Palantir is extending its reach even further into government
wired.com
wired.com
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
[not entirely true note: PalantirFoundry is a lowCode/noCode stack on top of a Spark cluster]
Pipeline Builder : https://youtu.be/WIQA7u1tbsY?si=iG-N9xHpUPPVAqDX
OntologyManager: https://youtu.be/SOW0IA_I0bk?si=u5eha0o-yrn4pHvu
This is marketing speak who means nothing. What do you mean? Something like this?: https://www.ibm.com/products/information-governance-catalog
Here is a tool to visually explore your graph:
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/vertex/graphs-explore
And here is the search engine to search for your objects (free-text and/or types): https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/object-explorer/gettin...
And here is the tool to manage the ontology (the types and relationships of the graph, plus the mapping of the graph to the tabular datasets):
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-manager/overv...
The UI designer based on the graph data is called Workshop:
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview/
I still have to find a stack where this duality is as integrated as in Foundry.
This one has 10 years of precedence: https://www.ibm.com/products/information-server
These are slogans with marketing grade truth, not engineering truth. The moment you leave the happy path wizards you run straight into Python, SQL, JVM knobs, and cluster limits. The visual Pipeline Builder drops you into a Code node the second you need anything beyond basic joins/filters. Here is an example: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/code-workbook/getting-...
>> nor scalability consideration. Foundry Spark jobs expose tunable variables, you are expected to tweak them for performance and cost: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/optimizing-pipelines/s...
Having most of those PySpark functions exposed visually as building blocks with debug points available at each step simply outperforms a codeWorkbook in term of maintainability and readability.
...Except in this case, there might be a lot of value in letting James Bond or Boris Badenov whip up a quick spy pipeline without putting up a job ad for a Python coder.
All of these things are pretty fascinating, as they concern the meta of the meta; the nature of knowledge itself; how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people.
Many software engineers are happy not knowing any of those terms. This perceived boredom is part of the reason why companies, some indeed with questionable ethics, like Palantir (is there even more than one in this space?) have very little competition and are making big bucks on big contracts (and only stand to make more once ML becomes less chaotic and more structured).
Two comments here:
- the real power of Foundry is that it is REALLY scalable. Palantir is selling all the knowledge management+data management that you mentionned BUT at a level of integration and scalability that I had never seen in any other product.
- someone in the discussions mentionned IBM InformationServer as an alternative. Functionnaly that sounds quite similar to Foundry. The question is whether the implementation choices are as clever as in Foundry. #toBeInvestigated
So, lots and lots of pie charts?
Linux. Windows. Both are "operating systems"?
What actual novel data collating and anomaly detection algorithms does Palantir implement that no one else does? Oh that's right these services are all just different corporate branding atop the same old open source stacks and libraries everyone uses.
Show me a entity-relationship model management [with version control] that wraps Spark data frames into a fully ontology-based graph database.
Show me a low code/no code UI designer that is fully consuming the ontology layer abstracting your Spark dataFrames.
#meWaiting
They exist but are used in house not sold as products.
There are information theory texts with all these ideas written in them published back in the 1950s we just didn't have powerful enough computers
Thiel and Musk's only advantage is age. They were able to implement first due to a single property of physics.
Most "geniuses" today, like Tao, just like reading math. None of them have any truly novel net new ideas. They're parrots whose cages were in the nerdy section of a book store.
I was in the IC when Palantir was being rolled out and took a bunch of their training courses at their facilities in Georgetown
They have the data storage that complies with DCID and RMF ATO requirements across every IL and compartment
Before Palantir the only thing that we had was Analyst Notebook and you had to have a CD to run it and manage your own data repos locally
Palantir was entirely browser based and you didn’t have to manage data at all so they killed AN almost immediately
Additional DoD SRG IL5 controls on top of FedRAMP
Physical and logical separation of IL5 workloads from lower-level workloads
U.S. citizenship and background checks for all cloud personnel with access
Hosting and data storage within U.S. territory
Continuous monitoring and incident response plans that meet DoD requirements
DoD-specific access controls and encryption <<<
Thats quite some strict list which most companies would just not pass...
They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
There may be a loss of interest or focus, often related to technological changes causing an atrophy over time, but that usually also just leads to long tail existence that seems to mostly be defined by the duration of the career length of those involved and/or any kind of special interests that can maintain their nepotistic/corrupt advocacy.
