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‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

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Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#201

Post by cheese4242 »

idle_zealot wrote: post #193
cheese4242 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you support deporting people who are criminals? Or have no intention of ever working and just want to live off various welfare programs? Trying to find some common ground here.

Nope. Access to food, water, shelter, and freedom of movement are fundamental human rights. I'm not a proponent of executing useless eaters. If you commit a crime with a prison sentence then you serve that sentence where you committed the crime.

Thanks for taking the time to clarify your position.

So if China or some other country decided to send 10 million people here for whatever reason, you think our official policy should be to welcome then in and provide them food, shelter, etc...?

What about 100 million people?

Should they also be given citizenship and right to vote in addition to food/shelter?

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#202

Post by db48x »

J_McQuade wrote: post #187
db48x wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.

This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it. Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?

This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#203

Post by Y-bar »

phoehne wrote: post #171
Y-bar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not t…

My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person. In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial rev…

I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement.

A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.

A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.

A fence contains the intent of separating things.

A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.

The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.

(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#204

Post by Dracophoenix »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #168
db48x wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.

This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus? This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.

The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#205

Post by hairofadog »

bradley13 wrote: post #22

[flagged]

They didn't attract the same publicity because

* They didn't jack up the budget to a size larger than most countries' militaries

* They didn't target primarily Republican cities and states out of vengeance for how those cities and states voted

* They didn't explicitly target people here legally

* They didn't send bands of masked men house to house to kick in doors without warrants

* They didn't implement Kavanaugh Stops, which makes racial profiling legal

* They didn't implement a "Papers, please" policy

* They didn't crow about their cruelty on social media or make funny memes about immigrant families being destroyed

* They didn't broadcast that agents had "absolute immunity" even if their agents killed people

* They didn't use fascist iconography and phrasing in their press releases and design systems

* They didn't create a situation in which businesses and schools had to shut down because their employees and students were afraid to leave their houses because even though they were U.S. citizens, they had darker colored skin or spoke with an accent

* They didn't try to end birthright citizenship

I mean the list goes on and on. It's not the same at all. That's why they didn't attract the same publicity.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#206

Post by idle_zealot »

palmotea wrote: post #142
idle_zealot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling. 2) Check those stats a bit more closely. The vast majority of "deportations" were people turned away at the border.

> 1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling. I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders p…

> Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.

Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it.

And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#209

Post by drdaeman »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #168
db48x wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.

This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus? This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.

> Torment Nexus

You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?

(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#210

Post by Finnucane »

pixelready wrote: post #12

I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals. T…

Yeah, this is no different from IBM setting up punch card tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany track its victims.
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