Palantir's Co-Founder Wants Us Less Judgmental About Deadly Iran School Strike | Hacker News Reader

Palantir's Co-Founder Wants Us Less Judgmental About Deadly Iran School Strike

motherjones.com

95 pointscdrnsf31 comments

> Iran’s leaders “might have purposely disguised some of these things to make them look like targets, the same way the Palestinians and others do,” Lonsdale said.

Ah—the old “murder our kids for sympathy” ploy. which has worked… when?

What an absolute murderous and racist piece shit this guy is.

Which works approximately all the time against Western powers? Influencing / manipulating public support is the strongest weapon the non-Western adversaries have right now.

People seem to be struggling to hold two, not-even-conflicting thoughts at the same time: the school bombing, even though clearly accidental, is reprehensible from our moral perspective and is a direct product of callous way the intervention has been conducted AND the Iranian leadership would happily sacrifice thousands of "their own" children to get an edge in this conflict by reducing the political support for the further escalation. We are talking about the regime which killed tens of thousand of "their own" citizens just a couple months prior.

Or, you know, the US just bombed a fucking school. I don't even think this was accidental.

And accident would imply they didn't want to bomb a school but this happened due to an honest mistake (already a tall order when you are dropping bombs in an area with civilian infrastructure).

In truth it was probably that the US didn't care about the collateral damage of bombing targets regardless of what is there.

Let's not pretend the US has much issues killing civilians in other countries. Your president just gave a speech at the UN talking about "annihilating Iran" and "driving them into hell".

Even after that people still contort their thoughts in the illusion that the US would never bomb a school. Imagine if Iran's president gave a speech talking the same way about Israel or the US, would you give Iran the same benefit of doubt?

> clearly accidental

I think the word you were looking for was 'negligent'. As in the bombing was 'clearly negligent'. It wasn't something that just happened, it was something that high ranking officials purposefully did and they did it negligently.

This is “Iranian Regime Derangement Syndrome”

1. Iran’s strongest weapon is keeping Hormuz closed. 2. Those who want to blow up Iran also influence public support (and government support too, I’d add) 3. The military “excursion” is already incredibly unpopular but that hasn’t stopped Trump or other racist POS Hegseth or even all the GOP and even some dems from keeping it going.

Absolutely the Iranian government murdered protesters but it’s a stretch to also say they’d “happily” somehow get the US the bomb a school.

It’s a dumb strategy anyway. We’re still blowing up kids in Gaza and calling them future terrorists and crisis actors and saying “what about their pre-existing health conditions” about kids who died of starvation.

Yes, we are the baddies.

May 3, 2025

When the protester said, "Your AI and your technology from Palantir kills Palestinians,"

Karp replied: "Mostly terrorists, that's true."

https://fight.fudgie.org/search/show/cspan/episode/20250503_...

Everything about Palantir and Joe Lonsdale are just so gleefully evil that one can not help but laugh at their ignorance.

Lonsdale was also accused of rape and is quoted as saying that women need to be raped to learn to respect men.

So, the prototypical a*hole to say "made us hit things". The blame the victim playbook.

Astonishing with how much you can get away with by wearing a suit. If he would be wearing rugs, a lynch mob would beat the shit out of him. I'm not implying that's desirable, I'm just baffled by societies criteria, which swing from one extreme to another. And neither one makes sense.

> a*hole

Asshole.

Add that him and Thiel are billionaires and it gets terrifying.

St. Luigi was jailed for our sins.

I think the world and even Americans are getting real tired of these techies and they're going to pay for it.

i'd like to see more folks at the hague over the same. Less judgment isnt forthcoming over child murder and those who align with child killers. There is no justice, no rule of law, while those responsible walk with their head firmly attached to their shoulders.

Deliberatly luring AI into bombing kids? Anything other than admit AI should never play judge jury and executioner eh? Fucking rats.

I wish this weren’t the case but autonomous ai warfare is the future. We should accept that fact. Likely attribution for war crimes will be hard to pin down responsibility for.