It is a function of the empire and the reserve currency status of it, i.e., the “infinite” money printing that causes profligacy that is also an existential threat because it distorts perceptions and reality, e.g., the belief that it does not matter and that no discipline in spending or budgeting is necessary, hence why America has essentially for 56 years now (ignoring the anomaly in 2001) not produced a balanced budget.
I used to work a defense contractor and still have some friends in that industry. One of them told me their project (related to some armored vehicle) was unceremoniously killed overnight a few months ago. As best they can tell it had nothing to do with cost, schedule, missed deliveries, etc -- it was just someone in the administration deciding they don't want to keep paying for it. They work for a very large contractor and apparently this happened to a whole bunch of projects / teams there.
Right. That's exactly why they get hate. So what's the problem with that?
Enabling a parallel construction in a surveillance state should draw hate, as it weakens the fourth amendment.
My point isn't that you shouldn't hate on Palantir, but that in doing so often the cause and effect get reversed in people's minds. They think that Palantir is the cause and eroded civil liberties is the result, when the opposite is true.
Hate?
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
[0]: https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-former-chancellor-se...
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
The problem as enunciated also 100% tracks with my time as a consultant -- delivering solutions was 40% people-fixing and 60% code-fixing.
I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.
SAP is also a good comparison, so maybe GenZ SAP.
There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
Is that because palantir takes them out for golf outings and steaks? Or is it because palantir promises certain results and outcomes to them once the product is in place?
> There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues.
Yea, it's just the ideology of their founders, it has _nothing_ to do with their actions and partnerships.
> I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
"They're evil and they don't care who's buying."
> but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives.
That's not how morality, ethics, or the law works.
> People voted for this.
Literally _no one_ voted for this. The people who wanted DOGE to clean up government spending did not in any way think that all federal data, including their own private medical data, would be, or even need to be, fed into a private company to be used in service of the problem.
This is ridiculous apologia for evil. What is wrong with this site? If there's even a single dollar of profit on the table then civil rights are the first thing the "hacker news types" sacrifice. It makes you all seem gross and unapproachable.
The real issue is that people voted for this. All of it.
Anyone who voted for Trump after J6 knew what they were getting. All the people with buyers remorse about Trump make me think of this parable:
https://www.northerncherokeenation.com/boy-and-the-rattlesna...
“You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
Yes, in that one of their cofounders and his buddies bankrolled the current administration...
Do facebook or google do this to their users?
Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company. The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterpriseData work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.
And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !
Do data barons attempt to replicate silo control within Palantir?
> Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative
With this profitable existence proof in the market, are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data?
So data customers have simply taken over the Palantir platform and manage the data import, data pipelines and data exposure (both general purpose exposure, and custom project-specific exposures) without caring very much about the data barons. Those ones simply deny the need for such a data integration platform.
So we really are in a situation where users have embraced the platform and live in it on a daily basis, and the barons spend their days pretending that it is a minor useCase.
I am pretty sure PoolParty and some other integration stacks exist. But they lack the insane scalability and the proper stacking of layers that Palantir is implementing.
For the moment, the killing stack that Palantir proposes is:
- Spark
- PipelineBuilder
- OntologyManager
- Workshop
And I see nothing like that anywhere else. [but I would love to]
definition of treason.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S3-C1-...
it would not be treason for drone armies of automated bots deployed in the field because they aren’t human?
if there were the same number of people standing on street corners collecting the same data as ring doorbells and waymos in san francisco, to sell for political and military applications, where does the treason begin?
how many humans need to conspire to erode democracy for it to count to your standards?
Treason requires a war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Un...
Matches the last treason charges too. WWII was the last time anyone was charged (and convicted) of treason.
likely, we’ll never be at war again based on how we now do conflicts, waging language semantics and syntax
no war, no treason, no problem
we are evolved, there is no war in Ba Sing Se
the constitution being edited was “a coding error”
if it wasn’t though, no assemblage of men, still no treason.
You got a name and a raw source?
The beginning of the essay
> I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
The full essay https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” - not Peter Thiel
That idea has always been tested, with the current times being the largest test in several decades at least.
Also, I assume you meant to say "Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person *is* a representative."
