Proceeds from many actions people take on a daily basis go to companies that actively support, design, and deploy technologies for use by the military.
Seems like whataboutism to me. Other people and companies doing a bad thing doesn't make doing the bad thing ok. Stopping one entity from doing evil is still a good thing even if you haven't stopped all evil everywhere.
Rather than complaining about people doing a small thing to improve the world, we should consider how we can scale up the small thing into something bigger.
To be specific, technologists like the people on Hacker News need to take a stand against providing technology (or funds) to the military. The industry should unionize so that programmers taking a stand against providing technology to the military can protest without being fired. The industry should produce a code of ethics that includes not selling tech to the military, and we should hold corporations to ethical standards.
How does stoping an Osprey from sale improve the world? I genuinely don't see it.
The military is and always will be a part of modern societies. There will always be someone that has to take that role within. It took CHOP 24hrs before a self imposed group provided "Policing and Support". Making an argument about something like this is counter productive.
The arguments to be made are how to use that tool to the benefit and betterment of man kind.
It's extremely clear that most of the HN crowd have had limited interaction or experience within government and or the military. It's the same with politics, many people yelling about it from the outside, but very few actually participating and trying to change from within.
