#you don't have to use latin phrases to sound smart jackass

[numbersareimaginary]

>"every engineer is a fascist"

>is engineer

modus ponens is a hell of a drug. try it sometime.

Engineering as a discipline within the United States has a really interesting relationship to capital. It wants so desperately to be a Professional Practice, like doctors and lawyers, but in reality its a job like any other (and indeed, so are doctoring and lawyering, but they've managed to achieve cultural status that engineering has not). Engineers are technical workers, but they see themselves always as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs, as just one break away from being their own boss, from being the capitalist themselves. So they have Professional Associations (not unions, never unions) and they talk a big talk about leadership and business management and blah blah blah blah and it's like, c'mon you're a fucking number cruncher. And as you should know by now if you've been paying attention, capitalism and fascism are deeply intertwined.

Engineering education is deeply flawed and produces a lot of really worrying biases in students. "Engineering ethics" is a joke and education on it even more so. Almost every engineering student I've talked to is deeply illiterate on history, on politics, on social issues, etc etc, no matter how good they may be at 3D dynamics or fluids or robotics or whatever. Engineering curricula also breed that sort of "I know how to solve one kind of problem so every problem must be solvable by the same methods"-type thinking that creates the sort of people who will happily drop into discussing eugenics at the lunch table.

This ties into the field's massive demographic problem. Engineering fields lag behind all others in terms of gender and racial equality, queer involvement, etc etc. An overwhelmingly white, male, conservative discipline with a mindset of being the best at solving everything is uh... dangerous. Also, just as a personal anecdotal sidenote. Almost every engineer and engineering student I have met is the sort of person who would build gas chambers for $70,000 a year and not even question themselves. People I know and care about and love have gone off to build bombs and fighter jets and missiles and not once thought their own morality. The people I interact with daily scare me for their complete lack of ethical or moral core, for their joking about cushy jobs at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, for their casual dismissal of anything that isn't capital E Engineering. I stand by my original statement, asshole.