And the amount of power an individual has is negligible so a bad vote is diluted much more than it is in a representative democracy.
I think that's the only example needed to prove that direct democracy is not a desirable form of government, let alone the ideal.
I find it illustrative that so many here defend Democracy as an ends to be achieved or an unqualified good unto itself, rather than a process or a means to an end. It illustrates the arguments made elsewhere about how democratic processes and institutions have been succeeded by Democracy, the belief.
As an unqualified good, one can simply claim that the majority has voted or that the Democratic process has been performed, and therefore the outcome is just. There's an apt George Carlin quote...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Democracy%3A+The+God+That+Fa...
See Squid Game as a more recent commentary.
How familiar are you with the writings of the founding fathers? The ones who very intentionally avoided creating a system based on direct democracy?
The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s. They were not infallible, nor was the system they created.
That's why they created mechanisms for evolving that system.
Except we rarely do. "But Constitutional Amendments", people say.
Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.
Everything is very selective. Infallible when we want it to be. "Oh they didn't mean that/like that" when we want. And completely ignore other parts as inconvenient.
All of the restrictions they put in place, such as the electoral college and who was able to vote at all, along with the writings we have, suggests as a group they were not.
The youngest delegate to the Constitutional convention was Johnathan Dayton of New Jersey, who was 26, and there were three more under 30. There were more over 60 than than under 30.
The people that are frequently cited as being "Founding Fathers" in their "early 20s" (or "between 19 or 21, because we're not sure exactly when he was born", in Hamilton's case) are people who were that age in 1776 and ended up playing an important role. But the Constitution was drafted more than a decade later -- there was a war, plus time under the first system of government under the Articles of Confederation in between.
> Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.,
No, that was not a "doctrine of the founding fathers", it was a belief of Thomas Jefferson expressed later in a letter to, as I recall, John Adams, specifically (the upper limit of the period at which he held any law or constitution needed to expire was actually 19 years, based on actuarial data and a set of assumptions he had about what was necessary and acceptable in terms of avoiding the living being ruled over by the dead.)
You can tell it was not a widely held "doctrine of the founding fathers" (or, more to the point, of the Framers, who are the ones actually relevant to the Constitution, though the two groups have considerable overlap) because instead of expiring by its own terms in 19 years or less, the Constitution was permanent, with a very difficult method of amendment, and that method of amendment was specifically barred from changing certain parts.
There weren't really very many widely shared "doctrines" of the Founders or the Framers. They weren't a hive mind or a cult or even a group as ideologically aligned as the coalition that makes up either of the US's current major political parties. The idea of shared doctrines or a single unifying vision behind the Constitution are mythologies created after, and requiring deliberate disregard of, the facts.
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
Is it any wonder that he has helped fund our decline into authoritarianism? We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned increasingly against American citizens.
Other countries got those without paying Palantir billions.
Immigration detention facilities are not concentration camps.
Refugees admitted into Europe are not restricted to camps and do have some due-process rights, but they have at most times been a distinct minority of the refugees in the world.
Some refugees do live in inhuman conditions. Even if these conditions affected a majority of refugees, that doesn’t justify treating human beings this way.
All people have a right to due process. It’s a human right. Whether this or that government honors this right is a separate question.
We should be trying to emulate governments that honor human rights, not take our example from those that don’t.
I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
It's because most people don't have a good grasp of how diverse and often flimsy administrative and civil process (in cases where one party is the .gov is in reality. Typically the answer is "whatever the enforcing agencies come up with", which isn't very reassuring.
Like for a traffic ticket they at least haul you before a judge in a public court anyone can attend to give some pretext of the accused having serious rights that protect them. It makes sense. Traffic tickets are a "mass market" product so to speak and so the .gov has to put on a good show even if at the end of the day someone facing a $200 civil traffic fine doesn't actually have the same rights as the guy facing a $200 criminal public urination fine.
When it comes to stuff like code enforcement, arcane industry enforcement, fish and game, ICE and everything else federal the process is far less "due", so to speak and is far more likely to not have separation of powers on the government side (i.e. administrative ppl in the enforcement agencies will be making decisions that would be made by a judge in other contexts)
I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil (traffic ticket and the like), which itself is a joke compared to criminal matters.
