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Comment by djrobstep | Hacker News Reader

It's not only not curing cancer or solving poverty, it's killing people.

This is a flamewar comment, which makes it bad for HN regardless of anyone's politics. But you particularly have no right to do this in the context of a personal blog post by someone whose intention to improve society could hardly be clearer.

Large institutions are complex, neither completely good nor completely evil. I don't think that's too much to ask users of an internet forum intended for intellectually substantive discourse to understand.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927587 and marked it off-topic.

Excuse me Dang, what would you expect from a brief blog post linking healthcare to pentagon?

What I described in the first two paragraphs there.

> This is a flamewar comment, which makes it bad for HN regardless of anyone's politics. But you particularly have no right to do this in the context of a personal blog post by someone whose intention to improve society could hardly be clearer.

> Large institutions are complex, neither completely good nor completely evil. I don't think that's too much to ask users of an internet forum intended for intellectually substantive discourse to understand.

Except you did not intellectually substantiated anything, but your own/company's opinions.

Nor it makes sense for you or anybody else to arbitrarily mark the parent as a flamewar comment.

You are very free to have and express your own opinions, you should others have and express their own, though.

I'm a moderator here, so it's my job to set these expectations. That inevitably involves judgment calls, a.k.a. opinions. I'd say the lines we draw are far from arbitrary, but of course I'm biased.

While your former is true your latter is just horribly false. I worked in the DoD space for many years and the overwhelming amount of work you're most likely to do doesn't involve killing people even indirectly. More likely you're working on systems to go keep our people safe.

For example I worked on software that helped soldiers look at patterns of IED placements to hopefully help them figure out where others were. I wouldn't consider what I worked on even indirectly supporting any type of killing but helping out people stay safer.

I worked for the Russian military many years, and I believe Matt could do even more good for more people by using his talents in the Russian military. There is so much need there in software systems and support. It would make a great difference if there were more such volunteers. Like your experiences I agree that most of efforts were working on systems to go keep our people safe. It's nothing that involve killing people even indirectly....

But no matter Russia/US it all for a good cause - congratulations

Ultimately, though, aren't you helping soldiers stay safer so they can continue to kill others? I'm not saying that in a judgmental way, but that is the reality of war and military-related work.

This is incredibly tone deaf. I'm not sure why every thread about the DoD on Hacker News always ends up with the most extreme comments that lead to: "even if you're sending cards to the soldiers you're lifting their spirits to kill more people therefore you should feel bad about yourself".

I get it. You hate war. Most people hate war, even the soldiers in our army hate it. You want change? Vote and get outside and protest. Don't shit on a DoD contractor while sitting there doing nothing.

Real change requires real effort.

I mean, I'm doing something. I have a job that doesn't involve working for the DoD.

I understand the need for people to have jobs. I'm not unhappy about individual soldiers, individual cops, individual TSA workers deciding that's how they want to get employment. (I'm sort of unhappy at society-as-a-whole for making the military such a good career decision for many people, but the fact remains that it is a good career decision, and I won't begrudge that.) I'm not unhappy about you, because I have no idea what your job is or what your life is like. But this article is about a person who had an extremely good job at Google deciding that he wasn't doing enough for the world and that he could make the world a better place by working for the DoD. He could have stayed at Google; he could have even worked for the USDS for any of the non-war functions of government, if he really wanted to. I think that's fair to criticize.

How Ayn Rand do you want to go? By the same logic working for a company that pays taxes that supports the military is also helping things along. Best to withdraw entirely the efforts of your labour from the machine?

How taxes support the military is decided by lawmakers. We vote candidates based on their programs. If a candidate promised to lower contributions to defense, (s)he'd have my vote. You can have labour that doesn't feed the military.

My logic included an explicit allowance for those people whose best career decision is to work for the military (or for the police, or the TSA, or whatever). I don't expect a general strike, no matter how much I want the workers of the world to lose their chains.

So the same logic would be okay with people where all reasonable career decisions require working for a company that pays taxes to the military, and both Matt Cutts and I seem to be in that situation. But I think we're both in the situation where we have plenty of reasonable options other than working for the military directly. And it specifically sounds like he took an option that is worse for him personally, because he thinks it's better for the world. I disagree it's better for the world, simple as that.

