Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
wired.com
wired.com
It's also insane that a PAC campaigning against Bores is funded by current Palantir employee Lonsdale. Their critical ads literally criticize him for working for Palantir.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
It's life imitating The Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsCTpREM48M
It’s also a little funny to turn a thread about the blatant failures of a neoliberal “success” story into a weird criticism of the left.
If you decide that your work is against your values, you're also deciding to separate yourself from the group, even if you don't actually leave the company. That's painful. It's not an excuse, but it is a powerful motivator.
Words are cheap, thoughts are cheap, and voting is cheap. A full-time job, on the other hand, is a substantial contribution towards something, and it comes with a huge opportunity cost. The job you have is a major factor in determining your moral character. Determining what kind of a person you actually are, as opposed to the kind of a person you believe to be, or wish you'd be.
Extrapolating that to Meta or Google is a fundamental misunderstanding of history and insenstive.
This is equally true for leftist projects. If one is dedicated to the cause of improving the general welfare and creating economic and social opportunities for as many as possible, that's laudable, but you can't use it as an excuse to just ignore the human rights whenever you run into a problem or a tricky ethical situation.
Ethics and laws are for chumps like us. Because we don’t have the financial and legal muscle to challenge the state.
Certainly it's true that the incentives of corporations push you to ignore ethics. But that's why they're ethics: they're precisely the things you should do that you don't have to do. That's what morality is. Sure, for the purposes of doing things about unethical companies, it might be best to view all corporations as fundamentally unethical because that implies that the right place to make society better is by opposing their behavior with laws. But at an everyday human level everyone is responsible for exactly the things that they do and being at a corporation in no way changes it at all.
It is ok to harm another group of people financially and even personally because that’s what “business does”. Degradation being a ratchet that calcifies unethical behavior doesn’t help. Companies tend to get less ethical the older and larger they become.
The phrase essentially describes subsuming individuality in favour of group interests. You see similar refrains in militaries, monarchies, non-profits and HOAs.
It’s an irritating take. But personally I don’t move in the same circles as those making ethically dubious and partially legal decisions.
Do I want corporations to be ethical? Yes. Will I campaign for that and call my senator and congressman? Yes.
Are corporation lobbyists calling my congressman and senator with boatloads of money? You bet.
I don’t think everyone understands how disruptive privacy violations are. I think the best place to begin is start educating kids in high school about it, like they do for sex ed.
Am I willing to put money on the line and risk unemployment in the current market? Depends.
It's made me rethink my life and how I do the same thing and was the impetus for me leaving tech.
Also the funny tendency humans have to dislike the people who are most similar to them. Someone who is at least recognizing factory farming is bad and willing to even think that far is more similar to a vegetarian than the people who don't give a shit and never even think about where their food is coming from.
Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.
Not necessarily. I mean, the people who give out an uncomfortable laugh do exhibit signs of cognitive dissonance.
I don't have an issue with accepting both statements: factory farming is awful, and I still eat meat.
There is no cognitive dissonance.
The logic is straightforward: I do not believe that me, an individual, abstaining from meat is going to do much to factory farming, while it will make a huge, adverse impact on my life.
Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved), and I'm all for voting for bans on factory farming, heavy taxes on meat products, etc.
One's gotta pick their battles.
I pick ones where my participation won't amount to martyrdom.
I eat meat. And I'm highly, highly morally conflicted. I'll leave it at that to avoid sounding hypothetical—except to mention that the only logical reason I don't go vegetarian/vegan is the work and personal development that'd be required of me. (I'll take being called lazy over disingenuous any day, if we're ostensibly virtue signaling here.)
During 10 year I gently removed some ingredients of my diets/habits and added others in the meantime. It was longer but way easier than I imagined.
Good luck, you lazy :-)
Thanks for the encouragement!
You completely missed the point.
In the context of picking battles, martyrdom is (self) sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, with no direct gain for the cause.
Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life, without possibly making a meaningful impact on unethical farming.
I'm well off. You might be. Most people in the US are not.
And in the end of the day, poor people are going to buy the cheapest products in the grocery store.
So, there's always be a demand as long as there's supply.
More than that. We don't really have a choice for where meat comes from anyway. There's no requirement to put that on the label, along with nutritional data.
That, by the way, is another example where legislation can make a lot of difference.
My point is that abstaining from meat is about as useful as that young man setting himself of fire in the US to help children in Gaza.
Same goes about feeling bad about eating meat (while eating it).
The impact on the cause is zero.
Your energy would be better spent fighting the ag-gag laws, requiring disclosures on the labels, making ethically farmed products cheaper (and factory farmed produce more expensive), and so on.
You having morally conflicted feelings doesn't help anyone.
And it's simple, really: you are complicit in doing a bad thing. But the complicity is not in doing the thing, it's in supporting the system where in doing it is the rational choice for the majority of people.
Your choice in doing or not doing the thing has very little impact on whether the thing happens.
On the first clause, exactly. (The second clause appears to be a bit of ad lib.)
> Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life
I don't think the concept of 'martyrdom' encompasses self-interest. It does however consider the cause/s of other beings. So I maintain, not a very cognitively consonant use of the term.
The original definition of martyr is: "a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty for declaring belief in and refusing to renounce a religion"[1].
It's suffering for the sake of being true to one's faith; impact of that decision on anyone else not being a factor in whether one is a martyr.
Abstaining from meat consumption when it's something you really enjoy is martyrdom in that sense: you are sticking to your moral principles while having no impact on the proliferation of unethical farming.
>I don't think the concept of 'martyrdom' encompasses self-interest
You think incorrectly. The concept of martyrdom means forgoing the self-interest of self-preservation and not being in pain. There's no martyrdom without sacrifice.
>It does however consider the cause/s of other beings.
It may, in the modern sense of the word, but it doesn't have to. See the linked definition. The causes for which one martyrs themselves may vary. The unifying factor is suffering in the name of the cause.
Not suffering with the effect of making something happen. It's choosing to suffer in the name of something that makes one a martyr.
Martyrdom is not an efficient way to bring the cause closer to reality.
> So I maintain, not a very cognitively consonant use of the term.
You can maintain it's not the correct usage of the term, dictionaries be damned, but cognitive consonance has nothing to do with that.
Do you even do any grocery shopping where you live?
Not long ago, I could get chicken for $0.99/pound, same as the cheapest tomatoes, whereas quality tomatoes sold for $2.99/pound.
Now the prices for meat are up, but chicken still costs $1.99/pound[1], while decent tomatoes are $3.99/pound[2].
Even if you are thrifty and find cheaper tomatoes, they are incomparable to chicken in nutritional value.
You know the expression "chicken soup for the soul"? There's a reason it's not "tomato soup for the soul" (as much as I love gazpacho).
> I'd assume poor people also like the taste of meat
Try eating on a budget instead of assuming what them "poor people" like.
[1] https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.960014952.html?...
[2] https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.184570092.html
First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy - which are what the 0.99/p chicken eat [edit: and it's closer in term of nutrients].
Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale. The grains price should be the one paid by the fermer, adjusted for smaller packaging. Your comparaison may stands where you live because of political choices and societal evolution. It doesn’t in a more liberal and non regulated juridictions, does it?
It's a direct answer to the question asked by the parent.
The answer is: no, vegetables are not cheaper than meat in the US.
It is perverse. Which is my point: what enables the low, low price of chicken isn't merely the laws of supply and demand.
>First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy
Those are not vegetables. Those are grains and legumes, respectively.
>Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale.
No shit.
Which is my point exactly: the problem is addressed by government regulation, and exists because of government regulation, including, but not limited to, subsidies to particular forms of farming, and ag gag laws.
>Your comparaison may stands where you live
Well of course I can speak about where I live.
And yeah, we're talking in English on a US-based website (specifically, a Silicon Valley one). I am talking about the US, a country of about 350M people.
It's not like I'm talking about a small state few people have heard of with no impact on anything. The situation in the US matters because it influences a lot.
Canada isn't that different from the US food-wise, for that matter.
> a plant or part of a plant that is eaten as food. Potatoes, beans and onions are all vegetables.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
I'm don't want to argue on definitions though but the chicken/tomatoes comparaison hardly make sense in an answer to satvikpendem: he mentioned vegatable in comparaison to meat in a poor people diet. In that situation one would certainly aim mainly for cheap and nutritious staples AKA grains and legumes instead of tomatoes.
At least we agree on the regulation impact! I wish you a pleasant Californian day :-)
Aside, I'm not sure why you're being so aggressive in your comments, it doesn't make for good discourse when one says things like "you've completely missed the point" or "no shit" or the oft seen pattern of quoting and rebutting each line. If I were to speak to my friends that way I'd quickly lose friends.
Quit being such a fruit.
But that is precisely acting as a martyr.
You're "highly morally conflicted", which means you suffer inside. You could stop that suffering by either 1) going vegan, so you don't have to worry about it, or 2) deciding to continue eating meat and no longer worry about it. Right now, you're picking the strictly worse combination of continuing to eat meat and remaining conflicted indefinitely.
I'm starting to realize that internal moral conflicts are a lot like physical pain - it's an important signal from the body, and you should pay attention to it, but in the end, if you know you're not going to do anything about the underlying cause, then there's no point in continuing to suffer - you just make it go away with painkillers, and carry on living. This does not mean denying the problem - quite the opposite. Constant pain makes it hard to think rationally, and suppressing it puts you in a much better position to address its underlying cause.
My cynical inner pedant compels me to point out that societal collapse will also solve "factory farming is awful". And we're probably closer to that than effective government regulation of it.
You can easily chose 'not factory farmed' and still eat meat. You just don't. I'm guessing unless you grew up rich or very recently, you consume more meat now than you were accustomed too growing up. In that case you choose to actively benefit from the factory farming.
So, you get the point of having legislation like laws prohibiting child labor instead of moral grandstanding calling on people to abstain from purchasing unethically produced goods, right?
>We now eat pigs, animals smarter than dogs, that lived tortured lives while wearing clothing made by children.
Which goes to show my point: the problem of child labor has only ever been resolved by having legislation against it.
Not by passing the (un)ethical choice onto the consumer.
>I'm guessing unless you grew up rich or very recently, you consume more meat now than you were accustomed too growing up.
I grew up in a communal flat in post-USSR-collapse Ukraine with five families to 1 toilet, in case you are wondering, and no, I don't consume any more meat now than I was accustomed to growing up.
I don't see how that is related to anything I'm saying, other than trying to go for another holier-than-thou ad hominem.
>You can easily chose 'not factory farmed' and still eat meat.
Pray tell how.
Let's be specific. I live in California, and while I consider myself well off, I'm not what you'd call rich.
I shop in stores like Lucky, Ralph's, and 99 ranch.
When I go to those stores, how do I tell which meat was "factory farmed", and which wasn't? Honest question, because that information isn't on the label.
Which is, again, a point I am making: it should be illegal to not put this information along with nutrition data.
Vegetarian options got cheap, and I still eat locally produced eggs and some milk products.
But like, awful can be coped with. Everyone thinks factory farming is awful. Few give a shit.
All that is to say: some people act less ethical then others, and should have to accept that fact - instead of trying to produce an image of the self (to themselves mostly but also to others) that conceals it; be it through normalization ("guess we all do that"), rationslization ("if i wouldn't do it someone else would"), or blame shifting (if someone would do this and that i would behave like that, so it's up to them to provide me with xyz)
edit: I apply that to myself. I know that I don't act as ethical as I could regarding the consequences of my diet.
Not that I'm in any position to criticize; I'm in the cognitive dissonance camp.
Have you considered consuming "ethical" animal products (e.g. free range eggs or whatever?) That doesn't seem like martyrdom; compared to what you want (government mandated livestock welfare) it only costs you marginally more (due to missing economies of scale.)
