Thread by @AlexandraErin

If we talk about abolishing, say, the health insurance industry, I want a plan that takes care of the people who would be out of work; my preferred solution is UBI and a social safety net so if any company goes under or any whole industry becomes obsolete it's not a big deal.

But if I found a magic ring containing the Overly Specialized Cosmic Wish-Granting Entity who can only grant the wish of abolishing the US military-industrial complex overnight... I mean, I'd ask for information about what that means. But if there's no monkey's paw in it, I'm in.

Because the harm done... lives lost, homes destroyed, countries transformed into both actual open warzones and hellish nightmare pseudo-warzones where drones buzz around raining missiles and people who don't die just live their lives... outweighs the x-factors.

I don't think anyone should work for Lockheed Martin. I don't think there should be a Lockheed Martin to work for. In another, better earth where the "space race" wasn't about gaining the ultimate high ground in a fight between nuclear-armed imperial powers, it would be fine.

But we live in a world where "the aerospace industry" means weapons systems. And the fact that someone here grow up with an interest in aerospace engineering and join an aerospace company to work on aerospace things and then be surprised when told they'll be working on weapons..

...is a sign of how sanitized our perspective has been, how removed we are from warfare, how... the word I'm going to use here is "remote", in the sense of the concerns of other people being remote, but it also emphasizes what I find uniquely pernicious about drone warfare.

There are people on this site right now posting about family members who went into aerospace engineering and got a job at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon and then quit when it was clear that not working on weapons wasn't an option.

And there are people on this site replying to them, "What did they expect? Surely they knew what they were signing up for."

But on that other, better earth, "aerospace engineering for the aerospace industry" means exploration and travel, not death and destruction.

And it took a lot of years of messaging and propaganda and carefully constructing blinkered points of view to get us to a world where "aerospace engineering for the aerospace industry" means "finding more devastating and effective ways to kill from greater distances".

People are replying to this thread, earnest people I don't have any argument with, to say it would be dangerously irresponsible to magically wish away the US military-industrial complex because Russia and other hostile actors.

To be clear, I don't have a wishing ring of any kind

In the impossible hypothetical situation where I decide if it stays or goes away and those are my only two options... I would wish it away. Knowing there would be consequences, both obvious ones and ones nobody could imagine.

But that's not going to happen.

And maybe it would be the wrong decision and no maybe, I am not the best person or even one of the right people to be chosen to make that decision.

But I know what my decision would be, because when I'm overwhelmed by the world I imagine what I would do if I could change it.

If I could shut down the US war machine by wishing it, I would. This viewpoint is naive. Other people would choose to keep it around as long as it's needed. This viewpoint is also naive. And others believe it will always be needed. This viewpoint is also naive.

The person whose offensive existence as a fat, disabled, opinionated trans person touched off this discourse wasn't a weapon systems engineer. I don't know what he does for Lockheed Martin. I have no argument with people who say making coffee for the receptionists is inexcusable.

And I'm leery of any defense of Lockheed Martin as a company or their employees that hinges on the idea that LM's existence is somehow benign or neutral in comparison to the murderous internet harassment mill because the harassment mill is openly sadistic in a way LM isn't.

If I had that specific magic wishing ring... Ana Mardoll would be out of a job, along with a lot of other people just trying to get by in a capitalist imperialist white supremacist power that shoots something they chose to call "Hellfire" at the people of other countries.

The people who manage software licenses, the people who make coffee, the people who clean the bathrooms in the facilities... would all be looking for jobs along with the people who make the weapons.

And I reiterate that if it was an either/or choice left up to me, I would do it. I'm not saying "Before you condemn the companies that make Remote Forever Warfare both possible and, to the government, necessary, think of all the custodians you'd put out of work."

My point here is twofold:

One, you can think that Lockheed Martin is inexecusable and also think that sacrificing a random peon who is an autistic trans person to the fuzzy flightless fruit farm is inexcusable.

As my tweet last night implied... I mean, Lockheed Martin itself has something like a dozen verified Twitter accounts. There are assuredly people on here who proudly display their affiliation with it, and Raytheon, and other similar defense contractors.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1553934585876152321

The speed at which so many people across the entire breadth Twitternet pivoted to the idea that you can't work for Lockheed Martin and expect to just exist on Twitter, the very moment it could be applied to someone they already didn't want to exist on Twitter... it's breathtaking

If US society as a whole moved in the direction that any work for Lockheed Martin was inexcusable, I would not shed any tears. I'd see it as a positive step, the way I view any lessening of public copaganda as a positive step.

But this backlash is limited to a single person and is not doing anything to weaken or even effect the military-industrial complex, and it's also causing the people who have gamified suicide to express glee at how it worked beyond their worst wildest dreams.

Oh, I said my point was twofold, which means I should probably get to my second point.

We don't have magic wishing rings. If we want to kill the beast, the best way would be starving it. We could starve it of essential labor so much more easily if we had that UBI and safety net.

Just as the military wing of the military-industrial complex gets more living bodies to throw stuff (up to and including themselves) at other living bodies by leveraging poverty and desperation, the industrial wing could not exist without the US's desperation-based economy.

We are all better of when we are all better off.

If every single person knew their basic needs would be assured even if they did not work for the evil company, more people would choose not to work for evil companies. For any kind and any amount of evil.

This might incentivize more companies to be less evil.

It would also leave more people free to take a chance on starting their own smaller companies that have not succumbed to the temptation to increase profit via decreasing decency.

This is not a thread that is going to end on a strong point that is clearly articulated. I have no actual solutions, merely descriptions of problems that I see. In real life there aren't magic wands or wishing rings.

When I said upthread that when I'm overwhelmed by the world I imagine what I would do if I magically had the power to change things. I'm not advocating this as a coping mechanism or other practice. It's a maladaptive behavior that has at times deeply threatened my well-being.

But from where I'm sitting... which is a place of relative protection and privilege on the global stage while being highly precarious and unsafe at a more local and personal one... we can only make the world better by making the world better.

The politics of resentment and fear, the practice of feeling better about our lives and our powerlessness by finding someone we can be convinced deserves it and then grinding them into nothing... these things aren't going to end our never-ending bombing sprees.

A politic and civic philosophy that is based around people getting what's coming to them and the corollary of making sure nobody gets away with anything or has anything they don't deserve is reactionary and it creates an environment in which the reactionaries will always win.

What I said in the first thread about wanting UBI and a social safety net so we don't have to worry about what happens to all the people employed by private insurers... also applies to coal miners. Commercial fisheries. And aerospace engineers.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1554205847168991234

Making the world better for everybody makes the world better for everybody. Google "curb cut effect" (or possibly "kerb kout eghect", depending on where you are) for more discussion of this.

And I'm not good at wrapping up threads unless they started with the idea of a punchline, which this one didn't, so I'm just going to sign it off here.