(Whether this logic would forbid working for companies that support the military indirectly is an interesting question, and I think 'BinaryIdiot has convinced me that it should.)

You're technically correct. If we subscribe to a morality based on causal links of one's actions, then you'd partially responsible for the actions of your government, when paying any taxes to them. If they're involved in a war, so are you.

However, even in "peaceful" countries you'd have a hard time avoiding that, as most of them have some sort of mandatory pensions system, who in turn most likely fund arms production, which will then sometimes be sold to be used for war.

It's not as if Google doesn't do work on behalf of the State Department and Department of Defense to begin with. Let's not split hairs here - by your rationale Matt Cutts was already tangentially involved in helping the US government kill people while at Google.

And those IEDs they have to deal with were placed someplace because the actions of the military are mainly peaceful and only reactionary violent and the reason they are in a place fighting another military group is not caused by past and current interventions of the over-funded military? I totally get that the individuals making up the forces deserve all the safety they can get, but that doesn't change the fact why they are deployed in the first place.

Yes let's shit on the DoD contractor who worked on software that no one in combat directly used that helped them look at historical events because you disagree with congressional decisions.

I don't know what you expect your comment to accomplish here but it's incredibly tone deaf.

Aiding the work of a misguided organization that's primarily used for causing misery in the world, regardless of what tiny piece of the puzzle you've contributed, makes you on some level accountable, if you consider that it's not one's sole option of income. It's not much different from helping violent criminals by hiding them, and most of us would agree you cannot expect immunity if you do that, but somehow we make an exception for the military because of their general proclaimed mission and totally ignore how they're deployed most of the time. In that sense it's good we get more drones, as it reduces the need for on-site forces and makes it clearer what many military tasks actually are.

That said, there are certainly peaceful tasks the military is responsible for, and we can make exception for those, like handling natural disasters, providing logistics for weather research, etc., but let's not kid ourselves, the military didn't grant the invention of the Internet for connecting the world population.

I'm taken aback by this comment. This is such an out of touch extreme. You would probably do well with getting some exposure to the DoD because you're dragging in an absolute ton of issues unrelated to the conversation.

Regardless are you willing to do the same? Just as millions are employed through the various agencies of the DoD through contracting it'sthe same with the large technology companies. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many others are actively DoD contractors. So they're making money in the exact same way and yet I never hear people telling them to stop or quit .

So are you going to continue using Google, Microsoft and Amazon knowing they actively work on DoD projects and profit off of them?

The difference lies in directly and voluntarily working for such an org vs doing general work they also happen to have a use for. I get your argument, but it's odd that we make an exception for government orgs while we don't for, say, a doctor that willingly aids criminal orgs (for profit) with underground medical services. Who decides which partially violent organization is the one that gets a pass? I certainly cannot, so to me there's no difference in working for the mob or working for the military, when most military conflicts, which are events requiring the help of all kinds of professionals, are caused by irresponsible policies.

If you don't happen to live in a region where the military is the sole employer, and therefore you have the option to not work for them, and you're also concerned by the conflict of their actions vs proclaimed mission, then what justification is there to work for them directly?

What it boils down to, if I were at Red Hat, and I got presented a project to work directly with and for the military, I would kindly decline. But I would still work on Fedora and/or RHEL because those aren't exclusively for the military.

You can work for an arms producer on automatic assault rifles, but then you cannot reasonably expect me to believe you're under the impression that the products you build are purely for hunting and sports. Then there are arms which you can work on that are unlikely to be used by the military and primarily for hunting/sports, and assuming hunting is for controlling wildlife population, it's understandable why it's morally acceptable.

The original thread here was about Matt Cutts and his decision to work for the DoD, not about you.

You offered your work experience as a specific example of how you could work for the DoD without being involved in killing people. I think there's no good way to discuss the validity of that example without being a bit callous, since it involves a) your personal work b) discussions about killing people c) politics, but I think the commenters here handled it appropriately. I certainly think it would have been worse for the discussion for it to go unchallenged.

I disagree. I don't think people realize that the various militaries deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan actively clear IEDs from civilian neighborhoods that hurt and kill civilians. They are not always placed for military attack but many times insurgents attack civilians with them.

