[IMC-Boston-Editorial] Two for discussion before centering

[Matthew Williams]

Hello all --

I'm against centering Jason's article, although not so strongly that 
I'd block it. It looks like it's an entry from Mass Global Action's 
blog, which is not necessarily bad, since we've featured other entries 
from the blog. However, I don't think this really has what we're 
looking for in a commentary--a discussion of facts and then a 
commentary that builds on those facts. This is more of a response to a 
magazine article--though I suppose you could argue that such criticism 
of the mainstream media falls within our domain.

On Pfeifer's piece, I feel kind of ambiguous, but I would support 
centering it--though if others were adamantly against it, I wouldn't 
make a big deal of it. I think these sorts of victories are important, 
even when they're won at Raytheon. I think it's important to keep in 
mind that, while it's easy to be critical of members of the 
professional-managerial class (like the engineer mentioned in the 
article) who work for places like Raytheon and probably have other job 
options open to them, working-class people often have many fewer job 
choices. One of the mistakes middle-class peace activists too often 
make (although more peace groups are becoming conscious of this 
problem) is to attack blue-collar workers at defense manufacturers, 
when those workers would often prefer to work producing something 
else--but they can't find other jobs. What's needed in such cases is a 
peace conversion program--a program to move our economy away from being 
centered around production for war. (Of course, I'd also like to see a 
conversion towards economic and workplace democracy, but that's an even 
bigger project.) And let's not assume that there are no blue-collar 
transgender people who couldn't benefit from protections like this. To 
be fair, the article could have been better written, explaining why 
this victory is important even though Raytheon does all sorts of 
horrible things, but I think it would be a mistake to discount it.

OK, now that Pete and I have disagreed with each other, we definitely 
need someone else to weigh in here. Or we could just center both of 
them or neither of them.

-- Matt

On Aug 2, 2005, at 11:07 PM, Pete Stidman wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> A summary-
>
> Pramas- Maybe center?
>
> Feifer- Against centering
>
> I'm on the fence about Jason's article, only because
> it's a bit short and it kinda toots the ole MGA RAFFE
> horn a little exclusively without a whole ton of
> information to back up doing so, maybe rightly so tho
> I don't know.  (no offense J- of course, by the way,
> shift+option+hyphen makes those cool extra long dashes
> like this: —dashing— )
>
> And then Feifer's article about Transgender folks, OK,
> with you there Bry, winning concessions at Raytheon,
> whoa Bry, WTF?
>
> The main point against the Raytheon article would be
> that from the standpoint of our readers— They couldn't
> give two shits about an employee of Raytheon, and I'm
> tempted to agree with them.
>
> It also looks poorly on an activist site to be
> supporting what seems like a luxury, protection
> against sexual pref. discrimination, when you consider
> Raytheon's weapons systems are blowing people inot
> little pieces all over the world.
>
> Most of our readers are all for transgender rights,
> including me, but if their using those rights to be
> able to build weapons that kill- I think most of our
> readers would say- "fuck em."
>
> -Pete
>
>
>
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