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They've all become war profiteers and fascist enablers.
The only way to live with my conscience was to choose not to be complicit.
If you went around scrutinizing the personal failings of every single creator and deciding not to support their art, you would cut yourself off from a huge chunk of human creation. Creators and builders are disproportionately imperfect people.
Harvey Weinstein, for example, is a serial abuser and genuinely evil person. He also was involved in an enormous number of Hollywood productions. Do you go out of your way to make sure to never watch or consume media associated with him? My guess is probably not. It's impractical and also I think the net benefit of this mindset, where we only allow people with certain moral characteristics to succeed, is a loss for society.
Your claim is similar to saying nobody should own a gun, because it should be illegal to defend yourself or others. So everyone who owns any kind of weapon is evil and bad? Only bad people are allowed to own weapons and we should just roll over?
Nobody should defend Ukraine from Russia? Anduril has been helping Ukraine since very early on.
Let the guy have his little side modding hobby.
It is a decision to start producing regardless of how well-intentioned it is. You will be profiting off of people being maimed and killed. Various people thought they solved war through new weapons only to create more effective killing machines. That's what WW1 was.
Palmer does not have to work on weapons nor justify making them. Building tech that will be used to murder people (and yes, it will happen) is a decision. Not funding his other hobby when he's getting money off US military contracts is hardly breaking his bank. He wants to build weapons? I don't want to buy his products. Easy.
Building more efficient weapons does not make us safer. Every dollar saved through "strength" and better weapons matters little to the parents who lost their kid when the most precise weapon in the world kills a bunch of schoolchildren like it did at the start of the Iran war. If you can't gaurantee your weapons won't get used for that, why would you build them? You cannot.
I thought Tony Stark already made this point.
If nobody in the world was manufacturing any weapons and it was fully observable from space, nobody would have cause to manufacture these kinds of weapons. We do not live in that world.
At some point, any reasonable person should agree that if a country exists in an environment that contains many threats it might need to defend itself or others from, then it makes complete sense for it to develop weapons towards that aim. Countries are not people, people are people. So people make the weapons.
It just so happens that Palmer Luckey is a person. He can't sell weapons to any random person or country he wants, he can only sell them to the US or with permission of the US to a country that the US has a strategic interest in defending.
Precision weapons have helped reduce casualties. This is a fact. Please try to contradict this fact in the face of napalm bombing and nuclear bombs of yesteryears. Please try to tell me that precision weapons aren't better than just randomly aiming artillery at the sky and letting'er rip. Please do. I want to hear your well founded argument for this.
Is it more efficient than napalm? Great. It still will be used to kill people which I find to be gross, especially when innocents will die, too. If somebody has to build weapons and somebody has to fund said weapons maker, I'm glad it doesn't have to be me. Doesn't have to be Palmer either.
If they should be killed, then they should be killed with the minimum number of civilian casualties possible.
Countless millions of people died in World War 1 and World War 2. So many people died that we only have estimates, because there were too many to count individually.
If nobody pushed back against Japan, Germany, Russia, North Korea, China, Iraq, Iran and so on, the world would not be a better place. It would be a place where full on global war was legitimized as a viable global domination strategy. And global domination was in fact the goal back then. The problem is, we aren't sure that goal has ever gone away.
As a result, the entire world is a chess board with smaller countries being manipulated or compromised in various ways for some other grand strategy. For many years now we've accepted that there would largely be some sort of equilibrium or status quo. Except these smaller countries also have a mind of their own and their people universally reject being controlled and manipulated.
Russia with Ukraine. China with Taiwan. North Korea with South Korea. Venezuela with Guyana. Iran with Israel, Iraq, Yemen, etc. Now suddenly all of these countries are all the prowl almost simultaneously. If you only look at US action, look at the world we're reacting to. It's not as simple as some political propagandist hitjob soundbite on TV being the complete answer.
"Peace through strength" is a fine motto, but you can't claim that motto and then turn around and base your business on selling to an entity that routinely starts non-defensive wars.
You have so many tools at your disposal for learning, you really have no reason to just have no idea what is going on unless you just don't prioritize your time that way. In which case, it's ok to understand that you don't know, but why hold your opinion so strongly then?
Go do a couple searches real quick and see what some of the points of the war may be. Many of them will be incorrect or incomplete, but you will come back with at least some reasons that exist.
Sure, I can do searches and find people giving various reasons for the war. What's your point? Am I not allowed to disagree with people? If I can do a couple searches real quick and find some people saying A, I'm not allowed to claim not-A?
I don't see how logic dictates that there's a point to this war. I understand that some people believe the war is being carried out to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon or whatever, but how does it "logically" follow that there is necessarily a point to it?
So let's start with the nuclear thing.
Russia is a bad actor. It treats its own people poorly, doesn't have a free press, doesn't allow free speech, it blocks a bunch of the internet so it's harder for people to find the truth. You get thrown in prison because they don't like you. Under the Soviet Union they killed millions of their own people in stupid famines from poor authoritarian decision making. They throw you at the meat grinder of the front lines of poor wars and destroy everything, because they do not value human life. They got nukes to make their bad behavior invulnerable. Ok, so fine, the world is a little worse off, but that's Russia.