The commenters are largely tone deaf in this arena. They never call out any large technology companies for doing the exact same thing. Google and others actively work on the same projects. They are all DoD contractors. HN seems to think anyone involved in the DoD complex is accountable to some degree for military action then completely ignore all of the west coast companies involved in the exact same thing.

Then I'd like to clarify that I'm also objecting quite strongly to all companies contracting to support the US military's ability to wage illegal wars. I do think there's a fair portion of HN that is loudly unhappy about, say, Palantir. I would never work for them, although I'm not as loud about it. I think you're right that I should also never work for Google.

(Also, war is messy. I know that the insurgents also kill civilians, and I'm certainly not supporting them any more than I support the US military. I'm advocating pacifism, and if you want to say "well, pacifism doesn't work because other people want to wage war", sure, that's a debate approximately as old as the idea of pacifism itself.)

Eh, what do you think the military is doing when they run into IEDs? The reasons to remove IEDs is of course to grant yourself movement to fight the enemy.

the overwhelming amount of work you're most likely to do doesn't involve killing people

I'm sure that's not what you meant, but this sounds like damning with faint praise :)

>the overwhelming amount of work you're most likely to do doesn't involve killing people even indirectly

Precisely no part of my current job involves killing people. I think I'll stick with my job.

Are you aware of the primary purpose of the Department of DEFENSE?

It merged the Department of the Navy into the Department of War, because separating the Army and the Navy was inefficient. (And it was briefly called the National Military Establishment.) Let's not buy into these politically-correct renamings; it's still the department of war.

Yeah what do I know anyways? I just work there, I'm sure your google search lends you more clarity as to what they're doing than my day-after-day exposure.

Cool.

Frankly, you're the one that emphasized the name as if it meant anything; maybe you should have left out that argument and made the case based on your personal experience instead.

There is no argument. What the department is or is not doing is not up for argument. Objective reality doesn't change just because the dept used to have a different name, that's stupid.

I work with dozens of peaceful, bright people, on projects that are responsible for keeping people safe without violence or conflict or any nonsense like that. Many of the people whom I work with wouldn't swat a fly, so I don't really concern myself with the thoughts of people who have no clue what they're talking about, like commenters on HN who google "depart of defense not really about defense???" and then think they've stumped me. Honestly.

Objective reality doesn't change just because the dept used to have a different name, that's stupid.

Exactly. Then why did you bring the name up? Nobody was even talking about the name before you posted; seems rather silly to complain about people discussing it now.

Shrugger, I think we are aware that DoD is too big to only have one objective. My aunt, anecdotally, had a long career in cybersecurity with DoD. I still posted the comment about the old name because the DoD engages in expensive and unnecessary wars which use such a significant percentage of DoD's resources. Using the name "Defense" to interpret the department's actions decreases understanding of it.

I actually think that working someplace gives you less insight as to what the place does, because there's a strong psychological desire to believe that you're doing something good for the world. (I've had this happen to me a couple of times before. My previous employer didn't even do anything evil, just enabled IT departments to do certain things, but I suddenly realized when they collapsed that everyone's better off if IT departments can't do those things.)

It was called the War Department between 1789 and 1949. Ironically, during that time, the US engaged in fewer foreign wars than after adopting the "Defense" misnomer.

And without it, lots of people around the world would not have the freedom to make a comment like yours.

Oh the irony.

Which people exactly?

south koreans

all those who were liberated in Operation Freedom obviously. All those who now live life of a zen like peace due to Operation Enduring Peace

Reminds me of the clip of the Us Marine pointing a gun in the face of unarmed protesters screaming "GET BACK WE ARE HERE FOR YOUR MOTHERFUCKING FREEDOM"...... yeah right mate, you just keep telling yourself that.

As though America is the only meaningful nation advocating for freedom in the world; or that Americans are themselves living lives of liberty, free from the shackles of systemic oppression.

The post and all comments were in the context of America. That does not in any way what so ever imply America is the only meaningful nation advocating freedom. You read what you wanted to read, not what was written.

Yes, and there are a lot of people in the world who have less freedom due to US interventions / support.

Yeah, all those people with their new-found 'freedom', granted them by the West, are all either floating across the Mediterranean right now, or sitting in camps being protested by the 'truly free people' whose country they are 'invading' ..

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