I would really like to see all this shit thrown out by the supreme court. If the .gov, be it fed, state or local, is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals bet it a fine or jail then they ought to meet the same bar. Allowing people to be jailed (in the case of ICE) or fined large sums (in the case of many other types of administrative matters) because it's not nominally a criminal matter is 100% an end run around the constitution.
Then let's explore that. There are some rights which aren't fundamental human rights... that is, you don't get them just by virtue of existing. Voting comes to mind, that's a citizen's right only.
The right to be present within the borders of the United States is another such right. If you aren't a citizen, you do not have this right. We might extend the temporary privilege to non-citizens, but it is absolutely at the prerogative of the United States... subject to revocation at any time. The idea that it can't just be subject to revocation (arbitrary or otherwise) is the dimwitted notion that there is a sort of second-class citizenship... that some not-really-citizens can be here permanently and we can't decide that we want them to return home.
So, if they can be deported (for reason, or none at all), the only recourse such people have is "I can prove I'm a citizen". If ICE isn't letting them do so, if they protest that they are a citizen and the ICE agent sticks his fingers in his ears and chants "I can't hear you" repeatedly, then that would be a violation of due process. The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
I reject the idea that it is necessary or desirable to drag each of these foreigners before a judge to perform this function.
> is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals
I don't want these people punished at all. Punishment would be putting them in prison (where they would stay in the United States). If someone is trespassing on your property and you call the police, the police would punish them by prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating. When they drag them from your property and tell them to get lost, that's not punishment. It's just removal from where they aren't permitted to be. It's still not punishment even if they cry that they don't want to go home.
A DOJ lawyer literally said they haven't been doing this sufficiently and then he got sacked by Pam Bondi. SCOTUS then reaffirmed 9 to 0 that the original lawyer who admitted this failure in court was actually correct, that DOJ wasn't giving people their due process rights.
I find it extremely hard to believe you have not heard about the Kilmar Abrego case?
Yes. And to the best of my knowledge he is not a citizen.
He did not assert citizenship, they did not violate due process rights. No other process is due him. Anyone claiming that it's a violation of due process rights doesn't know what they mean, though for a moment I had hope for you... you sort of described them, or at least hinted at them, but you're unable to apply what you described to this situation. Due process rights can't and won't keep non-citizens in this country if they are trying to avoid deportation, and shouldn't ever. Non-citizens only have the revocable-for-any-reason-or-none privilege of visiting, and that only if they get the visa.
What do you know that they don’t?
Why?
> aren't in lockstep with liberal/progressive ideals
These aren't the same thing
Increasingly (from my limited view), people with a progressive viewpoint seem to be making this claim ("account X never participated in good faith and therefore should be banned") without any real grounds for doing so.
No wrongthink allowed! Protect the narrative!
Libertarianism must necessarily be concerned with qualitative outcomes of individual liberty rather than being lured in by axiomatically asserting the existence of freedom by construction (commonly resulting in Newspeak). Analyzing all power structures with an eye for coercion, not falling into the trap of championing new ones with differently-named abstractions while defining away the coercion. The "rightist" deductive logical implication following is of course necessary (one can't get very far without it!), but it is incapable of achieving liberty by itself. Trying to do so inevitably fails spectacularly, which is why there are sibling comments in this thread abusing the concepts of liberty to argue in support of naked authoritarianism.
- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.
- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.
- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.
I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.
And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
Explain why that is a straw-man.
The freedom to own a slave. The freedom to treat women as property. The freedom to kill somebody who may have wronged you.
Just an array of freedoms.
>I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual
Assume for one moment that it is true that science will be able to eliminate natural causes of death in the very near future. If you are a multi-billionaire, what does that mean for you?
What is the biggest danger to you moving forward?
Can the earth support the current population expanding at an ever increasing pace if everyone lives forever?
Is it feasible that the wealthiest 3,000 people on earth can 'control' who has access to the ability to never die a natural death?
Another tidbit: he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic... - Gift link
https://archive.is/mPjPq - Archive link
So yes, he does say it's more likely to be Greta Thunberg than an "evil tech genius", but does not outright say she's the Antichrist.
I still find it strange that he's afraid of her creating a one world government.
You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
Are you wrong or were you lying?
I actually went to listen to it too.
