Only if it involves Val Kilmer. And in the movie he was not pleased over the use of his work being used for war.
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Pretty much, some of those wars lasted weeks before the civilian morass began.
I still say we lost the Korean War.
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I’m not certain 50 millions South Koreans would agree.
And at what point shall we decide the cost of human life is too high to continue our wars of choice? We made the decision to invade another country for no reason and kill their citizens who look at us funny. This isn’t something we should shrug off as the cost of war.
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Yeah it’s an odd company to label an “arms dealer” . While these days they’re more of a typical military contractor. In the past the company mostly made support aircraft. And when Northrop and Grumman were separate entities. Grumman made everything from panel vans and aluminium canoes to cargo aircraft and fighters. NG still builds and designs a shit ton of stuff for the space program (something Being Boring generally seems to love).
It’s an aerospace contractor. And while they make a fair lot of drones and bombers these day. I don’t recall them making much if any of the armaments their airframes actually carry. It’s not like theyre a firearms manufacturer. Though it seems they just bought a missle manufacturer.
I mean don’t get me wrong. Northrop Grumman has been a pretty fucked up company in a lot of ways since the merger. And their purview has shrunk considerably. But they aren’t, as of yet, generally the sort of company that gets labeled an arms dealer. It’s a bit like labelling Boeing the same way.
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I’m not sure I can hear them disagreeing over the Incoming Nuclear Missile sirens.
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Oops. I’d assumed you meant being involved in the first place, not that they didn’t “finish the job”.
However, continuing the Korean war, possibly into a 4th world war with China, is a what-if that’s got way too many variables to be worth the risk. The cease-fire was the right decision.
Which to my mind is why, when evaluating whether to start or continue a war, every decision should start heavily weighed towards “no war”. Almost every war has a decent chance of a worst-case scenario that is infinitely worse than the discussed worst-case scenario.
The scale against/pro war is not 1 to 10, it’s -100 to 10. Decision-makers tend to fail to take into account the long tail of possible disasters.
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It was always odd to me that that the most evil corporate entity in the Marvel Universe wasn’t the military contractor, but Roxxon Oil.
Granted, both can be faceless sources of destruction, but Roxxon was working a lot harder at being evil. If Stark building a wearable tank, that’s at least something their customers are interested in; Roxxon built armored suits all the time for basically no reason except fighting Iron Man.
Thats something the movies generally improved on. Stark pulling out of the arms business. Focusing those resources on Iron Man and the avengers/sheild, And shifting the rest of the company to clean power and consumer tech. The other armor suits come from arms manufacturers trying to fill the gap Stark left. The clash coming from Stark looking to prevent proliferation. And it all sort of blowing up in his face. Makes quite a bit more sense.
This whole thing is clearly a false flag “outrage” by the competition.
Bringing reason and facts to a manufactured outrage?
Not necessarily. These sort of marketing comics are always weird and often troubling. And a lot of people would prefer they stopped happening regardless of which company/government agency they prompt. And Northrop Grumman is a nasty company. But mostly for their labor relations and environmental record rather than “all they make is weapons”. So the controversy is warranted. But from even the less outragey coverage I’d seen I’d assumed it was a gun company of some kind and the outrage was connected to that.
NG are assholes and not the sort of company I’d like to see promoted in a comic book. But they make as many satellites and space telescopes as they do drones. (Though I think they’re involved with ICBMs in connection to that. ) So not for the same reasons as, say Colt.
Reminds me of when NASA wanted to get into making computer games and thought it was a good idea to team up with Army Game Studio, a company founded to make middle-east-war-themed FPS MMOs as military recruitment tools targeting teenagers. The result was the infamous Moonbase Alpha game. They would have done much better sponsoring Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager game.
Uhm no. Nothing the US military does is for your defense. And I don’t even mean to say that everything they do is evil, but really, it’s not defense.
Some wars the US is involved in might be honest attempts at doing good in far away places. As in “those bad guys are killing people, we need to stop them”.
Others are for geostrategic reasons - as in, “we don’t want our rivals to gain power here”.
That’s not defense, because - newsflash - neither Russia nor China have any desire for invading the US. It’s a power game.
Yet others are for economic reasons - some to further US economic interests, some to further the economic interests of US politicians.
We could have endless discussions about which US troop deployment falls in which category, or about when a war is justified. But referring to that as “defense”, “keeping us safe”, or worse yet, “Defending Our Freedoms”, is just propaganda.
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And what’s up with that outfit?
But why not Space X instead?
Presumably, Elon was too busy securing a name-drop in Star Trek: Discovery. That said, considering that RDJ is basically on record as playing Iron Man as Elon Musk with rocket boots, it is weird that they didn’t go that route for this.
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Haven’t seen a frame of that yet, but I’m already onboard for other reasons.
Still, Star Trek is pretty keen.
Because presumably Space X didn’t feel the need to pay Marvel Comics a bunch of money to produce a bit of advertorial?
Most major comics publishers have been doing this sort of thing for decades. And they’re always weird. And this isn’t even the first go round with a defense contractor for Marvel. Like I said its creepy, and there are good reasons to be pissed that Northrop Grumman specifically was involved. Or at it happening at all.
But the headlines/discussions/think pieces and whatever are pretty consistently using phrases like “weapons manufacter” and 'arms dealer" to the point where despite having read several articles about this before seeing it on Boing Boing I hadn’t caught that it was NG. And thus assumed it was a firearms company of some sort. Because those phrases aren’t generally applied to the sort of company NG is.
I’m neither confused at why people were pissed. Nor do I disagree with them. I’m just confused by the precise way people seem to be phrasing things.
Because the aerospace industry has always been heavily militarised?
Fighter planes, bombers, spy satellites, cruise missiles, ICBMs. Northrop Grumman’s core business.
I don’t have the numbers, but I’d expect that aerospace accounts for a larger proportion of military spending than small arms do these days.
Absolutley.
Its just when I hear “arms dealer” I don’t instantly think of the company that made the Lunar Lander, my dad’s aluminium John boat, and these.
Northrop Grumman isn’t exactly that company though. Its more the Company that bought that company. The Northrup half, and what they’ve been doing since the merger certainly cuts closer to the classic military contractor. Not a lot of civilian aircraft and goods coming out of there since the 90s.
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