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Army press release: https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...
> The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI. Oh, great, vertical integration between the violence organizations and the three worst and most amoral companies in tech. I’m sure not…
The people in that list all sound sketchy. Where are the "good guys"?
This article is clearly written with an attempt to frame this as a purely patriotic and yet somehow an apolitical ideological decision, but it reads as incredibly fascistic.
> incredibly fascistic. What do you mean by this? Is its some feeling you have or do you have any objective measure?
It might help to contrast it with an authoritarian left-wing approach to this same problem of private and state collaboration. In a system like that, we might expect these companies to be nationalized. But a right-wing system would generally be against that. They would instead keep those companies private, but the company could effectively still become state controlled by intertwining leadership such as we see here.
A free and open society should generally be against the merging of corporations and the state as it allows for too much concentrated power which can lead to both corruption and tyranny. These two sides will of course be aligned generally on the well-being of the nation, but having leadership literally splitting time between the two functions goes way beyond that as it creates problems like inherent conflicts of interest and allows for the circumvention of laws and regulations around how both the government and corporations should work. For example, the government might be prevented from spying on its people such as collecting internet histories and corporations might be prevented from exerting physical power over people like imprisoning them. But if the two groups are acting as one, this distinction doesn't matter. The corporate side can do the data collection to find who needs to be imprisoned and then the state does the dirty work of rounding people up. This would be much easier to implement and hide when it can all be orchestrated by a single person delegating their desires down whatever chain of command can legally accomplish the specific subtask at hand.
And wrapping this all up under the general banner of patriotism is doing them no favors here either as it comes off like the nationalistic propaganda that often accompanies fascism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I'll take that as your tacit acknowledgement of not having known of the existence of direct commissions before your outrage got ginned up to the appropriate level. I bet you also think that a president using both the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest is, like, totally unprecedented and omg 100% Nazi.
I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on this topic. From the context it seems like you're not convinced that this is the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll take that as your tacit acknowledgement of not having known of the existence of direct commissions before your outrage got ginned up to the appropriate level. I bet you also think that a president using both the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest is, like, totally unprecedented and omg 100% Nazi.
> I bet you also think that a president using both the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest is, like, totally unprecedented and omg 100% Nazi. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on this topic. From the context it seems like you're not convinced that this is the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I bet you also think that a president using both the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest is, like, totally unprecedented and omg 100% Nazi. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on this topic. From the context it seems like you're not convinced that this is the case.
1992 Los Angeles, 1957 Little Rock, and 1968 pretty much everywhere including the steps of the Capitol tell you that, no, using the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest != "totally unprecedented and 100% Nazi".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I bet you also think that a president using both the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest is, like, totally unprecedented and omg 100% Nazi. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on this topic. From the context it seems like you're not convinced that this is the case.
1992 Los Angeles, 1957 Little Rock, and 1968 pretty much everywhere including the steps of the Capitol tell you that, no, using the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest != "totally unprecedented and 100% Nazi".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this the sort of thing that warrant officers were created for? Why wouldn't they give him a high warrant officer rank rather than a commissioned rank?
If you bring in people from other organizations, you usually give them titles that reflect their actual roles. Warrant officers are a leftover from an era when you had to be nobility to become a commissioned officer. Today a lieutenant is just a kid with a college degree, and a lieutenant colonel is someone who did an MBA and was promoted into middle management.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1992 Los Angeles, 1957 Little Rock, and 1968 pretty much everywhere including the steps of the Capitol tell you that, no, using the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest != "totally unprecedented and 100% Nazi".
I haven't seen National Guard and active-duty soldiers quelling any unrest recently .. the deployment to the west coast appears to be a mix of sleeping rough and unrequired performance theatre while the LAPD and state forces have things well in hand.