
-The average day of a Lockheed Martin employee
I don’t work for them because I chose not to, but honestly, work for them, don’t work for them, it’s not like they’ll lack for employees. If you write that line of code that eventually blows up a hospital or someone else does, it will still happen. You’re not going to stop them by turning down job offers. You’re going to need to change politics.
This argument is deeply flawed, and I’ve heard engineers working on arms projects using it to justify what they’re doing. That, and the “I just build it, it’s not me pulling the trigger” are trotted out to soothe dying moral consciences all the time. There are far too many bright minds being used to create death and suffering.
The fact that by partaking in this industry, you form a critical part of the decision and event chain that leads to bad people killing innocent people is important, morally, and completely unchanged by whether it not someone else will do it. So it does matter if you turn that job down, and not just for your own conscience.
If enough people turn down these jobs then that will change politics. And those that do choose to take them need to face up to their responsibility in enabling and perpetuating horror.
I think the issue is that there are people for whom it is necessary and proper to use military violence against, and when you don’t continually invest in it, you find yourself subject to those who have (see: Europe vs Russia and/or the US).
Further the decision and event chain that you mention has been used just as frequently by the US military to head-off and prevent escalation of violence.
As I pointed out elsewhere, putting psychopaths in charge can make most things dangerous. The Trump administration is currently weaponizing financial fraud against all of us so the billionaires can feast on the remnants of the middle class. Now obviously, military tools are made to be dangerous, which is not in line with a pacifist morality. But most people aren’t pacifists, and sociopath leaders will always find a cornucopia of tools to murder their opposition.
deeply flawed
Direct me to the flaw.
Will someone passing them up make ANY difference to what they’re doing?
It will still happen is a bit of a fallacy. It’s one less person doing that job but I agree that one person won’t make a meaningful change
However the thing that changes is that if you reject that job you reduced by 100% your direct contribution to people killing missiles. Someone else will design that missile but at least you won’t have to live with the guilt that you did
Now, if it’s between that and a much worse life, I won’t blame anyone. But it’s a choice that everyone has to make for themselves. Personally I have possibility to reject those offers, and so I do.
I totally agree, not taking the job can mean a HUGE thing to you. It just won’t affect the company whatsoever.
I don’t do it because I don’t like it. I worked for DOD years ago, on non-dangerous stuff but it wasn’t something I wanted to personally support.
They aren’t immune to supply and demand, the job market is the agreegate of us all deciding what we will put up with to stay alive.
I’ll be honest, I’d rather the best engineers be there to create weapons that are extremely precise. The weapons are gonna be made regardless, but I’ve seen photos of what happens to cities when bombers are dropping unguided munitions. Back during WW2, if you wanted to hit a factory in London, you didn’t just drop 1-2 bombs, you dropped hundreds of bombs, you flattened absolutely everything in the area because that was the only way you were gonna hit your target.
At least with precision munitions, if you’re doing war ‘nicely’, you only hit what you intend to hit, not your target + everything else even remotely close to said target. With precision munitions, you can’t ‘accidentally’ bomb a hospital, so when you inevitably do bomb a hospital, you don’t get to go “Oh oops no it’s not my fault it’s the bombs’ fault!”. The sights are crystal clear, the plane/drone moves exactly where you want it to, there’s nothing interfering with the guidance, the bomb locked onto the target you wanted to hit, and you dropped it, all thanks to engineers making those systems. You had everything going for you as a bomber to know exactly what that target was, and you dropped the bomb anyway.
I don’t think, specially with current events unfolding before our eyes, of war as a precise thing.
We have precise enough weapons already.
Israel’s primary weapon is starvation via blockade. Yea, it’s not very precise.
Points israel
Yeah, and Israel can’t pretend they aren’t choosing to bomb hospitals. It’s almost never “Oops we didn’t intend to do that”, it’s “Well there was a Hamas bunker under that. They were using those playing children as sandbags, we simply had to blast through them!”
That’s why I design targets.
Sounds like something an architect would say…
Shame
Shame
Shame
I just wanted to build scientific instruments on satellites. Sucks when the company you worked at for 18 years gets sold to an arms dealer.
BootLoop@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
No