It's not an all-or-nothing thing indeed; there's a huge spectrum between veganism and not at all thinking (or caring) about where the animal products come from.
But yes, I, as a consumer, am not responsible for what is already heavily regulated in favor of factory farmers. Heard of the ag gag laws? You can't vegan them away.
It's not a free market, see.
It's as delusional to blame people for eating the availableunethically produced meat as it is to blame them for starving during the Holodomor (..or Great New Leap, or the Irish Potato Famine, or...).
Radium-based snake oil "medicine" didn't disappear because the consumers boycotted an unethical product. It was because we have FDA.
I really do not feel responsible for what would amount to trying to enforce regulation that doesn't exist.
I am responsible for voting, so when it comes to the ballot, ethical farming does get my vote.
(Not disagreeing with you, just mentioning it because your statement inside made me think of it)
The agricultural market is perhaps the furthest thing from it, given the importance of, well, having food. Farmers get subsidies. Nation-states get involved in the circulation of food around the planet. Geopolitics comes into play.
In some markets, individual choices of consumers matter a lot in shaping them.
Agricultural products are as far from that as it's possible.
I am not convinced that not buying unethical meat does any more than not buying unethical weapons of mass destruction, or not using Palantir's products.
Few of us are hoarding stashes of chemical weapons or signing contracts with Palantir, and yet Palantir still thrives.
Perhaps simply not buying it isn't always the most effective way to end something.
I noted this in another comment, but the "free-range" designation means almost nothing. Hens have access to the outdoors, but that can mean a packed coop with no grass where part is missing a roof.
Look for "Certified Humane" or research the farm directly.
Side note: I've never seen that "certified humane" label. I'll look for it though.
The people who are saying that it's "easier than ever" to be buying ethically farmed products are full of it.
Aren’t they alive too? What if they were conscious? If they aren’t but still a lifeform, that makes it perfectly okay?
No answers, just makes me wonder at times if common ethics is all it’s cracked up be.
Is eating plants not required for sustenance or nutrition really justifiable? (Chocolate, sugar, spices, …)
Well, they're not.
> If they aren’t but still a lifeform, that makes it perfectly okay?
According to Jains: No. Violence against plants, insects, and possibly even certain microorganisms is considered unethical.
IMO as an irreligious person: Yes. Life is just a particular form of self-sustaining and self-propagating system. Those properties are of little to no moral value.
"Cage free" and "no antibiotics" are probably the only USDA-regulated terms worth caring about, but they're fairly low bars. "Certified Humane" designation is a higher, well-audited bar, but many farms that might qualify forgo it due to the costs associated.
not the person you replied to, but it mostly would for me. Factory farms are among the closest things to hell on earth.
I eat meat, but try to limit it to once a week and have replaced milk with oat and soy in a lot of places. I still love cheese but it does give me conflict when I spend even a second thinking about what it takes to actually get cheese. (Cows dont lactate without pregnancy). That said, my own personal philosophy is that we have likely evolved to consume animal products so I cant dismiss it fully, just reduce my own consumption. ~75% of all agricultural land is used to feed livestock, yet livestock produces only 18% of the world's calories and 37% of its protein, which just seems insanity to me.
factory farms would stop breeding animals to kill them? Did you think you had an argument here?
Isn't all life sentient?
If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?
Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it.
It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me.
I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant).
But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.
Did you mean I acknowledge the sentience of plants but not animals?
I believe that all life might be conscious, but life that is "very different" from me I have a hard time imagining what that consciousness might be like. For animals, especially mammals, I can easily imagine what they must be feeling and empathize with them. I can understand that a cow feels pain when hurt, because the cow is very similar to me. A plant might also feel pain when hurt (even the grass I step on might not appreciate me walking on it), but I'd have a harder time empathizing with that.
'Former' and 'latter' were in reference to the two questions I posed to you.
What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us.
In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
You are very wrong here by orders of magnitudes. The US produces about 5 billion bushes of soybeans. 1 bushel is around 60 lbs. Having made tofu myself, depending on the type of tofu you make 1 lb of dry soybeans is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 lbs of tofu(remember we are adding water to the mix so we increase weight). If 1 bushel is 60 lbs and we produce 5 billion then we have 136 million metric tons of soybeans which makes 272 million tons of tofu which is enough to feed the entire US several times over.
This doesn't even begin to touch the amount of food you can make from the byproduct of tofu, soy pulp which is itself a food in some countries.
I'm not suggesting we actually do it but to answer your question of "is tofu the answer," it could be. The vast majority of our soybean crop was sold to other countries until Trump tariffs made China switch from us to Russia. I'm not sure what the current status of our soybean production is but we have the crop production to feed the entire US.
To your first point about the small animals in the fields that are harmed by agriculture, I think that's worth having concern about overall, certainly. But many of the animals that people currently consume are fed large quantities of crops that incur that same cost. The average beef cattle is eating such things for 18 months prior to being slaughtered, breeding sows do the same for 3-5 years, and their offspring 5-6 months on average.
If there are advances in things like cultured meat that can be produced in a sort of industrial setting at a competitive price it might be possible to drastically limit both the conscious and inadvertent harm to animals.
Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals.
> In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
Assuming you stick with it, I think that could be a good idea.
I lived for a year in a suburb of Charlotte NC a couple of years ago, and there were herds of whitetails on my dog walks.
I'd like to learn more about "Chronic Wasting Disease" if you have any resources, because on podcasts or r/Archery and the like, "harvesting your own food" is par for the course. Thank you.
It's much more efficient to use land to grow food crops for people to eat directly than it is to grow food for livestock and then have people eating the livestock.
It's one of the reasons that I've been pescetarian for a few decades - it's unsustainable for everyone to eat substantial amounts of meat and there's a lot of deforestation just to sate people's desire for burgers.
What do you do now?
Personally I don't think I would recommend it. Not that it's necessarily a bad choice but I think that the people for who this is the right choice will feel compelled to make a change regardless of what I say (I know I had people trying to convince me to stay in tech). Fully changing careers like this and living the poor and overworked grad student life in my 30s has taken more commitment and stubbornness than I had expected but some fights are worth doing.
Yes, animals have feelings and are intelligent (to varying degrees, but generally a lot more then most think). Modern meat factories are absolute shit shows and it's outlandishly bad our societies treat the animals like that.
However, it doesn't have to be that way. And killing an animal for food which lived a nice life is perfectly fine. We're all part of the physical reality in which the survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Even if you want to put your head into the sand and deny this, animals eating each other is perfectly normal. And yes, humans are animals too.
> It seems like if it's normal enough people will say something is bad and will happily do it anyway.
But let's agree to disagree there
There’s an endless list of atrocities committed by our ancestors or our peers in the animal kingdom that we no longer tolerate. There’s no reason why eating another animal can’t someday become as abhorrent as cannibalism or slavery or whatever.
So here's the conundrum: should I be sick and avoid the food that makes me feel really good, because of ethical concerns? Self-preservation, I believe, should be the top-most concern.
Whenever I hear vegans preaching, I think of the quote "for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" — if veganism works for you, I'm glad, but I wish most vegans would be a bit more empathetic and scientifically-minded rather than making people feel bad because, for many reasons, they live their life another way. A way, must I say, that is completely natural.
Honestly I'd rather have a discussion about nutrition with a vegetarian, than a preachy vegan that first insults me, shames me, before trying to hear my reasons.
In fact, I've had the idea floating around my head for a while now for "fully ethical" meat, where you don't even kill the animal, just wait around for it to die of old age. Depending on your views on euthanasia, maybe if the animal gets like cancer or something and is evidently suffering, gently kill it to put it out of its misery because that might overall reduce suffering.
Also, pardon my asking a possibly stupid question out of ignorant curiosity, but if you're vegan for ethical reasons, why not eat eggs? My stepmom had some chickens a while ago, they lived lives that seemed pretty happy, they hung around the backyard eating stuff on the ground + the food we gave them, relatively free to move around (we did put up a small fence to keep them away from the dogs and cats, who did not exactly have a stellar track record of veganism, but they were free to roam inside that safe space) they laid eggs, because there was no rooster around to fertilize the eggs the eggs weren't going to go anywhere... did us eating those eggs hurt anyone?
ps. Im by no means a saint in this regard, but I have moved to soy milk and eat much less red meat generally, both out of self-interest for the health aspects, but also partially as I think its better for the environment generally. I suppose I should give up chicken, but its a habit hard to break in my social circle. My point is a gradual move by degrees is still improvement, when integrated over the whole population.
Look up Mike Bisping, someone you would typically class as a tough man. Even he couldn't work in a slaughter house. So imagine what it does to your psyche day in and day out having to kill animals. Slaughterhouse workers suffer from PTSD. In one report one worker described how a pig came up to him and gently headbutted him (like a cat showing affection). He had to suppress his compassion to be able to kill it. How effed up is that?
We can vote with our wallet to reduce or stop all that.
In regards to eggs, I would say eating eggs from chickens you have in your garden is OK. There are folks who rescue chickens and let the roam in their garden and eat their eggs. There are certain vegans who complain about that. That is being dogmatic.
And what you suggested, eating meat from animals who died naturally and didn't have to be killed for you, I'd even class that as vegan, because no animal had to suffer. But it wouldn't be profitable as a business, so I don't see how it can work on a large scale or replace factory farming.
We need cultured meat or simply train ourselves to enjoy plant based foods. Dr Wareham said it will take a few weeks for your taste buds to 'like' other foods. And you get enough of nutrients and protein from those foods. Plenty of top athletes prove that point.
Or folks who eat road kill, I'd say that's also vegan. The animal died by accident. You didn't pay for it to be killed, i.e. you didn't contribute to the demand that keeps the meat & dairy industry running.
EDIT: typos & clarity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_environmental_impac...
Clams. Clams and oysters and such. Sessile bivalves are the plants of the animal kingdom, the "genetically engineered brainless cow" of nature. They're also environmentally friendly even when farmed, and more healthy than any animal meat while addressing the same nutritional needs and more. They're almost comically ethical and healthy (and seafood dishes are great imo), they just don't produce bacon and burgers specifically.
The only thing people will say that annoys me is the "but animals eat other animals" argument from otherwise intelligent people (no worries if children say it). I've yet to meet someone who sincerely thinks that what happens in nature is ethically okay (as a simple point, many animals will eat their own family when stressed and sexually assault each other constantly, which are very natural but obviously unethical for humans to do. I've seen animals torture and eat each other alive) so the whole argument is a waste of time. It's weird that the "it's natural" argument is probably the most common when many people will walk it back even before I point out the flaws.
Then you would have to argue that an omnivore eating meat is immoral while a carnivore eating meat is moral. I wouldn't enjoy defending that statement.
Most people get proseltyzed abt veg before independence. As adults, few reconsider, replaying childhood scripts.
Then, society papers over reality.
() oops just realized that tracks your tall person analogy.
I can understand someone being vegan because they believe eating plants is healthier. I can understand being vegan because you don’t like the taste of meat. But bringing any moral/religious reasons for it always seemed silly to me. There’s nothing more natural than one animal eating another. Humans evolved from mostly vegetarian monkeys to predators
Considering that this is nowadays a substantially less common background, and probably trending that direction indefinitely, this reads more as you being desensitized. It's not like vegans are unaware that people could have a background like yours.
> But bringing any moral/religious reasons for it always seemed silly to me. There’s nothing more natural than one animal eating another. Humans evolved from mostly vegetarian monkeys to predators
Morals and religion aren't about what's natural, they're about what humans desire. Illness, violence, and deception are all perfectly "natural."
So how do you get from that to human cannibalism == bad?
