A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands…
… The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.
I don’t disagree with any of that, are you just venting right now or are you mad at me for not sounding angry enough? Hard to tell, but either way yeah agree.
Just venting.
All too often, I see people treat war as some kind of sporting event rather than a socially acceptable form of genocide.
Gotcha. I didn’t mean to sound glib or disinterested. In my head that was a sort of Dan Carlinish pronouncement of horror, laden with gravitas.
To me, it reads like they’re just venting.
Probably. It’s just hard to tell when the discourse is so overheated lately. I feel like everyone sane is mad enough to condone murder but too stricken with learned helplessness to do it themselves. And maybe a certain subset that are also cursed with enough conscience to believe that violence perpetuates violence. We all need to vent sometimes, but I almost feel like it’sa waste of good rage.
The only thing I’d say in defense of a good venting is that for change to happen, enough people have to decide that the consequences of taking action are less bad than not doing that, and a big part of that is online dialogue. The more of us that agree about these things, the more it leads to eventual action.
The problem is that getting to that point is difficult and often requires a catalyst that we haven’t yet had.
But all of our online angst does help build a foundation that future change can spring from. While that may sound hopeless - and it ain’t roses and daisies for sure - still, it will help. Eventually. Hopefully.
But I get it. I’ve mostly stopped reading the articles about The Latest Stupidity Trump Has Said Or Done because I’m exhausted by it. It feels useless, and some of it is demoralizing. But I think most of the discussion helps lay down that foundation that I hope we build a new society upon.
I just hate the feeling that we’re all just yelling at each other when we should be scaring billionaires.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Doing one does not prevent doing the other.