There was a time when it appeared nuclear war was the future of warfare. Thank goodness we refused accept that as fact.

It likely is the future, same as bombs once were, that doesnt mean we allow people to go about clusterbombing residential neighbourhoods you know? If you cannot predict the inpact, if you cannot minimize collateral damage reliably, then it isnt tech that is ready for the front lines. There's a reason we ban biological warefar, even though its even more effective than AI driven weapons. So, what the fuck? Why are we deciding this isn't worth regulating?

The more of this shit i see, the gross incompetence, the total lack of reverence for human life, the more I see a butlerian jihad as the only viable option.

A tool is a tool, and abuse of a tool, intentional or by gross incompetance should not earn a free pass because the tech is new.

We need to hold people accountable for their action/inaction.

I suspect the truth is, that in a war of equal super powers, the winner will decide what was ethical and right.

When your opposition says, "stop doing that," they've made the mistake of revealing their hand. The only logical response is to keep doing it, more and with greater intensity.

The zionists genocide forces and businesses specialise in strikes on schools, hospitals, aid agencies, civilian administrations, police, fire and emergency services. Hind Rahab bieng just one little girl murdered by them, but the Minhab school strike went over there openly described limit of a 12 murders which tends to trigger the kind of notice in the international press that they are carefull to avoid. This hit on Minhab was a double strike, that is the zionist signature, from playing the sounds of injured children from drones to atract rescuers, and dozensvof variants to the simple expedient of timing the second strike for the arival of emergency services and civilian rescuers. And once again they are claiming to be victimised by the hard work of managing genocide, and further in this case, a total failure to achive anything that has an end game or off ramp. 'allied' governments now have staffing issues as people will quit before they will facilitate the zionists further, and so positions are filled based solely on someones ability to function nicely with murderous genociders. And no matter how wildly proffitable investing in genocide has been, there is then the cost of bieng associated , which is not, comfortable , safe, or clean.

The more public statements come from these tech bosses the more they all seem like they live in this shared psychosis where, literally, the rest of the world is acceptable collateral damage on the path to their inscrutable personal goals.

And the longer they don't have any consequences for their actions, the worse they will get.

I'm starting to think that the further they look into the future for their utopian dreams, the less care they have for the present, and the less care they have for the present the more girls schools will be bombed and companies hacked and other predictable and unpredictable collateral damage.

> He also argued that Iran might have deliberately lured the US military into the AI-assisted targeting of two Tomahawk missiles at an elementary school on the first day of the the Trump administration’s war in Iran.

I'm not sure if there's any way back to objective reality for someone saying this sort of thing publicly.

it's very easy from the outside to judge anyone associated with palantir as a total piece of shit

it's pretty hard to tell why from the inside though, isn't it ?

It's an insult to all of our intelligence that guys like Joe Lonsdale + Alex Karp think we won't make the connection that they say just happen to be Zionists and then say horseshit like this. We know they value the lives of their in-group at 1000x more than everyone else, they don't even try to hide it anymore.

This is hilarious, its the schools fault it got blown up. Talk about victim blaming.

Mother Jones on Hacker News?

Standards slipping significantly if this despicable propaganda rag are permitted.

For a contrarian take: I think it’s true. When there’s a war, you make this kind of tragic mistakes, either with AI or humans.

The point is that the war itself is pointless. The tragic mistakes, and the other civilian deaths, accidental or totally expected as “collateral damage”, are not part of some project that, despite its costs, makes the world a better place.

Though of course the AI bros take is also “don’t hold us accountable for anything, ever”, and that’s pathetic.

Hegseth dismatled units whose work was "ensuring this does not happen all that often". They were too soft and woke Then bragged about lethality. Then president proceeded to threaten more war crimes then again in escalating amounts.

Same people are murdering civilian on boats in pacific.

Civilian deaths are by design.

Well, there are good war crimes and bad war crimes. Bad war crimed are prosecuted, good war crimes are downplayed and justified. /s

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