The naturalism argument has a zillion counterexamples of things that used to be considered natural and now we arbitrarily consider bad.
I have no doubt whatsoever that half the people I know and love would have owned slaves or at least defended slavery if they were born into a time where it was commonplace. They easily would have bought into nonsense science or religious arguments about the intelligence or moral value of this race over that, like they do for animals.
However, I lead a morally imperfect lifestyle. I get around by driving or being driven in a car, even when it would only be moderately less convenient to walk or bike or take transit. A few dollars could feed children in poverty for weeks, and I spend on lot more than "a few" dollars on luxuries like travel. By my measure, knowingly choosing not to prevent human suffering on such a scale is massively worse than eating meat, but at the end of the day, I don't consider myself or others in my position to be monsters.
> The other thing I see is casting every human as sacred and every non-human living thing as without value, or, at least less value than a single meal.
While I believe non-human animals generally have greater moral value than a single meal - the most widely consumed animals are clearly capable of suffering and IMO intelligent enough for most to instinctively empathize with - I don't think it's particularly strange for humans to view humans as sacred.
Many if not most people view morality as rooted in the golden rule, and non-human animals are incapable of making moral considerations the way humans are.
Even just considering gut feelings - let's say we presented a trolley problem, on one side one's close friends and family members, on the other side some number of chickens. I would be very surprised at genuine responses opting to save the chickens. Personally, I would sacrifice literally any number of chickens.
> Many if not most people view morality as rooted in the golden rule, and non-human animals are incapable of making moral considerations the way humans are.
Ironically making us the only animals capable of moral evil.
> Even just considering gut feelings - let's say we presented a trolley problem, on one side one's close friends and family members, on the other side some number of chickens. I would be very surprised at genuine responses opting to save the chickens. Personally, I would sacrifice literally any number of chickens.
Is this due to a internally consistent moral value system apart from a view of humans as sacred? If on the other side of the trolley were some of a race of aliens, smarter, better, faster, younger, and more emblematic of the human ideals by way of virtue than the humans on the other side, would you save the aliens? Probably not. Your preference to preserve other people is very natural and probably hard-wired into your brain. That doesn't mean it isn't human chauvinism.
If people were pragmatic instead, and the vegan community would quit alienating people the non-perfect, non-purists the world would be slightly better, too.
For example, in my country licorice is popular. Whether it contsins gelatin or not, not one pig less will be killed because it is a by-product.
10 years ago, I went to a workshop (with DIY) on how to make vegetarian and vegan sausages, and since you mention sausage, I'll use that as another example. A sausage contains herbs and vegetables (to develop taste) and certain chemistry (= cooking) techniques, for example salt and to keep the product together. It is relatively easy to make something akin to that yourself. Heck, one can sauté carrots and build something akin to a hotdog fairly easy.
Comparing it to gelatin is unrealistic, but to say sausages are made from the best meat of the animal? No, minced meat is not since then they wouldn't mince it (as rule of thumb). Frikadel is another example eaten a lot here (NL), the Germans also got their sausage culture.
Meanwhile, there's a much more dramatic example: chicken. There's a lot less meat on those birds per serving, so suffering per human/day on avg omni diet is much worse. But does that mean one should avoid free range chicken eggs? No.
And that is ignoring the environmental impact, since there too a vegan diet (with avocado and almonds requiring a plethora of water and movement of product to market) isn't ideal either (the latter might be less of issue for say Cali).
So in short, we should welcome those people who love bacon to 1) consume less bacon 2) try vegn alternatives. But it doesn't have to be either they're vegan or omni 24/7. Flexitarianism is much more reasonable for a lot of people, and also many situations can arise where such is desirable (such as gifted food, festivities, etc).
Written by someone who follows a pragmatic vegn diet.
Some people have thought about it and are just deflecting, of course, but not everyone.
The two paths I see would be giving up a lot, including my family since I doubt my wife would go along with it, and live a much less consumptive lifestyle, starting with less space. In the meantime, billions of people in China/India/Brazil/Nigeria are waiting to increase their consumption.
Or I stick my head in the sand and continue ignoring the problem and living the one life I have, and let nature take whatever course it will.
But farmers also enjoy high societal standing here, maybe that helps.
> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
But there's something bigger that you allude to, which is that very few peoplel think of themselves as the bad guys. People separate themselves from the harm they contribute to or they dehumanize the targets of that harm and then argue they deserve it somehow or simply that this is necessary for some reason (eg lesser evil arguments).
I eschew the concept of "bad guys" in general because it's a non-argument. Philosophically and politically it's known as "idealism" [1][2]. It's saying "we are the good guys because we are the good guys" and everyone think they're the good guys.
The alternative to this is materialism [3] and historical materialism [4]. There is no metaphysical or inherent goodness (or badness). You are the sum of your actions and their impact on the world. Likewise you are a product of your material world.
So we don't really need to go down the rabbit hole of figuring out if, say, FB/Meta or Palantir is a "good" company or if the employees are or feel "good". We can simply look at the impact and whether that impact was intentional or otherwise foreseeable.
And that record for Meta really isn't good eg Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide [5] or FB's real world harm from spreading misinformation [6].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism_in_international_rela...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
[5]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[6]: https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devasta...
I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast. I and many others had enough of Silicon Valley.
Side note: I find it illuminating that one of the most popular social apps that birth social trends did not come from Silicon Valley, but China. I don't think Silicon Valley can drive social trends at all (anti-humanity types are too prevalent).
Yes, because Wall Street is a paragon of ethical corporate behavior.
To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.
It's exactly this over reliance on companies to shape society that got us in this mess
I'm not an American, never set foot in the US for that matter, but I'd say I'm pretty sympathetic to the people actually living there. All this to say that I've recently had the same realisation as you when it comes to West Coast people vs East Coast people, by this point the SV automatons are way, way outside of "normal life", maybe that has always been the case but for sure back in those days SV didn't have the same power as it has now (I'm not talking money, even though that is important, I'm talking actual power to have control over people's lives), not by a long shot.
Can you clarify what you mean by "believes in"?
I believe Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field, that he was an expert convincer. Do you hate me or do you hate him or do you hate something else entirely?
The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?"
The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.
“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”
It didn't help that the workload was a joke. I believe the entirety of our assignments were 5 single page "essay" responses to some ethical scenarios, and the professor seemed to hand out As just for writing enough. It probably took me less than 2 hours of total writing. I imagine most of the students these days are just having ChatGPT write it for them. We absolutely need to take ethics more seriously though, even if it involves adding more/more rigorous courses to the curriculum.
I don’t know if that is still the case though, I’m not sure how relevant BCS membership is these days, I don’t know anyone who has it.
It can also have the opposite of the intended effect when it encourages beliefs that bad behavior is normalized in the industry. I've heard an executive try to drum up support for a program to sell customer data by saying that everyone does it, from Facebook to Google. When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it. They had read so much about big companies collecting customer data to sell that they thought everyone did it and therefore it was okay.
I'm not sure there's a significant meaningful difference between direct selling and what they actually do, which is to make it available to target and manipulate people with extreme granularity. This is a huge part of why a person may not want their data to be held much less purchased to begin with, meaning it's "doesn't sell your data... but does or facilitates all of the things you do not want a group, in buying it from them, able to do."
It's a distinction without much practical difference.
Also: They buy your data from other brokers who do sell it, vastly enriching the degree to which customers of their ad platforms can make use of the data you already know they have far, far beyond your ability to know their full capabilities and the profile they have on you.
Again, it's not actually selling your data, but it's worth noting that when "they didn't believe it", that misconception was possibly helped along by Facebook or Google being on of the potential customers for that data either directly or via the proxy of a data broker whose largest customers are companies like that.
A (covert) investment in us today can make you seem like an angel tomorrow! Also, with this agenda we're probably going to make a fortune so you might as well get in on the ground floor. Why just fall into hell when you could take one of our luxurious express elevators and get there twice as fast?
Like a guy who has taken home office supplies from work is not on the same level morally as someone doing home break ins.
> [after surviving a shark attack] why did this happen to me? If I survived against the odds, surely there had to be a reason? [...] After becoming an attorney, I ended up in the foreign service because it seemed like a way to change the world, and I wanted an adventure. I ended up at the UN because I genuinely believed it was the seat of global power. The place you go when you want to change the world.
> It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook, and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything. They’d be setting the rules for this global conversation. I was in awe of its ineffable potential.
> The vastness of the information Facebook would be collecting was unprecedented. Data about everything. Data that was previously entirely private. Data on the citizens of every country. A historic amount of data and so incredibly valuable. Information is power.
> After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going. Like an evangelist, I saw Facebook’s power confirmed in every part of everyday life. Whatever Facebook decided to do—what it did with the voices that were gathering there—would change the course of human events. I was sure of it.
> This is a revolution.
> What do you do when you see a revolution is coming? I decide I will stop at nothing to be part of it. At the center of the action. Once you see it, you can’t sit on the sidelines. I’m desperate to be part of it. I can’t remember ever wanting anything more.
Sadly, terrifyingly, for every one of her, there are hundreds who might also self-reflect - but >choose< to be comix-book villains.
But I also think that’s partly because it’s actually true. (I concede I work in defense and am biased.)
There’s certainly a necessary debate to be had about whether these companies are doing the right things, whether they’re going about it the right way, and whether the United States’ actions are moral and legal.
But it’s very hard to argue that national security itself isn’t necessary. Whereas you can much more easily argue that a social-media-based ad company has no reason to exist in the first place.
> Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?
Their framing is wrong. The beliefs and internal politics of the people making the surveillance tools don't matter.
The fact is they're making tools to assist government overreach, and anyone with any political awareness (or maybe more importantly here, objectivity) could have seen that. They're just the enablers.
meanwhile large corporations literally bribe trump -- they're the ones calling the shots, and the government is just the organ
I'm more saying they never DESCENDED into fascism -- their ideas about how things should go in the world don't really matter. They are merely enabling fascism, regardless of their attitudes towards politics or their work, and they should have known that from the beginning.
They're literally saying "people are using the weapons we make to hurt people." No shit, what business did you think you were in?
From either perspective, if the roles were reversed, wouldn't it look the same? Both parties thinking they are doing the right thing.
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms out there, they seem to be vastly outnumbered by illegitimate criticisms, no matter what position you hold. It's easy to hold your opinion when you are inundated with a constant stream of invalid arguments that say little more than "I don't like the tribe you chose". Any valid argument is easily overlooked without a sense of guilt in that environment.
Good luck convincing people to not just take the money.
Many people envisioned a future where there wasn't a phone company intermediating a long-distance call, where you could participate in a virtual economy without government interference, and where many more products were not much affected by capital and scarcity. After all, once you have the computer, the software possibilities are unlimited, even if the hardware might not be ready yet. People could extrapolate from dial-up modems to neural linkages and participation in a virtual or holographic universe which was free from physical constraints.
What we have in the 2010s and beyond is people coming to terms with the reality that what they developed is actually a more effective straight-jacket than the previous constraints of physicality, and at the same time it is hollowing out traditional human relationships and social constructs. The fact that things like MAGA, Qanon, Ziz, and 764 are transnational and transcultural now is bizarre. These are all disappointing developments from the dystopian side of 70s-80s science fiction, not what people thought they were building when they were creating the first addictive smartphone apps.
Also Palantir customers should understand that by buying Palantir services/products they are doing business with U.S. defense company.
I don't say that this is positive or negative, it just clarifies the relationships and it should set the expectations.
This is true sometimes. But many times the companies and the government get together to kill people for money (The dead people's money or the taxpayers money - they don't mind which, money is money)
Offense, killing is not good.
