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

[Pete Stidman]

point of info though- I think engineers would be
considered white-collar, and I'm sure most employees
of Raytheon- outside of the cleaning staff and such
which might even be contracted to another company,
would be considered at upper blue collar, or highly
skilled labor.  

I'm agreement that it can stay on the site of course. 
But centering it would mean an endorsement of the
right of people to make weapons that kill masses of
people.  Even if we are talking about making that
opportunity an equal one- it's still a lame choice of
occupation.  

This is side news to me, no need to draw mass
attention to it.  

-Pete


--- Matthew Williams <mw21 at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 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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