hiring! at the war crimes factory
becca@drones.edu
Every couple of weeks I force my friends to play a game where we come up with increasingly ethically dubious jobs.
Copywriter @ halliburton
Social media manager @ a slaughterhouse
Outreach @ Blackwater
It hurts me to recount what has elapsed on Twitter in the past few days that makes this game relevant, but as it will be indecipherable for anyone who is not terminally online, I will do so. Reluctantly!!
Someone who has a lot of followers on Twitter named Ana Mardoll, famous for recently claiming it’s ableist to expect writers to read books, recently came under fire for … working at Lockheed Martin. Yes, the Lockheed Martin of weapons and war crimes. And this person Ana Mardoll who works at the war crime factory is the type of Twitter user who is normally out there privilege scolding objectively normal people, participating in the oppression hierarchy hunger games, and even asking followers for money because they claim to be too poor to eat. Obviously untrue, see: job @ Lockheed Martin. To make matters funnier, their job at Lockheed Martin was a nepotism hire through a parent. You can’t make these things up! If you want a more in depth explanation, well, you don’t, but if you must, I found one here.
It’s a perfect moment for the terminally online subset of people that I have come to know too well as my friends and comrades. We have been laughing for days. It’s a mark of how sick we are.
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But you bet your ass that whoever lived in a glass house and threw a stone didn’t go down without a fight. I guarantee They posted through it. Which is what happened here. Mardoll spent many tweets justifying their job and many other people (idiots, frankly) got involved and stated why they thought it was okay / not okay for someone to accept a job that has directly contributed to many people’s death via fucked up weapons.
It’s easy to justify our own decisions, but some people find it nearly impossible to apply those standards to others, which is how we get the oppression Olympics and at least 50% of fights on Twitter.
Luckily, it’s actually totally fine to laugh at someone who has managed to shoot themself in the foot in the most spectacular way possible. We don’t have many joys left, but we do have making fun of losers online.
I have this amazing tendency to black out whenever someone is trying to justify something to me. Like I literally just black out. If you ask me what they said and how they justified whatever somewhat immoral action, I’m like, idk. No idea. It’s not because I think it’s impossible to justify sketchy things, rather, I just think it’s pointless. Everyone is going to do what they are going to do. Most of the time the reason is very simple: people do things because they feel like it and they want their lives to be more enjoyable and nicer than they are. Fin!
For the most part, no one has to do anything. People make calculated decisions based on their circumstances. The tradeoff is, if you’re going to make ethically fraught decisions while being a hall monitor for others, you simply cannot expect that people won’t laugh when they find out you work for a weapons contractor. A WEAPONS CONTRACTOR. The game has come to life! And not for the first time! I saw a guy on tinder a few weeks ago who worked in ‘social impact’ at BlackRock. It was just there on his profile like it was working in comms at a hospital! Social impact! What is happening? And then here we are, living through a real-time discourse about whether or not it is chill to work at Lockheed Martin.
The only point that I consider to be worth taking seriously in this discourse is the criticism laid out in the two below tweets.
One of my favorite activities is to casually talk about how I don’t like Barack Obama. This is so normalized in my circles that I sometimes forget that many people still actually like Obama and think he was a good progressive. Once I was talking about this with a friend and mentioned, as one does, him droning weddings, and she said, “I think that’s probably just what he felt he had to do in the situation.” America is a land of contrasts, I.E., a land of so many people able to convince themselves that war crimes are ~just a part of life~
I reject this premise! It’s actually fine to question politicians doing heinous things because ‘they felt like they had to,’ or to question people working for missile companies.
Watching the way politicians gladhand each other while simultaneously making decisions that kill people worldwide should not become something that we just look at and turn away from, saying, oh, well, they’ve got to do what they got to do. Same with regular people working at objectively evil companies. We do not have to hand it to the neocons!
Normally I think that the idea of selling out or working for a questionable company is pretty much fine. Like, whatever. As someone with no job, I would at this point take MANY jobs, yes, perhaps at an organization with questionable values. Then again, you can’t live an unimpeachable existence, but you can put a modicum of effort into not doing things that actively aid and abet war crimes.
Honestly, I regret even my momentary lapse into having a real thought and opinion on this. It deserves no real thought. It is pure absurdity, and that is what we live for here. The perks of a moment like this are not to be ignored. We need our entertainment.