I've seen this nonsense before from journalists
Thiel's words:
> Thiel: ... The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate....
> in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world.
> In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
> downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and individual liberty
People really do be bending over backwards not to hear the words spoken to them if they seem too wacky to be palatable. Dark secret though: billions of people believe truly wacky shit. Some of those people are unbelievably wealthy.
Anyone can go read the transcript. It's quite clear he's saying he believes Greta might very well be the Antichrist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
More likely to be Greta Thunberg isn't saying it's Greta.
———-
Douthat: … It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: OK.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does.
Are you claiming that lying about Haitians eating pets to get people to vote for your anti-immigration platform isn't racist? How do you figure that?
[1] When I was a kid, my muslim immigrant mom told me not to marry a white girl because “they eat snakes.” I married a white girl, and she had in fact eaten a snake before. Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
Democrats’ modern definition takes the social norm against declaring people inferior based on immutable characteristics and uses it to bash through cultural relativism and suppress criticism of cultural change. People have a moral right to use democratic means to create the kind of society they want to live in, and that includes policies to promote and protect their cultural preferences.
> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?
Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.
Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.
Soon you'll get to relive 1875, but now with cell phones.
Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though.
And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.
Like it was racist when Nazis said that Jews control the world and ate children and whatever nonsense you can think of.
Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism. The couch fucker treated them differently, by lying that they specifically are eating pets.
Nobody targeted anyone’s immutable characteristics. If you object to 10,000 Appalachians being resettled in your New England town, that’s not “racism.” It’s an objection based on not wanting them to do to your town what they did to their hometowns in Appalachia. It’s about peoples’ culture and how that manifests in the communities they create.
I think this is hard for liberals to understand because they’re so steeped in cultural relativism. They assume that cultural differences cannot be substantive—cannot shape the communities people create in substantive ways. So they cannot understand why anyone would object to mass settlement of culturally distinct groups except out of prejudice against immutable characteristics. Oddly, they seem to have this blind spot only for non-white people. Most would agree that West Virginia is the way it is because of West Virginians. But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka.
And that's fine to say. However, it isn't acceptable to invent a story that these Bangladeshis are eating pets with the goal to get everyone else to hate them though, especially when the place in question actually majority likes them, and was even asking for extra resources to help them.
It's a public source too, so it doesn't cost you anything to support your claim. Are you recalling something that actually exists, or trying to warp the narrative into whatever supports your perception?
They raised the definition of racism by preemptively asserted that articles leveling “legitimate” accusations of racism wouldn’t count.
For example, here’s an article trying to tie Trump’s growing support among minorities to “multiracial whiteness” and minorities “embrac[ing] white power movements.” From where I’m standing that sure seems like calling minority supporters of Trump white supremacists.
We all know the answer to that question, unfortunately.
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
In fairness, this has almost certainly been true of every governing system in the history of mankind. The powerful get to define the boundaries of the rules of society - the rest of us get to survive within those boundaries. Some government systems provide more flexibility within those boundaries than others - but at the end of the day, at their core - they are really all the same.
Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.
In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.
> billionaire coup
Every objective analysis shows that the majority of billionaires supported Kamala Harris. She raised $1.65 billion against Trump's $1.05 billion: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-har.... She went into the home stretch with a huge cash advantage over Trump: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/campaign-fundraising.... This was the second time Trump won despite being outspent and swimming against the opposition of Wall Street.
the lies is what got us here
To put that into context, replacing the federal workforce with random voters from AOC's district in New York City would double the percentage of Republicans! (https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news/aocs-district-saw-mass...)
> Those donation totals may be explained, at least in part, by the former president’s policies related to those agencies. Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate Education if he is elected. He maintained an adversarial relationship with EPA, proposing in each of his annual budgets to decimate the agency’s spending and meddling in its scientific work. Trump instituted a longstanding hiring freeze at State and referred to it as “the Deep State” Department. Trump has also vowed to do away with a merit-based civil service for much of the federal workforce.
"Employees at institutions being threatened to be dismantled by a presidential candidate do not support that candidate" does not prove what you think it proves. In fact, the same link says Trump got 40% of federal employee donations in 2020, which is much more balanced.
Also donation amounts don't map to votes. From another link on the same site, https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe... --
> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.