Russia spread communism to Korea, since they have had a long-term strategic interest in Korea as a basing for attacking Japan in order to control more warm water ports. Japan and Russia have had conflict around this since the 1800s. It's not new. So Korean war. Now North Korea has nukes. They make their people suffer. The world is a little worse off, but that's North Korea.
Russia spread communism to China for many reasons too. China killed countless millions of people through poor authoritarian decision making too, through yet more famines. They kill any of their own people who don't agree. They took over Tibet by force. They execute more of their own people than the entire world executes, combined. They started building up the largest military mankind has ever seen and now they have nukes. Now that they feel invulnerable, they engage in the largest influence and interference campaign in world history, manipulating countries at scale and spreading extreme propaganda worldwide. It is all pervasive in social media comments, YouTube and elsewhere. I've seen this shift happen personally, slowly. It is not organic. So fine, the world is a little worse off. That's China.
Russia tried to spread communism to Iran and helped the Islamic radicals overthrow the government, thinking the communists could have some control afterwards or exist as an alternative party. Instead the Islamic revolutionaries kill thousands of communists to say, "no, go away." Now we have an Iran that is explicitly friendly with Russia, China, North Korea and Venezuela, learning from North Korea's nuclear program, sending its scientists there. It engages in Islamic revolution in a way similar to how the Soviet Union was trying to spread communism before World War 2, with armed activist militant communist groups. They infiltrated Yemen and that caused the war there. They infiltrated Gaza and Lebanon and Iraq. Afghanistan HATES Iran, because of their attempts to infiltrate it with their radicals. Iraq went to war with Iran, because Iran was engaging in revolution inside their country. Now Iran had built up a huge conventional military just like its friends Russia, China and North Korea, and aims to get a nuclear weapon to make their bad behavior invulnerable.
Iran can't be compared the same way as other countries that have nuclear programs, because most countries aren't Russia, China and North Korea which Iran is patterning itself after and buys military hardware from.
We're done with "so fine, the world is a little worse off". This is domino theory. This is salami tactics, slicing little bits of the world one at a time until the steamroll is so strong it has passed the tipping point and physics no longer offers a way for you to push back the tide.
That is only 1 reason for attacking Iran and it is highly abbreviated. There are dozens of other reasons for attacking Iran, defending Ukraine and deterring China from attacking Taiwan. Dozens of other reasons for capturing Maduro and trying to reform Cuba.
The US doesn't want to have to do any of this. We'd rather just be left alone and leave others alone, but that is not the world we live in. There are people that seek global domination and they are not the ones that want you to have freedom of speech or value your life.
If you want to back up your original reply to me, then you need to not only show that there’s a reason for the war, but that the war can actually accomplish those things. And not only that, but that believing otherwise is so catastrophically ignorant that it can only come from a complete failure to be aware of basic facts.
You can argue there are reasons for the war, although I already agree. You can argue that the war has a chance of achieving those goals. I don't agree with that, but it’s certainly an argument that can be made. But don’t give me this stuff about how it’s logically impossible to hold the opposite position.
He's probably not wrong that you have to be a certain kind of person that can stomach the inherent violence involved, that doesn't mean you want to kill innocent civilians. Yet you do have to be the kind of person who understands that civilian casualties can happen. Life is not kind to the mind that is fragile to the realities of nature. That's accurate.
As for nuclear weapons, he explicitly said he thinks they have done a lot to stabilize the world, which does put some limiters on how extreme war can be, because there is an extra red line that actually matters.
When it comes to chemical weapons, he already stated that no he wouldn't create biological or chemical weapons, but he thinks that there should be a special exception for non-lethal means like tear gas and pepper spray. It's like, a woman can take pepper spray out of her purse and use it against a criminal, but the US military can't use pepper spray to suppress enemies without killing them? Killing people is a more viable option than suppressing them? I think that's the argument he's making.
You should actually watch the stuff you link.
The article says the game is published by ModRetro.
This backlash can hurt modretro, it can affect the author of this game, but the impact on the defense industry is zero. And this thread, fuck, you'd think running JavaScript on an n64 would be the safest place to avoid yelling about US politics in 2026 but here we are. And there's nothing to be gained. A smart person doing cool work published a game through a fun and ethical company that is owned by a person that also owns a defense company, so let's all scream about murdering children. As if that protects anyone from anything.
I mean, that's just defense companies in general now. Would you rather have your own soldiers dying in a war, rather than robots? Ukraine is using AI in their targeting, is that something you condemn?
This is no different from the invention of machine guns or artillery. Yes, it's sad that these things will be used in war to kill (more) people. But intentionally avoiding that technology means you're just handicapping your own military and sacrificing others' lives for your principles.
Is SAAB bad making JAS Gripen being soon used against Russia?
I find your and similar views to be very childish. And somewhat suspicious.
Who would benefit from the west investing less in weapons systems? It boils down to what side you are on honestly.