After about 2 months of work, and after the production line got parallelized and speed drastically increased I went to see it work.

What I saw shocked me and I immediatelly quit. It was a production line for handling of female and male young and grown chicks. Debeaking, throat slitting. I was absolutely shocked how none of the superiors told me exactly which product was being handled.

After seeing the horrific product of my work I quit.

Since then, I'm not surprised, given what horrors we do to living animals, that we are ready to do them to each other.

I doubted the meaning of my work at university, what did I do? Spend 4 years at college to create killing machines? I didn't think I'd ever do that.

I sometimes think this is why we don’t see any intelligent civilizations out there. Intelligence gives rise to deceitfulness and eventually, one selfish actor can bring down an entire civilization intentionally or unintentionally since the weapons get so powerful.

It always amazes me that those big entities exist, because they require such a huge highly educated and skilled human power. What are all those genius at the NSA thinking ? I can't imagine somebody smart enough to work here is not smart enough to understand the consequences of working there. So why are they not quitting ?

Social pressure and money are part of the equation, certainly. I remember when I turned down a Google interview, my close circle though it was weird that I did that, even more for ethical reason.

Having the best toys, budgets and projects certainly helps as well.

But still, I wonder.

Maybe they don't have a problem with working on such projects, because they agree with their end goal?

I learned very young there are differences, like I literally (NOT figurative at all) couldn't see the motivation behind destroying school equipment, drawing on walls, etc. While for some, it's fun.

But even after all those years, it's just so hard to wrap my head around that.

I think the answer might be that they do have the same values, but they have a different model of the world overall, which calls for different ways of achieving those values.

To take this to an extreme, imagine a person fighting for their life against actual criminals threatening vs a person fighting for their life against a random person they think is a shape-shifting alien impostor. Both are internally justified by the same values, one is externally justified by a more correct perception of reality.

I exactly said I can't understand the line of thinking that leads to the decision. That's pretty much all.

And it's a very conflicting view of the word too. Do you see us as enemies as well ?

In which case, you win this argument. I don't want my tribe to fight yours.

As for myself being tribal - it's very hard to observe tribalism in oneself so, while I am not seeing it, I can very well be.

You'd be baffled, wouldn't you ?

It's not a matter of morality, of good or bad, or right or wrong.

I understand the difference exists. It just feels so alien to me I can't get to form the mental model that helps me understand what thinking lead to this behavior.

Also, read the other comments, we answered your points already.

Maybe I'm not reading this correctly, but you're saying that if anyone holds an opinion different than yours your reaction is the same as if they thought "eating babies" was OK?

Things aren't that black and white. People can hold opinions different than your and you can withhold judgement.

See again, you add morality in the equation, talking about black and white. But morality is arbitrary. You can draw the line anywhere, one inch to left or the right, and so on, indefinitely.

So that's not what I said.

What I said was "I can't understand".

Not "it should not be" or "it's impossible" or "they are bad people".

Apparently, you have difficulty to understand that somebody can't understand.

“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”

— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

Frankly the broad majority of people in the US benefit materially in some way from their existence in ways that they might not even be fully aware of.

I am not arguing this is a good thing, but I think it's a reality. Military power abroad means wealth accumulation at home.

Now if they use it to kill good guys, then it's a problem that needs to be solved.

I would have thought most people are somewhere in between.

Is an enemy combatant with a weapon a bad guy? How about an unarmed enemy combatant? How about an enemy combatant with just a knife, or a rudimentary club? How about an armed civilian who might be an enemy combatant?

Is a bank robber a bad guy? If so, do they deserve to die? How about a white-collar fraudster? How about someone running from the police? How about a mentally ill person running from the police?

This stuff is never clear cut. It's why we have courts and military tribunals. If you can't think beyond 'good guys' and 'bad guys', I don't respect your opinion.

Pay attention to the facts behind the curtain.

My government did enough stupid things for me to not want them to have sophisticated military toys.

Debatable, but regardless - do you think the reason US government have not killed Snowden is the lack of "sophisticated military toys"?

Also, my government did enough stupid things (like killing innocent people in war zones by mistake) for me to want them to have more intelligent weapons.

It's a hard problem, and most glib solutions are, well, just that, glib. Centralized agreements become increasingly difficult as the number of entities increase, for instance, even before we account for scenarios like this where the reward for defection increases proportionally to the number of other participants in the disarmament.

This is also ignoring those cases where there isn't even disagreement; in the real world, for instance, while you can quibble about the exact lines it seems to be the case that the Chinese accept and approve of levels of "invasive government" (to use a Western spin on the idea; I don't know what they would call it exactly) that Magna Carta-descended countries would consider abhorrent, making coordination even harder. (Meanwhile, they consider our lack of coordination or whathaveyou, if not "abhorrent", at the very least "sub-optimal", and possible dangerously socially negligent. As I'm using English here and, like I said, I don't know what they'd call it exactly, I can't help a bit of a Western spin here, but I acknowledge the flip side.)

No argument here, having a strong bully in the room is good for you when he is on your side.

Because not everybody thinks the way you do. That's why we have elections.

I'm sure disclosure would be illegal per your employee contract, but are there any other steps concerned employees can take?

This is never true. No government will allow its companies (and in this context that's how it's seen) to sell weapons to countries they don't approve of. That said, apparently the defense industry is often irresponsible at best.

What the poster meant was "just about any country" in the world. Which we've seen happen time and time again - the restrictions may be nominally in place (for a while), but eventually they get selectively lifted, and/or the companies find a way to circumvent them.

At times (and not at all surprisingly) with the assistance of certain government agencies chartered with the purpose of not only enacting precisely this kind of subterfuge - but perfecting it as an art.

The biggest problem is so-called "dual use" chemicals and compounds where there are legitimate military and non-military uses.

You can build extremely dangerous explosives from chemicals found on the shelf at a drug store, but that doesn't mean that company is in the business of selling explosives.

I'm much more inclined to believe it's the latter.

Sure you can argue that it's different because those are things the common man can get whereas on the state can afford surveillance dragnets and drones but it wasn't that long ago that only the state could afford computers.

Edit: Apparently I struck a nerve.

Technology transfers between military and civilian application all the time. Propeller technology that helped submarines that are now obsolete stay quiet is fine tuned in a different manner to yield more environmentally friendly watercraft. A drone that can disperse insecticides on only the crops that need it can deliver chemical weapons with some slightly different fine tuning.

An 1984 (or 2018 UK if you like) surveillance and law enforcement system could be used to track down corruption in government, suppressing dissidents, identifying insider trading, identifying human tracking, etc. It all depends on who's using it. (I personally don't trust any government to properly wield that kind of power.)

The technology doesn't care. It's all how you use it.

Why not just send them in with their fists.

This line of reasoning has no rational basis.

If we'd gone into Baghdad WWII style, carpet bombing and all that, we'd probably still be fighting a significant war in Iraq. Or the country would be depopulated. Presumably the appearance of ISIS was largely a reaction to western actions in the region, and its initial strength was proportional to the outrage that could be drummed up. Sure, there are probably asinine military commanders that don't account for this, but it isn't the universal rule.

And war hammers have a military context going back centuries and diy versions where used in trench warfare.