We'll need more substantial evidence to believe that these institutions are "permanently controlled by Democrats."
Really? Wow. It does not matter one iota who employees vote for. That is a dark and ugly slope. Maybe we should extend such dystopian views to the periphery, too, such as lobbyists.
It is not a surprise to anyone that people who see themselves as Republican, "the party for smaller government" are less likely to work for said government.
But the insult (and I am not even a public servant) that because people are democrats, they are somehow beholden to that over doing their job professionally, is a strong one. You've basically accused them of having a loyalty to party over their jobs.
There is an interesting concept in chemistry: activation energy. If there is a fuel/oxidizer mixture it takes a certain amount of energy to get the chain reaction started. Too little and the proto-fire will burn out by itself. But pass the threshold and it will continue to blaze until there is nothing left to burn. There is a good chance that we have passed the threshold as a society even though the fire has really only properly begun to burn a few months ago. Maybe it is not too late. But I wouldn't bet on that, too many people are spoiling for a fight, they'd harm their own interests happily if they believed it harms the other guy more.
I had really hoped that by now you'd have seen that the things that you voted for and hoped to see come to pass are not the universal sweet that you thought they would be. But all I see is that every time more news about the disastrous political direction that USA has taken is that you shift your goalposts with it and declare that this too is what you wanted. As a dad of bi-racial kids I would be super worried that those chickens would come home to roost. These are not just paper games and plenty of people who thought their situation in the USA was a safe as houses - and who voted for Trump - have seen that assumption invalidated.
But as they say: a conservative is a liberal with a daughter.
There have always been portions of the US electorate enamored with authoritarianism.
So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill
Democracy for all its imperfections, is symbolic of the idea that the people give power to the government, and that it is the government's duty to give power back to the people. To me, this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Did the people not give money (taxes) and power (accept rule of law) to the government? Is it so bad for the government to return some of that money and power to the people through the New Deal? Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to? I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda. From the quotes you can see how they are twisting the ideal of democracy "power to the people" to instead focus solely on power (to the government), and thus authoritarianism. To disregard that the government is a powerful institution is foolish, of course, as is to assume that it somehow will magically work toward the betterment of the people. But to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane, and the article you posted, when read in its entirety, agrees.
>...to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane...
> I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda
Praise is often used in a diplomatic context as well. Just because bad actors praised FDR, it doesn't necessarily follow that FDR is equally odious.
That said, at the time the US had shifted from the high growth, individualistic era of the Gilded Age, into the collectivism of the Progressive Era. When people talk about fascism here it is often in the accusatory, partisan context.
If you examine collectivist projects, you will find that they almost always require an authoritarian backstop to enforce the agenda. There are direct parallels between the Corporatist economic model and many of the progressive era reforms. Instead of using the word 'Fascism' as a partisan cudgel, it may be more informative to examine the parallels. Specifically here in economic doctrine.
>Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to?
In my view, yes absolutely. While it maybe fair to presume good intent, we could also judge the programs on their outcomes. Cynics typically look towards the special interests which benefit from the state's largess and dismiss the good intentions as a mere marketing ploy. Is self-professed altruism enough?
Federal Reserve (a public private partnership, see Corporatism) Chairman Ben Bernanke famously observed, "You're right, we caused the Great Depression. We're sorry. But thanks to you we'll never do it again." The comment was directed towards Milton Freedman, at his 90th birthday party. This was before Helicopter Ben presided over the 2008 financial crisis.
As for FDR, his new deal programs are widely regarded as deepening and prolonging the Great Depression.
So from an empirical perspective, yes these were specifically bad attempts.
However, I'm going a bit long here, and the main topic of the discussion is Democracy. Aside from empirical evaluations we can also reason about the premises of the democratic process in relation to FDR's programs. One of the key objections to Democracy as an ultimate good, is that the sum of the democratic process, Democracy the ideal, becomes greater than the whole of the participants. Axiomatically, if no single individual has the power to coerce another into an internment camp or force him to sell his labor at a fixed rate; Then by what magical incantation, did the votes of these individuals empower FDR to intern Japanese Americans or enact price controls?
I agree that there is an order of magnitude of difference between history's worst and FDR. However, many of the rationales and some of the methods are similar. If we are truly opposed to those outcomes or ideals, then we should call out the similarities.