Current department understands that and hence renamed to department of war
Edit: I honestly and directly answered the question and am getting downvoted for it? Lovely
The most weaponlike thing I worked on was a sniper rifle program, and to me precision weapons are one of those best you can do in an imperfect world kinds of things.
Until recently, most of the population believed that the vast majority of America's military actions were somewhat just and legal, for noble reasons.
Dark stuff like Palantir was never like that.
Some Iranians might disagree with you on that point. They can't, though, as they're dead, killed by missiles used not in defense and not in a war authorized by Congress.
> Until recently, most of the population believed that the vast majority of America's military actions were somewhat just and legal, for noble reasons.
That's naive. The US has been using its military for unjust actions (of dubious legality, often "made legal" after the fact) longer than I've been on this Earth.
"At least legally" It doesn't matter if this is true for this situation, as an employee you only need to have been convinced this is true.
"Most of the population believed" - Again, even if they were mistaken, if they believed it, and let me tell you, a lot of the people STILL believes it, that belief is enough to enure you'll have a good night of sleep after a shift in a Lockheed office or factory.
I don't work at defense contractor, but it would probably help to imagine the situation Ukraine is in. If no one in the West was comfortable working in this capacity, it would all be Russian territory now (and more besides).
What with all the ways our new military/techno-industrial complex is working to automate murder, surveillance and terror at scale ... it makes me nostalgic for that old-fashioned artisanal state-sanctioned murder, made in small batches by real humans.
The beginnings of "automated murder" were anti-aircraft weapons that implemented a kind of mechanical computer that beat humans in predicting where aircraft were going to be (you have to shoot at where the plane is going to be when your bullets get there). Look up Norbert Wiener.
For a century it's been automation assisted, none of this is new, it's just been improving consistently. They had UAVs in WWI for gods sake. (flying things without people in them, used in war)
> "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real."
-- Shards of Honor (1986) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Of course that was before the inexplicable adventurism in the Middle East.
People have a hard time admitting they’ve done bad things that caused pain. I’ve done bad things and I try to not do bad things now. Reconciled.
We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company.
The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" the country.
Do not obey in advance. It signals to the regime how much power they actually have.
Giving them the name is giving them the legitimacy to continue to justify the violence, and signals to the rest of the population that no one is coming to help and the new order is absolute. Mind you, this is mostly the fault of complicit media going a long with the name change rather than individuals here on HN, but whether its a true description of reality or not isn't important, whats important is any form of resistance to stop giving legitimacy to the regime.
You sound frustrated with the American situation. I am too but that doesn't mean someone saying "resist" is somehow condoning or ignoring the important issues.
I think the message of "don't submit in advance" is a great one and it actually makes sense to me to include that ethos in all things, including your speech. I think we all agree that speech alone is not enough.
Just (re)read 1984 and focus on Newspeak, controlling language controls the way people think and act.
The body of water that borders Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and other states along with Mexico is the Gulf of Mexico. The US cabinet-level department responsible for the military is the Department of Defense.
it's far more than that. By giving into the television like hyper-reality they create you're giving up base reality. That power and legitimate institutions are derived from the people and due process.
To surrender to the rhetoric is the entire point of the obscenities. War department, thugs with badges pretending to be police etc. The provocations are intentional and the offensiveness is the point, if you're just opposed to the concrete violence you're missing the forest for the trees. You have to reject their entire grammar they're trying to impose on you.
It's as if I put on a robe, went to Rome and claimed I'm the Pope (taking bets on this happening in the US too). You shouldn't then try to argue with me if I'm a good or bad pope or if I'm committing bad acts, but you should reject the entire non-reality circus I'm trying to pull you in.
No, this is what I am complaining about. The obscenities are the point, the rhetoric is cover. Ignoring the rhetoric does not stop the obscenities, and treating the problem as 'they are using the wrong name' rather than 'they are doing the wrong thing' dismisses the real harm being done.
If you claim to be the pope, rejecting your constructed reality is the way to help you out of your delusion. If you do so while leading a crusade to sack Jerusalem, it's not the priority.
I hate Trump as much as anyone with a moral core should, but the President's capacity for creating arbitrary military violence and expenditure has always been unchecked.
The same thing that is true for Donald Trump now was true for pretty much all past presidents. Nothing has meaningfully changed here, yet we did not have these same articles before, nor did we have folks who are so caught up in political fervor that they are happy to go along with any ole' article or reporting that aligns with their current beliefs.
In other words, articles like those are click-bait, and their sole intention or at least their effect is to cause chaos and doubt in the American government.
Legally? No. That's what OP said:
> The only thing stopping US presidents from acting like kings is precedent.
Now if we're talking reality, the realty is that new precedents were set (president acting like a king) which revealed that there are not effective legal checks on US presidents acting like kings (or else we would not have a president acting like a king).
But if your focus is on whatever he tweets and therefore he acts like a king, sure. Whatever. I mostly care about what actually happens, actual policy, actual laws and rules, not the theater around it which so many seem to want to indulge in instead of watching reality TV.
Sure they do! Take the king that the US's predecessor governments rebelled against, King George III. He was very much bound to the dictates of Parliament. From his Wikipedia article:
> Meanwhile, George had become exasperated at Grenville's attempts to reduce the King's prerogatives, and tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade William Pitt the Elder to accept the office of prime minister.[45]
Does this sound like something that would be said of an absolute monarch?
He isn’t a king nor does he act like one in the office of the President precisely because he is following the law (generally speaking, I don’t think it’s pertinent to get into specific details else we get into those same details with all presidents) and because he is constrained by Congress.
Your argument just makes “king” George out to be constrained in the way a president is. It’s a bad argument. Don’t let the reality TV fool you.
Your placing of King in quotes is bizarre. Like, you see a resemblance between the current president and an actual king, and your takeaway is to try to retcon history and claim the king was not a king?
Your argument that someone can't act like a king unless they're breaking laws is a bad argument (and ignores the fact that this one is doing both). Don't let your reality tv fool you.
If that's your criteria as to who is "not acting like a king", I’m not really sure what point you're trying to make here.
No, I don't. An actual king isn't constrained by checks and balances, or the law, for the most part. You're just adjusting the definition of king here to fit your argument.
For example, you refer to King George being stymied or frustrated by some act of Parliament. Is he a king or president? Our president today (and since the founding of America) is similarly stymied and frustrated by some act of Congress. Are the presidents kings or are the kings presidents?
It seems like people are so hung up on the Twitter reality TV sports of politics that they've forgotten what a king is.
This is demonstrably false: King George, who was an "actual king", was constrained by some checks and balances, yet he was still a king. We know that much is correct. Therefore your personal definition here must be what is incorrect. And indeed, it is. You're just adjusting the definition of king here to fit your argument.
It seems like people are so hung up on the Twitter reality TV sports of politics that they've forgotten what a king is.
> It seems like people are so hung up on the Twitter reality TV sports of politics that they've forgotten what a king is.
Yes I agree that you are doing that here. And now you've reached the point to where you're shifting definitions and cherry-picking various historic world leaders to draw inane conclusions and comparisons.
You're confusing how someone acts with which laws they are subject to, and as a result, you've been reduced to inane wordplay as your only argument.
Previously, even though a US president theoretically had the power to act like a king, they have mostly maintained a precedent of not doing so*.
Now, a new precedent has been set: A president acting like a king*.
Hope that clears things up.
* - I realize you may personally disagree with this. That's okay. I'm open to hearing arguments otherwise, but the ones you've put forth so far were unsuccessful at swaying people from the consensus stated above.
They sure spent a lot of time and effort establishing it for something they didn't need.
> Anyone can just say "well so and so is acting like a king or queen".
This does not mean that anytime someone says it, it is false. If many folks are saying a thing, there is more evidence of it being true than if "anyone" says it. The consensus here seems to be that the current USA president is acting like a king. To alter the consensus, make a successful argument to that effect.
To wit:
- "He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."
- "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance."
- "He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures."
- "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power."
- "For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us"
- "For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States"
- "For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world"
- "For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent"
- "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury"
- "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences"
For someone in the USA, some of this might ring a historical bell.
You're right, it doesn't mean that. But it belittles the accusation. Folks sometimes refer to their children as little tyrants. Conservatives would say Obama or Biden were acting like kings issuing edicts.
If you want to argue about this because you're interested in the mudslinging, that's fine but that's a separate discussion: a discussion about reality TV, not reality in offices of the government.
> The consensus here seems to be that the current USA president is acting like a king.
Current consensus is usually wrong, doubly so in this case. He might tweet a bunch of things, yet he's still constrained by the rule of law and the Congress, and the Court.
> You're right, it doesn't mean that. But it belittles the accusation.
Does it? I don't think so. Like we should refrain from ever saying it when it is appropriate, because there will always exist at least 1 person in the world who disagrees and thus the accusation is belittled in their eyes alone? Pass.
> Conservatives would say Obama or Biden were acting like kings issuing edicts.
Sure, and they can say whatever they want! It's not like people would agree with them if they said it, unlike in this example, in which they would.
> Current consensus is usually wrong
This nonsense sounds like a slogan of somebody who is usually both wrong and against consensus.
> yet he's still constrained by the rule of law and the Congress, and the Court
Yep, totally irrelevant, as we've already covered: someone being theoretically "constrained by the rule of law and the Congress, and the Court" does not mean "cannot act like a king", as we've now seen.
As best as I remember, it has always been the case that executives make decisions that result in court cases. I've never seen it like this, though.
In the Kiyemba decision, the court identified a pattern of 96 violations across 75 or so cases. Detainees were held despite release orders
In family separation cases, courts have required legal representation reinstated and the government refused to comply.
In the case of NY vs Trump, courts ordered funds to be unfrozen and the administration refused to comply.
Separately, if you want to claim that the Trump Administration is acting like a king because they've refused to comply with a single court case, then of course you have to extend that same categorization to any president who has ignored or circumvented a court order. But why stop there? Why not governors or private persons? Why do some have the luxury of seemingly ignoring Congressional subpoenas?
The Trump Administration has also lost quite a number of court cases and he has failed to prosecute his political enemies. If he were a king he would be ignoring much more than just a few court orders, folks would be in jail, &c.
In this case, Congress has completely abdicated their duties.
The challenge is all 3 branches are owned by the same group right now.
Just because they don't, doesn't mean they aren't able. The real flat earth theory is thinking that unwritten rules and institutions were protected from a president that insists on pulling every lever of power at once, but that's separate from the checks and balances.
Who will be overruling that "someone in the cabinet", when things start going the wrong way again? There is always someone on top, and in the US it's the sitting President.
This archaic and formal "I do declare war upon theee" is not flexible enough for the modern world and so we have found, perhaps an unhappy middle ground where the President can indeed take military action, for a limited period of time (60 days) without congressional authorization. The President is the civilian commander of the military and regardless of whether it is a Democrat or Republican we, like in other cases, give the President the discretion to make these choices. You may not like their exercise of power, but it is legal, Constitutional, and intentional and even if it is Donald Trump (much to my displeasure) we as a society trust him and his office to use this power responsibly and for the good of the American people. Even in the case of Iran and Venezuela, frankly, I think he has used power responsibly (if less effective than it should be) and for the good of the American people. We can't have a nuclear Iran in the Middle East, nor can we or should we accept thugs like Maduro running a country into the ground and causing mass migration to the US and causing problems here and breaking our laws.
There are folks in the cabinet that can take action, or resign, &c., but as the Executive the president selects his cabinet and they serve at his pleasure, once they are confirmed by the Senate. This is true for all presidents and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
I think sometimes we forget, these are just people. We give them broad authority and they get to, by virtue of being elected, exercise that power as they see fit though ideally if or when a law is broken we deal with it through the judicial system.