That is absolutely not true. That idea is not widely accepted among mainstream historians and economists.
The generally accepted lesson from the depression is that the fed policy was wrong. That theory has been mostly successfully deployed to subsequent recessions.
* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.
* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?
> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:
"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.
And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."
Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.
I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
Just because Palantir founder was being more open about how things are doesnt not make him or rather the company more evil.
Just for disclaimer, I do think Palantir is evil, but not any more or less than Google or Microsoft or any big tech corporation to that matter.
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
And they should have it given the multiple attempts to subjugate them.
I think that pipeline builder is a good tool for building pipelines - however maybe its just my company but there is a sea of very similar tables that have been generated and pipeline builder makes things a lot messier. Personally I would prefer to use data bricks or even M$ Fabric to do pipeline processing - its like a lego version of those tools.
At my company I don't think that the ontological layer is really any more useful than a strict RDBMS warehouse system. It feels like marketing speak when I hear engineers/product managers talk about it. I certainly don't think that it has added any more insights/interlinking. I would like to see clear examples of benefits to this data structure over traditional warehousing approaches rather than hype.
I'm not blown away by Workshop - for reporting/visualization I would use PowerBI/Tableau (far superior). For app development (i.e. some kind of intelligent spreadsheet to allow opps people to use it) its ok - but quite clunky. Its a lego like system - and I'm not convinced as an app its better than excel on sharepoint (broadly speaking its worse). Again I think its all marketing.
Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
Good luck with that
I'll be seen as a friend of the bots. A Godfather who funded their existence in the first place. The Digital Gods will favor me and my 100 shares as one of their own creators
/s (hope that was obvious. In reality, I'm pretty sure Theil's influence on the current admin will only increase Palantir's influence in the gov, but I don't think we're here for my speculative DD)
Eventually jumped in at $40 just before the election, as well as picking some bargain shares in critical mineral mining/processing. All are looking very good right now.
Like...they're a software firm. They specialize in government contracting. They sell software to the government, to fulfill tenders and requests asked for by the government (which is its own subset because government contracting generally sucks and is it's own skillset).
https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Basically they're selling BI-solutions for tyranny, usually by convincing government officials that it's a good idea to aggregate data sets that are separate for good reasons and then they'll achieve greater power over their subjects. That's the idea in the NHS project, that's what they're doing in the US and so on.
When your Navy literally can't defeat the Houthis, you know for an ironclad 100% certainty that there's zero chance they're capable of beating China -- right off the coast of China!
The American military could not successfully build a stable Iraqi democracy or completely suppress sectarian violence.
They absolutely destroyed the Iraqi conventional military and occupied the country for 8 years though.
China has a lot of resources, but they have not turned those into the type of resources which can fight and defeat the US military conventionally and have a serious power-projection problem compared to the logistical mobility the US military enjoys mastery of.
Which again highlights the absurdity of saying "couldn't defeat the Houthis, can't defeat China" as though you're comparing apples to apples.
The other absurdity is of course the supposition that anyone wants a war to be good for business: checkout how that's going for Russia's defence contractors. No: the fear of a war is good for business. An arms build up or modernization program is good for business. An actual war is ubiquitously terrible for business.
Doubt.
> an adversary with a 11 aircraft carriers
Didn't a couple of them literally tuck tail and run from the Houthis? Besides, three of them are scheduled for maintenance between 2027 and 2030.
> the largest submarine fleet in the world
Those subs are at a severe disadvantage in the very shallow waters of the South China Sea, which are riddled with all manner of sensors.
> serious power-projection problem
Irrelevant. Wouldn't we be fighting them over there?
Last year, and not for want of trying, the US Navy sure didn't do anything to destroy the Houthi's conventional military capabilities. They're still sinking ships left and right! So much for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas.
> https://edition.cnn.com/world/middleeast/eternity-c-houthi-r...
Now imagine the USN actually has to fight a war in shallow waters against a foe that's literally 10,000x better armed and equipped than the Houthis, and with a capacity for industrial production that dwarfs its own.
War is a measuring rod. Before it begins, each side guesses at its own strength and the other's will. Often it guesses wrong. (In Ukraine, NATO overrated its weapons and tactics, Russia both overrated its own capabilities, and underrated Ukraine's resolve.) But if both sides know the truth beforehand, they don't fight to begin with. Thus there's literally zero chance that there's a war between the US and China in 2027, because the outcome is not really in doubt.
The problem they're facing is they can't reduce that capability to zero without starting a half-dozen other wars to deal with a logistical supply chain.
> https://news.usni.org/2025/07/29/houthis-to-target-ships-in-...
As for "they can't reduce that capability to zero," the CFR made the same point a little while back: https://www.cfr.org/blog/houthis-have-defeated-us-navy-or-wh...
But it was turned around and reframed a little bit, where the inability of the USN to achieve anything tangible represents an absolute failure on their part. This is a more sober and credible read of the situation. If your tool doesn't work, what good is it? And if you think that the same tool is up for the job of fighting in the South China Sea, it seems to me that you ought to reassess your opinion. Expeditionary naval forces don't work very well these days. (Something that Russia also learned in the Black Sea.)
The Houthis aren't invading or occupying anything they didn't already own. No one is trying to take it from them. They are an insurance risk.
China trying to invade and occupy Taiwan is an existential threat for the people of Taiwan, and the volume and value of materials and men China would have to move across the Strait of Taiwan would vastly exceed the value of the missiles which would be targeted against them (and in fact would be targeted more aggressively since the US in part avoids expending missiles so as to retain reserves against more serious opponents - in a straight up fight with China though, you'd be much more liberal in your targeting priorities), which is what the US Navy is built to do. A platform being vulnerable to some new tactic does not make the platform useless, and if a minor upgrade would fix it then it just means you're in a transition point. If laser-equipped American destroyers with fleets of mixed capability interceptor UAVs in 2 years time are ensuring nothing touches a ship in the Red Sea, your theory would be in immense trouble - and that technology isn't theoretical, it's being deployed right now.
But perhaps if you really want to consider the problem, then just take a look at what China is building: missile destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers and stealth fighters. If all these things are so worthless and could not fight and defeat China, then why is China spending so much money trying to exactly replicate those capabilities if the future is all drones all the time or whatever other internet sensation of the moment (i.e. a year back when "the end of the tank was nigh" according to the internet).
Because: One of their best opening moves is a blockade of Taiwan, and that requires naval assets.
And because: There is such a thing as hedging your bets. No matter what anybody thinks, it is unwise to bet everything on your missile forces or new drones. You don't want to overcommit to one strategy or one way of waging war and later realize that you need to fall back on older means and methods. (As experienced by the Russians in 2022-2023.) So building a navy may be nothing more than a hedge against the possibility that other ways of making war won't work out.
But there's really no avoiding the fact that mobile launchers like the DF21/26/41 can launch a small LEO SAR constellation (i.e. just a few satellites) and a few ~10 minute contacts per day would provide enough targeting data to pinpoint any US surface fleet in the western Pacific. It's easy to see how a sufficient volume of missiles removes them from the board.
As an aside:
> If laser-equipped American destroyers
It's almost laughably easy to harden drones and missiles to high-power lasers. You can even retrofit old ones. Various different methods have been known since the 1970s. Lasers might work against trash-tier weapons and DJI drones, but the minute they become common on the battlefield countermeasures will become ubiquitous.
You actually need a balance of power to prevent an armed political conflict, so the adults in the room will maintain one.
> "You actually need a balance of power"
Yeah, but it has to be credible. If it's not credible, or hinges on vague wunderwaffen or failed concepts, then it only exists if both sides swallow one side's propaganda. (Or unless nukes come into play, but then you get MAD game theory and it's unwise to open that can of worms unless necessary.)
There are innumerable possibilities if the US assists Taiwan, especially through the lens of hybrid warfare and not pitched battles. We have no motivation from a strategic standpoint to give China the naval war they want, so why would we?
Palintir's reach is worrying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
Just swapping different big consulting firms around.
I remember when Booz Allen was the bad guy. I just checked and apparently this is what they call themselves these days "an American company specializing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.
What's their promise?
What is the solution? Is it more corporate controlled, incompetence in government? Or is it less government that is focused on core issues and building competency and trust?
Government isn't the problem here, it's the victim.
See for example (and yes I’d get cancelled for pointing this out) govt purchasing from ULA vs govt purchasing from SpaceX