Just "doing war" and calling it something else because you find the "right" way inconvenient or impractical is ridiculous, immoral, and illegal.
If the government acts on behalf of and derives its authority from the will of the people then do it according to our shared governance. If not then the people claiming autocracy or oligarchy or techno-feudalism has supplanted our democracy are probably on to something.
Tl;dr - no shit following the law is less convenient than just doing whatever you want
Is there something about the War Powers Act that's unconstitutional? If so, what specifically? I'm struggling here to understand what is being alleged to be unconstitutional.
Separately, I actually think Congress has been dysfunctional and has been outsourcing its power to the Executive and Judicial branches, but these claims about constitutional breaches seem to be, at best, wrong.
The POTUS is funny /s. Read his remarks about Tim Apple, pure comedy if was intended as such. He needs to take an ESL course. "3 or 4 "BIG HELPS". "I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’”
He's surrounded by the creme de la creme of our society, at least in terms of influence. Many of these folks come from old money, West Point, Ivy League, whatever. No matter how egomaniac one has to be to raise through the ranks of our the political system, they are still highly intelligent and connected tribe and should be able to read the future we are leaping into. Am I giving them too much credit? Why isn't their horizon decades long?
Congress should tighten up the War Powers Act, including but not limited to making the Secretary of Defense personally liable for breaches. (We do this with CFOs under Sarbanes-Oxley.)
Yes it is. And it can be done quite quickly in the modern world.
There are measures Congress could very easily take if they chose to, but modern Congresses are very much do-nothing and frankly regard the President taking unilateral actions as relieving them of accountability and the need to take action themselves on important matters.
The election was our say so. "We" collectively voted for this.
Look at the history of every single war we’ve been involved in since WWII, no declaration of war. Korean War, Vietnam War, Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, Balkans, GWOT, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Iran.
I’m not a fan of the president, but Trump only started two of those. Korea was Truman, Vietnam was LBJ, Grenada was Reagan, Panama was HW Bush, Somalia and the Balkans was Clinton, GWOT was Bush, Libya and Syria were Obama, and the last two were Trump. That’s 7 total presidents, add in Bay of Pigs and JFK for 8 and the only two presidents who didn’t start a war are Nixon, who fucked up negotiations with the NVA that may have prolonged the war to win an election, and Jimmy Carter, who tried to rescue hostages in Iran with military assets.
I think this is at least a little misleading. How many of these conflicts were started by that president/the US (as opposed to "joined")?
He didn't call it a special one though.
"Special operation"? Check. "$EnemyCapital in 3 days"? Check. "We haven't even started yet"? Check. "Goodwill gestures"? Check.
(It's actually a common joke on the Russian Internet. So common, in fact, that it has already stopped being funny.)
> […] The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
The author is a retired professor from the US Naval War College:
And the US ... retreated.
We might add, the Soviets, the other axis, did not retreat. China did not retreat. Both of them started killing people to keep their conquests.
I mean, there's no shortage of stuff that the US did wrong and US made mistakes. This was not one of them.
Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, etc.
US conquest was quiet similar to British conquest. They didn't make their conquered people citizens (that'd make things tricky for exploitation) so instead they make sure the "democracies" they spread elected the right leaders who just so happen to align with US interests.
There's a reason the US has military bases across the globe. It's not because they've retreated from their subservient states.
EDIT: I completely misunderstood the context here, nevermind.
Of course, not any more.
By contrast, the US retreated. And also didn't start killing any population.
Except for the populations in the global South. We spent a decade firebombing Vietnam and Cambodia.
>And also didn't start killing any population.
Yes, just Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and anybody who leaned national sovereignity/left in the Latin America and later the middle east.
Russia has 12, mostly in former Soviet countries. China has 3.
To be fair, you're comparing land powers–that tend to annex their holdings–with a maritime power, who tend to trade with and maintain favourable ports at their conquests/allies. So yeah, China doesn't have any foreign bases in Tibet. But that's because it annexed it in the 1950s.
Put together, America obviously has a larger military than China or Russia. But before Russia became a rump, the Soviet Union could marshall military resources comparable to–and for one decade, in excess of–those of the United States for much of the post-War era.
Are those 55 countries forced to have US military bases, or are they willing/happy to have them around?
Estonia wants more US troops:
* https://news.err.ee/1609992007/estonia-signals-willingness-t...
The Philippines is also good with the US expanding its presence:
* https://news.usni.org/2026/02/02/u-s-army-quietly-stands-up-...
* https://time.com/6252750/philippines-us-military-agreement-c...
Because that's, of course, the real question.
It's literally thousands.
You need thousands of military bases if you're going to do "thought police". Because that's what you'll never read here. Russia HAD a (military) thought police. It was Putin's job when he got started, by the way.
I generally take the word "conquest" to mean some outside force coming in and taking over. That didn't happen in either Vietnam or Korea. You could argue that the USSR used conquest to take over territories for the soviet union. However, that's not something really arguable about Vietnam or Korea. Vietnam, in particular, was the native population overthrowing their conquerors, the french, and then deciding they wanted to be communists. They got support from both the USSR and China, but they weren't ultimately under the umbrella of either regime.
Now, I'd agree that Vietnam and Korea both had civil wars supercharged by the US, China, and Russia. But I disagree that these were wars where the US was stopping conquest. We see that in the modern state of Vietnam and North Korea. Vietnam, funnily, became a closer ally to the US than China after the war.
Cuba is very much the same way. It wasn't conquered by an outside force. Yet they did ally with the USSR once the dust settled. They were still an independent nation from the USSR.
The Communists. Would you rather live in North or South Korea?
Vietnam is interesting in that they're still politically authoritarian but willing to be more economically open; see also China. (Just don't say the wrong thing about the wrong people.)
Where one wants to live is irrelevant. It wasn't about stopping an invasion, which was the initial claim. The US was meddling.
Today obviously the South. In 1950, probably the North. Throughout the Korean war, it's a wash. The US obliterated the north, but the south was completely insane towards their own civilian population. The ROK was not a "nice" government to live under during the korean war.
If you lived in the north there was a good possibility that you were getting bombed. It was best to live near china.
If you live in the south, there was a good chance you would be conscripted and sent to the meat grinder as a man.
The subsequent cease fire, the south has rebuilt and become the better place to live. The north has mostly struggled due to international sanctions. They have never fully recovered.
No.
For example, the US got involved in Vietnam to help the colonizer (France) stop an independence movement. Yes, because they feared the resulting Vietnam may become communist and USSR aligned (something they helped happen, since Ho Chi Minh quite admired the US and expected them to help him at first), but even if this was the case, it's still not about stopping an invasion, because commie Vietnamese are still Vietnamese.
Something along those lines for Korea, too.
As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sums in their rebuilding, in the process making stalwart allies of them. These were not puppet governments, they became thriving democracies.
This is not to excuse the many bad things the US has done in Latin America, Vietnam, etc. But there is really no comparison between US behaviour and that of the USSR (or of colonial European countries, for that matter). People in Soviet-controlled East Germany were quite keen to go to the west and did not perceive the presence of US military bases there as evidence of American totalitarianism.
That, of course, has changed and now America is seen as a predatory hegemon. But that has not always been true.
Edit Actually we probably could throw in South Korea into the nations the US has treated well after meddling.
There were different sectors. The US had essentially the South. There were also the British sector and French. The Soviets were the fourth sector but we all know how that one was quite different from the other three.
While the French and British have mostly left, the US stayed. Though to be fair even the British still do have some bases it seems as NATO troups. But no more large garrison in many larger cities.
The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force. Like think back to "Air Force One" (the movie with Harrison Ford) which used Ramstein Airbase in the movie (though they didn't actually film there) and that airbase has come up in the Iran conflict as a conflict of its own. Meaning Germany didn't want the US to use it as a hub for US operations (supply logistics) for the Iran war.
To provide for European security! That’s the deal in terms of Europe and NATO and also specifically to handle Germany. The idea was that America would provide security to Europe including the nuclear umbrella, and one benefit - among many others - was that Germany would not need to have a powerful military.
Can you perhaps guess why people might be concerned about a heavily armed Germany in the postwar period? Those same concerns are bubbling up in European capitals right now, as Germany rearms due to the loss of the US as a reliable partner.
And yes I definitely remember Colbert quite some time ago quipping about exactly that (paraphrased from memory): US no longer reliable NATO partner and nuclear deterrent. So Europe needs to step up. Let's have Germany have nukes. What could possibly go wrong!
The obviously funny thing being, that the US has, for a long time and Trump doubled down, asked Europe including Germany to spend more on military. And the "moderate forces" in Germany are not an issue in that regard. Those are the ones not wanting Trump to use Ramstein airbase in a war he started.
But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces? The party that was ruled as "definitely extremist right wing aka neo nazi" in some federal states by Germany's own "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution". Oh and also was that not the party a certain Elon Musk and Trump were trying to prop up? Which is doubly funny because of the AfD's alleged ties to Putin (sometimes more than alleged).
Totally! That’s what makes the situation doubly maddening. It would be one thing if these actions were bad for the world and good for the US. But they’re bad for the US too!
I forget who it was that said this, and I’m sure my paraphrasing is bad, but I listened or read something I found chilling. It was something like, ordinary Americans are totally unprepared for the level of danger they will experience over the coming decades.
The only reason Trump is able to destroy global institutions so easily is because Americans take their security for granted. But that security is the result of institutions developed in the aftermath of an utterly devastating war. Now those institutions are damaged and America’s friends are alienated, right when they are most needed to deal with China, Russia, AI, drones, cyber, nuclear, climate…talk about bad timing.
> deal with China, Russia, AI, drones, cyber, nuclear, climate…talk about bad timing.
Note the characters used for the "..." in that sentence. I have never seen a human do that, not even once, and LLMs like ChatGPT do it all the time.
That is also how Rome routinely dealt with the border tribes that it defeated. It's not a new idea. That's just what superpowers do.
The expressed goal of Communism (USSR, later China) was to spread its ideology to the entire world. The US chose at its goal the containment of Communism:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Article
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment
This is what drove Korea, Vietnam, Cuba/Castro, and many other countries with left-leaning governments. In many cases this ended up with the US supporting the right-wing people, e.g.:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet
> There's a reason the US has military bases across the globe. It's not because they've retreated from their subservient states.
Yes, containment and power projection to keep the sea lanes open for trade (which benefits the US financially and life-style-wise, but also benefits countries who export things, to the US and other places):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68
If you don't think having peaceful sea lanes is useful, see Houthis/Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz. What we're seeing with Trump's worldview is a return to how things tended to be earlier in history:
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater. [0] The current US administration has numerous similarities to 1930s Germany. The way they support banning books and the treatment of the LGBT+ community. Working to take over media organizations with proponent operatives, financial corruption, and _please the leader_ are also present in both. There are more ... read the book for them.
[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...
There are no governing bodies in history that have ever been isomorphic. Only similarities exist between them. Japan never assisted with extermination of Jews and they are in the Venn diagram of Axis and authoritarianism.
I have high confidence that Adolf Hilter, Bentio Mussolini, and Emperor Shōwa never were part of a child trafficking ring that catered to the wealthy and assisted them with raping and torturing of youths on a privately owned island. There are simulates though with _human trafficking_ between all parties.
Didn't Donald Trump state that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country? Didn't Adolf Hitler say Jews are poisoning the blood of the country? Aren't both simulates?
There never can be two states that are exactly the same; from policies to events. Iceland and Germany are classified as democratic countries and they have dissimilarities.
That is actually something that is pretty popular with anti-immigration rhetoric before and after Hitler, although there are probably over a hundred such politicians who used that rhetoric, not many have killed millions, that's hardly enough to think you have found Nazism.
> I have high confidence that Adolf Hilter, Bentio Mussolini, and Emperor Shōwa never were part of a child trafficking ring that catered to the wealthy and assisted them with raping and torturing of youths on a privately owned island. There are simulates though with _human trafficking_ between all parties.
As far as I can tell apart from guilt by association, there is no definitive proof about Trump being part of their pedophile ring, nothing that can't be said about Clinton, Chomsky or Gates or many others for example. The relation to Hitler in any case is no relation at all, so this segue is confusing
In any case, this examples are redundant as similarities are not enough to establish a category, as I could establish similarities between Hitler and Gandhi (Vegetarianism, cult following, theatrical rhetorics and meta-narratives) to say Hitler is actually a pacifist. That's of course absurd.
Ignoring the Nazi anti-morality and national scale paranoid schizophrenia which are major missing points, the rapid takeover of a single party of the state, destroying the parliament, making the Executive into the law, creating a party's army and using state violence against political enemies are some of the hallmarks of the beginning of third reich germany. This is simply not Trump USA after 6 years, not close.
I am sorry but these false comparisons are simply a social media convention of getting engagement by turning the volume to 11, and nothing works better than misusing categories through superficial comparisons
And the US ... retreated. harumph And interferred, and supported right-wing militias, and invaded countries by themselves, and supported coups, and so on.
And the US did not retreat, it kept its military all across Europe (and the world), brought its nuclear weapons to Europe (not for the Europe, but for the US to be used with Europe as a launching pad).
The Allies stopped them. The US was one of the major contributors, but they were far from alone. The Soviets, Britain, Canada, India, Poland, France, Netherlands, Kenya, etc etc all contributed to various extents. The Indian army was one of the biggest by number of men. The Poles and French were crucial in setting the ground work for the British decrypting Enigma, alongside their purely military contributions.
The Eastern Front was the real battlefield were Nazi Germany was doomed.
Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration, etc.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women (Japan still ignores complaints to this day)
The Japanese viewed non-Japanese as sub-human. It is no different than Nazis viewing Jews, Slavs, etc, as sub-human.
> The holocaust was a later addon (1940).
At least when it comes to the Nazis, genocide was always the general direction:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
The focus on Jews came a little later:
For generalplan ost, “The plan, prepared in the years 1939–1942, was part of Adolf Hitler's and the Nazi movement's Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten” which still makes it a later development.
(1) Nuclear proliferation.
We once had a deal that looked as though it was holding. Trump's nixing of the deal and the happenings in Ukraine accelerated Iran's desire to have nukes.
(2) Taiwan invasion postponement / CRINK disruption
As I've been reading, this might be a second order play to stall China's invasion of Taiwan. If China has to dip into strategic oil reserves to smooth out impact to its economy, it may forgo its Taiwan invasion plans for a bit longer.
It's also throwing a wrench into the CRINK alliance.
1) The deal was holding. And even if we take Trump's word for it that it wasn't, he told us that he destroyed their nuclear capability a year ago. So either he was lying about that, or there was no serious nuclear capability in the first place. Regardless of how that shakes out, there's no reason we should believe this justification today.
2) This is incredibly speculative, and no serious intelligence analyst or military strategist would suggest "war with Iran" as a solution there. And the joke is on us, anyway: China may be feeling an oil crunch, but we're depleting our stock of a bunch of materiel that we'll need if it comes time to defend Taiwan. On top of that, China's military leadership is seeing how incompetently the US is prosecuting this war, and is likely feeling a lot more confident about their ability to fend off a US defense of Taiwan.
The fundamental problem is that the declared objectives of regime change and securing control of the Strait of Hormuz cannot be achieved through air power alone. And this is the fault of the president, not the military.
How many is the right number of personnel and materiel to lose for this war that isn't war and seems to have been either purchased for a few hundred million by political bribes or is just a distraction from the administrations involvement in a monstrous child sex ring? Also didn't we already win this war last year, last month, and last week? It is really easy to wave away our fellow dead citizens (and Iranians, including a school full of children!) from an internet comment form but damn, real people are dead here and it's an actual tragedy.
For me, zero deaths seems like the right answer for these objectives and anything else is egregious abuse of power.
I'd love it if everyone stopped being happy with people lying to them. When you catch people lying to you, be angry and stop trusting them!
It's a bit of both. Our lack of mine-clearing and anti-drone technology is a legitimate weakness, as are our defence-production gaps. The damage done to our system of alliances, moreover, directly weakens our military standing.
They were articulated many times, maybe you didn't want to hear.
The action itself was poorly planned and executed, it's a different question.
We wanted to save the Iranian people from the regime that murdered 100,000 peaceful protestors (don't ask for evidence) so we butchered 170 school girls and didn't apologize.
We wanted to stabilize the region, so we greenlit Israel's rampage in Lebanon and directly induced Iran to close the Strait.
Yeah. Articulated.
At least 20,000 according to Amnesty International, other independent sources claim 40,000.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/01/what-hap...
I don't Amnesty putting their name behind any of those numbers but even the 20,000 is very hand wavey.
I don't see 40,000 claimed anywhere.
Yes, when you apply military force, civilians die. Nobody is happy about it, at least in US.
Yes, Iran closed the strait, because Trump taco'ed again and can't use force against it.
Yes, Israel bombs hezbolla, because what else should they do to people that shoot rockets at Israel? Send them fresh water and electricity? They tried it with Gaza, didn't help.
What was your point?
yes, one cannot imagine why keeping millions of people in an open air concentration camp doesn't work out well
Nitpick: the analogy is an open-air prison. Because prisons usually have ceilings. Open-air concentration camp is just a concentration camp, which doesn't really appropriately describe a siege.
That piece of land could be heaven on earth with all support that they received.
Gaza would be totally livable place if they didn't invest themselves into "death to israel" ideology. It actually WAS nice and livable, otherwise Israel wouldn't forcibly remove their citizens from there 20 years ago.
Do people fight against being released from prison?
Funny it's not even your phrase, you heard it somewhere and keep parroting ever since.
Consider this hypothetical situation. Iran funds a terrorist group operating in Tijuana to fire rockets across the border into San Diego. Assume the Mexican government is not organized enough to stop the terrorists from firing rockets.
What do you think the response of the US Government would be? Please recall what we did after 9/11 before answering.
Israel isn’t invading Egypt and Jordan, I wonder if it’s because there’s no Iran-funded terrorist groups firing rockets from those countries or if there’s some other reason.
Israel definitely has blood on their hands, but how do you suggest they deal with terrorist groups funded by Iran operating in lawless areas of neighboring countries that are firing rockets at civilians in Israel?
Israel has been invaded by all of its neighbors simultaneously more than once, it’s a pretty complex situation that spans over a hundred years. Europeans and Arab nations (aside from the Ottomans) treated Jews like shit for centuries, pogroms and holocausts and expulsions and forced migrations. No wonder they want to keep the nation of Israel around, everyone else has tried exterminating them. Just try not to be so reductionist and polarizing about it, it’s a complex historical situation with many shades of gray.
I know my opinion is probably unpopular around here, but it’s how I see it. Israel has done some horrible shit, but they aren’t just rampaging against any non Jew in sight, there were Hezbollah operatives constantly firing rockets into northern Israel for years. What’s happening in Lebanon (and Syria and may other places) sucks, and that massive pier explosion certainly didn’t help.
What they do is stop raping and murdering people, settling on their land and then acting shocked that the country they are taking over is reacting in a violent way in response.
Was the reason to open the Strait that was already open, prevent an attack, to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon, or to change a regime?
And, yes, on top of that, the action itself was poorly planned and executed, which just adds insult to injury.
I hate the idea that it was ever the DoD. It was always a terroristic, offensive force.
Not mentioning the Soviet terror in Germany during and after the war, since the topic is the US.
As for allied bombings, there is a chapter here on the term "Terror bombings":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing#The_term_%22...
The war was won by systematic, deliberate terror bombings, these weren't accidents or rare incidents.
From the great general Patton:
"We then went to the town hall and saw the Mayor, the Chief of Police, etc. I told Truscott to do the honors as he had captured Messina. The town is horribly destroyed – the worst I have seen. In one tunnel there were said to have been 5,000 civilians hiding for over a week. I do not believe that this indiscriminate bombing of towns is worth the ammunition, and it is unnecessarily cruel to civilians."
As for the Germans, they were among other things conducting terror attacks on civilan ships with their submarines, and openly calling their population to "total war".
All sides of WWII were conducting outright terror attacks on the civilians of their enemies, with the allied terror bombings of German cities and terror nuclear bombings of Japanese cities being the most devastating of these.
Let me ask you a question, directly, UltraSane. Is killing 60,000(minimum) civilians in an instant not terrorism?
Palantir used to be an effective augmentation to counter-insurgency and international terrorism.
Karp has gleefully pivoted to enabling authoritarian pogroms in American cities, and if you keep working there you have blood on your hands.
Posse Comitatus [1].
It’s obviously the law but this admin doesn’t respect the law, as they believe we’re in a post Constitutional era. It’s looks like they are manifesting their beliefs since so many people support them, both sides them, or decide it’s not that big a deal when the executive branch of the American government starts executing American citizens and trying to EO away the 14th amendment on farcical grounds.
I'll say them. The reasons are Trump, Vance, and Republicans.
The Republicans are entirely responsible for the war in Iran - they started it and have opposed every attempt to reign the administration in. Don't play this "both sides" game when one side is clearly causing the issue here.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/senate-defeats-democ...
Both side bad yeah, you seem to think the solution is still to cling to the lesser of two evils. Hell, dem presidential candidates were praising Trumps Iran policy up until the bombs started falling. There is no evidence they _actually_ care about a war with Iran outside of, just as you do, saying OH this is THEIR doing.
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
But sure one side is extremely against anything like this but unfortunately only get to demonstrate it when in opposition and unable to do anything.
Is there a more steelmanned version of this that I can ignore once you start making more false equivalencies in its defense?
We have to say "us good, them bad" because we're voting the same way next time, and we're not planning to vote for something bad, right?
I don’t know what to say but to call this retarded at best or evil at worst.
Trump ran on a platform that included purposefully harming people. He continues with it. Look at his response to Mueller’s death for instance.
Inb4 you mention something about a genocide in Guzah, and ignore how Trump is backing everything Netanyahu wants done in the region compared to the democrats attempts at holding him back.
Maybe if you tried writing genuinely without sarcasm (I think there is sarcasm there, hard to tell), it would be more comprehensible?
It seems like you trying to claim that the democrats actively opposing and trying to stop the war are somehow just as culpable as the republicans who are actively supporting the war just because the democrats don't have enough power to actually stop it? I want to be generous in my interpretation here, but I can't make heads or tails of your statement.
Politics aside, anyone in the supply chain shouldn't be surprised they have a role in illegal killings, because that's literally what they said they're doing.
No, it is not, at least not technically. That would require an act of Congress, which hasn't happened. Despite what the idiots "in charge" seem to believe.
No one likes war, everyone loves defense. Something something expanded surveillance under the guise of counter-terrorism post-9/11.
It was renamed after WWII. In part because smart minds realised that war between industrialised civilisations had ceased to be an accretive endeavour since sometime between Napoleon and the Kaiser.
I originally discussed "war between industrialised civilisations." "Korea, Vietnam, etc" were not that.
The World Wars drove home the argument that direct confrontation between industrialised socieities is a lose-lose proposition. Since WWII, what I think we've been experimenting with is whether industrialised civilisations can wage war by proxy and still come out ahead. ("Ahead" here measured in relative and absolute power and wealth.) The answer appears to be no–unless you can bog down another who was stupid enough to engage without a proxy. But I don't think it was obviously no until somewhere between the Iraq War and now.
As a third party watching I just assumed it was a “dead cat”[1] to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files.
Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys either but the timing of this war… it just looks very odd.
...and then of course, this didn't help:
The most sane reason for "why now" would be because Iran was in a relatively weak position (domestic unrest, severely weakened proxies due to Israel) and the hawks saw an opening
That and Trump was more easily moved now that he's developed a taste for military shows of force after the Maduro thing. He probably thought it would make great content.
The Iran hawks and Netanyahu probably didn't have to push him very hard
I'll believe this when it comes from someone other than the Epstein people. As it stands, the worst people in the world do not like Iran, so they're definitely doing something right.
The name change is a harsh truth.
the "department of defense" has been doing military actions against other countries forever.
'We' talk is how the pseudo-educated talk down to those other people who are the problem.
It's not hard:
* They're trying to build nuclear weapons, and they're one of the worlds leading sponsor of terrorism (if not the sole leader).
* The country ran out of water, people started to protest their government, and were killed by the thousands (some say tens of thousands potentially more).
Water is one of the most basic human needs, if they're willing to kill their own people protesting for the most basic human need, what would they do with Nuclear to the rest of the world? I feel like people don't understand the gravity of Iran with nuclear.
Iran having nuclear will not end well for its citizens or the world.
* The worlds leading sponsor of and spender on terrorism (including financial aid to Hamas) is Israel, by a wide margin (2)
* Claims that “thousands” or “tens of thousands” were killed specifically over water protests are not supported by widely accepted evidence
Now I'm wondering which country is a bigger threat to us and peace in general.
A country on the brink of financial collapse, with a severe drought and one of the last remaining opponents of our greatest ally?
Or a country that "provides funding to both Democratic and Republican leadership teams, often supporting over 90% of targeted caucus members" (3) and constantly wants us to fight their wars?
1) https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_state-sponsored_ter...
Trump has issued an order to call it by "war" name, but it never actually change its name.
Or really, it's not disguised at all. The company is named after Tolkein's palantíri, so they weren't being shy about it.
It's a company that exists solely to exploit a loophole that shouldn't have been upheld, effectively eliminating the fourth amendment.
If the IRS uses Excel, that doesn't mean Microsoft is actively catching tax evasion. Microsoft is selling spreadsheet software, and one of the users of that software is the IRS.
If people feel threatened by this organization and the people who make it up they should start doing to them what they're doing to everyone else.
Who specifically works at Palantir? What do they look like? Where do they live? What kind of vehicle do they drive? How do they spend their free time? Who do they associate with?
These are all very interesting questions.
Questions that can be answered and answers that can be distributed online, forever.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
No secrets.
You may think you are being even handed and neutral in some way. If you are actually, find me that part of Palantir that's doing good.
looks to be a computing tool used for purposes currently popular and not warcraft
This was obvious from the start. Not sure why people "are starting to wonder", which I don't believe either.
I can't imagine any of them are confused about this. I'd expect most are proud to support our military.
The line that's been crossed is the military being turned against Americans. Palantir helping ICE surveil and round up folks who turned out to be, in many cases, innocent American citizens, seems to be what's prompting–correctly, in my opinion–the crisis of faith.
any time you're flying on a Boeing 737, 787, 777 etc you're doing the same. Just like every time you turn on a GE light bulb.
People read things like this and a switch flips in their brain, that they're being told to be more charitable to Palantir, and that's not at all where I'm coming from. Rather: the attention paid to Palantir does a very effective job of running cover for Oracle, IBM, and Cisco.
Obviously, the ludicrous marketing/communications operation Palantir is running doesn't make any of this any simpler to reason about. Imagine getting a manifesto from AWS alongside your S3 bill urging you to reconsider Apostolic succession in the traditional Catholic church; that's the vibe they've managed to create.
Every time this comes up, I find myself asking, "what do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?" Maybe it's just that I'm older than the median here, but when I was a kid, the mere concept of a relational database was something that stirred disquiet in the press; people were worried databases were going to take over society. It was not a completely crazy concern!
Apart from my own thoughts on the Ukraine war and autonomous weapons, that name makes me feel like the company's founders either haven't engaged with the moral questions of their technology, or want to mock them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Laws_of_Robotics_in_...
(Interestingly, neither of those articles mention Ukraine)
Uh... don't you mean U.S. attack company?
But I also think we need to get more smart people interested and working in national security. That’s the way you get the best balance between effective security and the minimum negative side effects to civil liberties or collateral damage, by having the smartest people inside these companies coming up with the best tech while also shaping the conversation from the inside.
It’s easier to just dunk on the big bad company (and maybe they are bad!) but I don’t think that solves anything. National security should be something more people participate in, not less.
“Would you like the undercarriage coating for your new Abrams?”
I kid you not.
Wait, that's actually based as fuck. The 20th-century battleships were the pinnacle of human architecture, let him have this one.
The smartest people don't get that choice. Oppenheimer, Teller and Ulam were all ignored in matters of policy, the Manhattan Project was not designed to integrate their political feedback. Conversely, the scientists at Peenemünde never got to question the effectiveness of V-1 bombs with a CEP measured in miles. Their participation in policy was deliberately severed, ultimately to the detriment of the Wehrmacht.
When you start seeing technologies that affront humanity - warrantless surveillance, civilian terror weapons, chemical/biological agents - that's when normal people step out. No amount of sanewashing will fix the underlying administrative issue, it only exacerbates the underlying moral dilemma.
So Oppenheimer Teller and Ulam were not normal/sane people. In other words, they had the choice, and made a decision. Everything is political.
Which might be also good: von Neumann advocated for a U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.
In the context of this thread my claim is simply that smarter people will yield smarter solutions that balance the tradeoffs mentioned earlier. The choice to use those weapons still lies with our elected leaders.
> smarter people will yield smarter solutions that balance the tradeoffs mentioned earlier.
That's conjecture, as far as I'm aware. Again, the earliest researchers of spacecraft were being forced to design a pitiful terrorist weapon. Those same scientists wouldn't meaningfully progress peaceful space exploration until decades later. There is no balance inherent to having good ideas or executing them well, the procurement process can (and frequently does) excise intelligent thought when tensions run high.
FWIW, I bear little ill-will towards the defense industry or US service members. I just think that "shaping the conversation" is a fool's errand when "the conversation" is warrantless surveillance, and "shaping" simply means finding the best way to do it. An intelligent humanitarian would be fired long before they instill an ounce of ethical change.
like what are some examples of the kinds of people you mean -- what degrees are they getting, what causes are they applying their intellect to right now that are _not_ national security, etc.
I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis
I was discussing resume screening with a jr engineer and unprompted he mentioned he would filter out anyone who worked at a defense contractor, not knowing I had worked at one. I tried to make sure he was removed from interviewing as he obviously wasn't mature enough for it.
You know that the Nazi comparison isn't because of the disagreement, but because of what that disagreement is based on?
It's really not hard to compare ICE to the Gestapo or SA, core Nazi institutions. They're kidnapping people off the streets in brutal manners, targeting them based on immutable visual characteristics, sending them to camps from where many are never heard of again. Including people who are citizens and thus not even "guilty" of the crime which is supposedly being targeted.
Palantir as a company enables that. In the same way we legitimately call out Dehomag (IBM's German subsidiary) for them enabling all Nazi atrocities, we can call out Palantir for enabling the current atrocities.
It's not "disagreement", it's "if it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's a fucking Nazi duck".
Wasn't the the problem that Sauron had one so he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting?
Surveillance has lots of good and bad uses, and is morally neutral itself. Powerful but neutral. The problem comes when the users use it for bad purposes, and in fact it is so tempting that they can't help using it for more and more bad purposes. If every palantir (either one) user was a "good guy" who refused to use it for bad purposes, it would be a potent force for good, and that's why they were created in the first place.
This is trivially true to most common moral understandings. If my neighbor installs a camera pointing through my window and into my shower, applying some fancy technique to see through clouded glass, most of us would justly think that was immoral of him, even in complete absence of any other immoral actions facilitated by that surveillance.
Your neighbor's surveillance of you is bad because they're violating your privacy, and using the tool of surveillance to do it. If you lived in a foggy area and they were monitoring their front walkway with a camera that was good at seeing through fog, and they happened to get a corner of your property in the camera's field of view, then you might have something to complain about but I wouldn't call it morally wrong.
I agree that surveillance is a tool of control. So are fences. It's ok to control some things.
I also agree that surveillance gets into sticky territory very, very quickly. I definitely don't have a clean dividing line between what I'd like the police to be able to see and what they shouldn't. (Especially when the temptation to share that data is so strong and frequently succumbed to.) I would probably say in some useless abstract sense, mass surveillance is also morally neutral. But given that it's proven to be pretty much impossible to implement in a way that doesn't end up serving more evil than good, I wouldn't object to calling it immoral.
A more obvious parallel is violence. To trip over Godwin's law, shooting Hitler would have been a moral action, but not because "shooting people" is amoral. Shooting a random person is definitely immoral. We constantly do immoral things for the greater good, but it is a mistake to thusly assume those actions are amoral.
id say the control is immoral, in all forms. Voluntary agreement and consent are fine but then its not surveillance, its people saying where they are. the patient wants the doctor to know where they are and what they are doing, and not just letting the doctor decide on their own what to know.
the worker wants the foreman to know that they are present and working, in fulfilment of their contract together. its not surveillance either.
the jewelry store itself is immoral, but private property and control thereof is a tradeoff we've made
In this view, maybe an ultra radical solution to privacy issues is : no privacy at all, for no-one. Complete and total transparency of everyone to everyone. Now the question is how to implement that ? That's obviously impossible, because someone in power will always have something to hide. So maybe if true democracy where everyone holds exactly the same amount of power that could work ? Same issue, because it is impossible to implement too. Oh well.
Good fences make good neighbors... If I could put a notion in his head: Why do they make good neighbors?
Tolkien's Palantirs let you see and communicate and influence across vast distances. That's no more immoral than a videophone. Of course, that's also not surveillance; that'd be a telescope. But surely telescopes aren't immoral?
[1] I mean, I would, but (1) you can't create a mass surveillance system from a morally neutral or positive place, and (2) it seems nearly impossible to implement a mass surveillance system without creating more harm than benefit. So it becomes a boring semantics argument as to whether mass surveillance is fundamentally immoral or not.
In the LotR, Aragorn bends a palantir to his will and uses it for good with great difficulty. He manages to do that, because he is (in addition to everything else) the trueborn king and the palantiri are his birthright. Denethor, on the other hand, succumbs to corruption. While he is a powerful lord with good intentions, he is only a steward, not a king. The right to use the palantiri is not inherent in his being, because he only wields power in someone else's name.
It implies that there will always be people ordained through some manner which are incorruptible and therefore can use these things to "fight evil". The usual suspects in our world are people in Government, and by extension in military and law enforcement.
One example of someone actually destroying such a device after they finished using it rather than letting themselves be corrupted by it was Batman after he finished using it to locate the Joker. But of course this was in a fictional movie, and in no way represents the real world.
you can't do surveillance and not learn the bad knowledge, and once youve created the bad knowledge its just a matter of time before it gets into nefarious hands.
a "bad guy" could still hack the "good guys" or palantir itself, and get access to all the bad data the "good guys" have created.
It's worth noting that by the War of the Ring (the Lord of the Rings story) Sauron had possessed a palantir for around 1000 years. Anyone who knew what a palantir was should have known that they were not to be trusted.
As for how that relates to Palantir the real-life corporation, I'll leave that up to your interpretation.
Interestingly enough, the stones could not lie. They only showed real things. Sauron's corruption was achieved through a lack of context. Just like Palantir (the company) can do with data. A dataset can be completely truthful, but lead to a false or manipulative conclusion.
But to the original point, yeah, the name Palantir is spot on for what the company intends to do, anyone who even has remote knowledge of Middle Earth wouldn't dare touch that company with a 10 foot pole.
I have no problem that they are doing what they’re doing. Someone was going to do it. But to be so oblivious to it is a problem. One would argue that it’s a national security problem.
If you are capable of being hired at Palantir, there are thousands of non-evil companies who would be happy to have you.
It's self-aggrandizing egos all the way down/up (to Alex Karp).
Also, yes, they are.
Contrary to Karp’s fantasies, he will not have the capability to send fent-laced piss drones to every single person who’s ever criticized him.
In addition, the more data they have on us, the higher the odds they have something “bad”. So the irony of them increasing the volume of surveillance data is that it becomes pointless for people to “behave” in front of the camera once they’ve “crossed the line”.
And in addition to that, talking shit online lets others know they’re not alone. It increases the odds of coordinated action.
The best propaganda trick up the CIA etc.’s sleeve right now is the illusion of inevitability and learned helplessness. Online voicing of opinions is critical to fighting both of these tactics.
IMO a lot of these debates depend on implicit assumptions about the threat and how it operates. For example:
1. Lawful Evil: They care about good data and going after the "worst" offenders, even if I might disagree about what is "bad".
2. Lazy risk-averse evil: The data needs to give them something to justify the existence of the program, they'll go after whomever is convenient.
3. Cover-your-ass evil: The data archive exists to let them make a plausible case for someone they've already decided to persecute for other reasons.
4. Fraudulent evil: The data archive is just to make it easier to fabricate a fake reason to go after someone.
5. Blatant evil: The data doesn't matter because they can just do stuff to you by fiat.
Some of those groups would be hampered by noise, some would benefit from noise, and the last just won't care.
Everyone know what Palantir was. The name is a dead-give-away.
I think it is really time that the superrich are downsized. Certain companies that are working against the people also need to be removed. Key considerations in any democracy need to be consistent. Palantir (and others) create inconsistencies. Granted, none of this will be fixed while the orange king is having his daily rage-fits, but sooner or later this is an inter-generational problem, no matter which puppet is taking over.
When Sauron took Minas Ithil and captured the Palanir that was kept there the Kings of Gondor forbade the use of them. It is shown that Sauron can use them to corrupt and read the thoughts of the other users. We also see him use them for their intended purpose when he conspires with Saruman.
All to say Peter Thiel doesn't understand Lord of the Rings.
Or it's a lot more complicated and doesn't lend itself to blank-and-white answers. Say you're working on nuclear weapons technology: is your job building weapons to enable the genocidal destruction of another country, or to prevent that kind of thing through a credible MAD deterrent? Both things are simultaneously true.
And then there's no way to predict the future: what's true today when you build it may not be true tomorrow when it's used, because there's a different leader or political system in place.
Did I say it wasn't complicated? I'll admit I didn't say it was complicated, but you can't infer a sentiment from a non-existent statement in either direction.
Yes, it's complicated. But I stand by my statement that many people just don't think about it. They want to solve interesting problems or to get paid well, or both, and so they take jobs at places like Palantir without thinking through the consequences.
Many others do think it through and either find a way to justify it, or do work they don't like and live with the emotional consequences of it.
> Many others do think it through and either find a way to justify it
Do they not think about it, or just not talk about it to you? I could totally see someone thinking about it in private, accepting some justification or reason, and then moving on to their work and not discussing it.
Though a lot actually just wouldn't even discuss it in the first place. I think, though, that if you're going to work on a weapon or a component for a weapon you owe it to yourself to think deeply about the topic. I've known too many people who thought about it too late and realized that they couldn't live with it. Better to figure that out at the start and change career paths than at the end and either kill yourself or drink yourself to death.
I think it has more to do with the fact that many of the products built for defense are never actually used against adversaries in their useful life. Just look at our nuclear weapon stockpile.
Palantir on the other hand is an invisible weapon. They could be reading my comment right now and identifying me with sentiment "adversarial" for all I know. What implications that has on my daily life is innumerable...and I'm a US citizen!
One only has to look at what the US military has been up to for the last few decades to realize that this is like saying "I knew he would use the gun to mug people, but I hoped he wouldn't fire it."
Imagine I came to know that ghosts exist with supernatural powers. My first reaction shouldn't be of fear. It should be of curiosity. What laws are prevailing in ghost realm which provides them with great powers over material world. Does one becoming a ghost suddenly know the truth of Rieman Hypothesis or P=NP?
The same could be asked of people who are supposed to know better by virtue of them close to knowledge and technology. Should they spend their improving lives of others or enslaving them for material gains?
Even if some of the outcomes seem reprehensible, it's not really evil because we're good people. We do it in a responsible and caring way. We're truly sorry that your grandma is now hooked up on endless AI-generated slop, but shouldn't the media be talking about all the other grandmas whose lives are enriched by our AI? We have strict safety rules for the types of cryptocurrency ads that can target the elderly, too.
It can get pretty close at times. Witness Meta and Zuck being told, in clear terms, that there was clear material threats to Burmese dissidents with some of the asks of Facebook. "The features matter more."
And you know what? there's a pervasive ideology in the place that justifies it all.
One day you wake up, and you realize that you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer, even if the official documents say otherwise.
And we are talking about Tax Payers here. Now imagine an organization like Palantir that can de-humanize their targets marking them with the Terrorist label. It is easy to convince people that they are on the right side.
Any force employing threat of violence for control does the same. Police presence, military occupation, hell you even see it in the eyes of loss prevention folks.
Yes, there is.[1]
With this "are we the bad guys" perspective, I wonder how much of the "evil" they are apparently doing is a result of the current view a majority of people globally have with the current administration?
Though we may find it difficult to separate the two, because it seems leadership and the founders of Palantir are supportive of, and in some ways responsible for, Trump getting elected, but with different leadership using the tools in different ways, would we still consider Palantir the bad guys?
> “Wether [sic] we acknowledge it or not, this impacts us all personally,” another worker wrote on Monday. “I’ve already had multiple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post.” This message received nearly two dozen “+1” emoji reactions.
> “Yeah it turns out that short-form summaries of the book’s long-form ideas are easy to misrepresent. It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs,” a third worker wrote. “I hope no one who decided to put this out is surprised that we are, in fact, getting kicked.”
entirely possible they're phrasing their concerns on the corporate slack to be 'pro-company' so they don't worry about getting fired for their views but it doesn't actually sound like they're wondering anything, they're just bothered that it's being brought to light.
You are not in defense contracting. You are in the business of war contracting.
Take from that what you will.
They are just annoyed Karp is breaking Kayfabe
I would have trouble trusting the kind of person who would work at Palantir. It seems like it could be career-limiting in the long run.
I would have trouble working at the kind of place with those running jokes in the office.
I'm pretty sure this is the same population of people who lost (and may still be losing sleep) over Roko's Basilisk. They're clever but not smart.
It was almost certainly everyone's first job.
It's not too hard to think of ways you can get a bunch of young folks do your bidding without them questioning the motives or what kind of moral challenges the job has.
Not quite as creepy as recently when Anduril sent an email saying I was "on their radar".
Unless it is being trained and applied to suppressing certain groups. Karp said a not-so-quiet goal out loud.
It doesn’t.
>Join as skynet developer for EvilOrb corporation run by an actual cartoon villain
>Skynet trained by MoralArmy(tm) in Gaza
>Blows up an elementary school in opening strikes of war
>SurprisedPickachuFace.webpSo one of the things I strongly look for when hiring is for people who have a high sense of personal responsibility. They're not going to just throw shit out there because it's easy or quick. They know they are responsible for what goes out and they really are going to own that responsbility.
In the same way, take a look at anything senior management says about their ICE or military contracts. It's not that I think they're doing something bad or that the military shouldn't have access to good technology. It's that at best they seem entirely disinterested in that what they're doing could be harmful or that they have any responsibility if it is.
It's not that I think Palantir is helping the US government bomb Iranian school chilren. It's that I don't think it would bother them if they were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_We_the_Baddies%3F
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Although it could be unintentional - the phrase is mainstream now and not hard to produce independently either.
Combine that with speed and a insular SV culture steeped in the ideology of Ayn Rand and Nick Land (who likely suffered from amphetamine psychosis) and you get something like this Palantir manifesto.
I would feel sorry for them if they weren’t building skynet.
And that's deeply sad to me
This is incredibly racist, ending thinking at "well, some types of people just suck, and other types of people are better" without considering the complex and nuanced factors over the course of human history that result with the world we have today.
> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I would go further and argue that Palantir employees are just as valid military targets as occupation soldiers are.
[1]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
Desperate for some negative sentiment aren't we? The orbs were not "corrupting" in any way. Can we just have reporting anymore without everything being slanted?
The "manifesto" Palantir posted seemed pretty reasonable to me given their company mission and alignment. I don't get the backlash. It's much less worse than what they're already accused of, I think. It doesn't make me think worse of them at all.
There are ~68 countries with mandatory military service in the world [1]. To say nothing of countries with some other form of mandatory public service. How many of them are fascist?
The U.S., with the backing of widespread public support, passed bipartisan immigration enforcement laws in 1996 with an aim of rapid and mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and it was not viewed as "fascism". Those laws remained on the books since that time and were only recently under enforced with dramatic consequences.
I honestly feel like we're increasingly living in separate realities driven by media bubbles and wanton historical illiteracy and dishonesty.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
I think the real standard for “fascist” has to be - how similar is what someone is doing to what Mussolini did? If there’s a genuine similarity there, the term “fascist” may be appropriate; otherwise, it isn’t
Like your company is literally called Palantir, after the object from the Tolkien universe (if you're living under a rock), which allows the user to see things happening in other places, and allows "A wielder of great power such as Sauron could dominate a weaker user through the stone".
Not only that but your company's founder goes around the world doing lectures about the Antichrist.
And if that wasn't enough, you're working with governments around the world to oppress citizens and have been complicit in a literal genocide by partnering with Israel in the past years.
I mean if you're not the baddies, then maybe Voldemort is just misunderstood, and the Joker is the good guy, etc.
Like why justify it if it economically isn't even that advantageous? Ya'll are laughable.
...now it is complete
Palantir now has too many eyes to the average person on the street and its reputation is negative.
We will have the same conversation about OpenAI, Anthropic, Mechanize, Inc. and the rest of all the other AI labs just like we are doing with big tech companies.
Thats all.
Time to load up on Palantir stocks?
I'll ride this thread with you to the bottom of the page.
But that's priced in.
Them featuring in conspiracy theories is just because there's a cultural treadmill for all these things, isn't there? You can't harp on about Raytheon forever. Those are the villans of the past. Back when Bush was the great evil, or something. To get engagement, you need to frame things in the current meta.
In high school, I had a visitor from West Point. My dad (Killing Fields survivor) was so excited. I (16 year old boy who only knew video games, porn and comics) later threw an impressive tantrum that defeated my father.
I threw away a golden ticket to see the world for what it is (instead of from within my cocoon in the suburbs of Los Angeles) and become a man at a more appropriate age.
Instead, I became an overpaid Peter Pan in San Francisco.
Theres some effect, I can't remember the name, where experts in one field (engineering) think they understand other fields (war) because they're so smart at their own field. I think this very much applies here.
If you're at Palantir and think you're the bad guy, first make the honest effort to convince yourself otherwise.
Failing that, leave and make room for patriots.
I don't like hurting others, but you really need to understand there are others that absolutely want to hurt you for basically no reason, and that hurting them first is highly effective, and as both firepower and intelligence (Palantir) improve, it becomes less fatal (clear historical trend).