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Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

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Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#231

Post by grafmax »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #228
grafmax wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who aren’t trespassers or violating any law are punished and deported without a chance to make their case. You’re assuming that all people ICE sends to concentration camps deserve to be there? But these determinations have been made without fair hearings where people have a chance to formulate a defense. Due process is not afforded these people. Treating people this way is unjust.

>People who aren’t trespassers They very much are trespassers. They're not citizens, therefor they have no legal right to be here. We issue visas, but we reserve the right to revoke those without notice or for that matter right to appeal. We're removing them from property that is not theirs. Punishment would be additional to that, but perversely would require that they remain here for the punishment, so people like m…

The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true. Is this or that victim of ICE really a “trespasser”? Without due process you can’t know that. All you have are accusations and punishment.

A place of mass detention without due process: that’s the definition of a concentration camp.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#232

Post by mindslight »

grafmax wrote: post #71
ants_everywhere wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel. He says "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The beginning of the essay > I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “liberta…

I mean, he’s not wrong. Libertarianism is freedom - for the rich. And concentrated wealth is antithetical to democracy because it’s concentrated power. He’s just taking libertarianism to its logical extreme by repudiating democracy. Is it any wonder that he has helped fund our decline into authoritarianism? We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned incr…

The capital-L Libertarian party is a bastardization of the libertarian conception of freedom based on the longstanding American delusion of "temporarily embarassed millionaires", similar to the philosophy-laundering that goes on in the two major parties. So called "right-libertarianism" as a complete overarching philosophy is a logical contradiction. For example, in the "right libertarian" framework, North Korea is isomorphic to a bastion of freedom - Kim Jong Un simply owns everything, and everyone there has contracted with him with some pretty oneous terms, including making all of their children party to this contract as well. The right-"Libertarians" reading this are now reflexively looking for logical escape hatches - restrictions on the freedom to contract, age of legal personhood, etc - but only because this example is so galling it's setting off the atrophied "leftist" inductive half of their mind.

Libertarianism must necessarily be concerned with qualitative outcomes of individual liberty rather than being lured in by axiomatically asserting the existence of freedom by construction (commonly resulting in Newspeak). Analyzing all power structures with an eye for coercion, not falling into the trap of championing new ones with differently-named abstractions while defining away the coercion. The "rightist" deductive logical implication following is of course necessary (one can't get very far without it!), but it is incapable of achieving liberty by itself. Trying to do so inevitably fails spectacularly, which is why there are sibling comments in this thread abusing the concepts of liberty to argue in support of naked authoritarianism.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#233

Post by keernan »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #18
giancarlostoro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its really easy to read this and be scared without being given any context, not everyone in the room knows who you are referring to and if your reading of their remarks are accurate. You got a name and a raw source?

Peter Thiel. He says "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The beginning of the essay > I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “liberta…

What so many seem to be overlooking is the very, very strong belief by the top 0.01% is that science is about to - or already has - found a way to eliminate natural causes of death. Hence the quote from Peter Thiel:

>I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual

Assume for one moment that it is true that science will be able to eliminate natural causes of death in the very near future. If you are a multi-billionaire, what does that mean for you?

What is the biggest danger to you moving forward?

Can the earth support the current population expanding at an ever increasing pace if everyone lives forever?

Is it feasible that the wealthiest 3,000 people on earth can 'control' who has access to the ability to never die a natural death?

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#234

Post by keernan »

yosito wrote: post #17
ants_everywhere wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palantir is unique in that one of its founders has publicly stated he doesn't believe in democracy, the bedrock of the American system.

To be fair, I'm not sure there are very many people who believe in US democracy right now.

It's interesting that so many Americans currently alive actually believe they have ever lived in a democracy. The news they read every day has been controlled since the day they were born. Their choices in every election they have ever participated in have been selected by forces well beyond their control. The only "democracy" they have experienced is the freedom to make choices from a menu created by the actual powers.

In fairness, this has almost certainly been true of every governing system in the history of mankind. The powerful get to define the boundaries of the rules of society - the rest of us get to survive within those boundaries. Some government systems provide more flexibility within those boundaries than others - but at the end of the day, at their core - they are really all the same.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#236

Post by wmorgan »

rayiner wrote: post #213
sofixa wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does Are you claiming that lying about Haitians eating pets to get people to vote for your anti-immigration platform isn't racist? How do you fig…

The traditional definition of “racism” focuses on treating individuals differently because of their immutable characteristics. Democrats have turned that concept on its head, to encompass opposing cultural change to a community from mass migration of people from foreign cultures. Regarding the specific example, the “food versus pet” distinction is a core one in any culture.[1] Vance’s story aptly illustrates the cult…

This so-called traditional definition returns too many false negatives. It would exclude, for example, the inflammatory newspapers of the Jim Crow era. Americans learned with tragic regularity in the Post-Reconstruction era why spreading racial rumors is so reckless. It doesn’t matter to the moral calculus that the rumors were "truthy." The norm against expressing racial prejudice predates the most recent party realignment; it's amply represented in WW2 training materials. This is not a new thing.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#237

Post by rayiner »

wmorgan wrote: post #236
rayiner wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traditional definition of “racism” focuses on treating individuals differently because of their immutable characteristics. Democrats have turned that concept on its head, to encompass opposing cultural change to a community from mass migration of people from foreign cultures. Regarding the specific example, the “food versus pet” distinction is a core one in any culture.[1] Vance’s story aptly illustrates the cult…

This so-called traditional definition returns too many false negatives. It would exclude, for example, the inflammatory newspapers of the Jim Crow era. Americans learned with tragic regularity in the Post-Reconstruction era why spreading racial rumors is so reckless. It doesn’t matter to the moral calculus that the rumors were "truthy." The norm against expressing racial prejudice predates the most recent party reali…

We live in 2025, not 1875. The sentiments we’re talking about aren’t rooted in “racial prejudice” constructed to maintain a slave society. They’re rooted in the same reaction that folks would have if tens of thousands of desperately poor Appalachians were resettled in a small town in Vermont or Massachusetts. It’s not antipathy over in immutable characteristics, but actual differences in the aggregate behavior of large groups of foreigners as compared to the existing population.

Democrats’ modern definition takes the social norm against declaring people inferior based on immutable characteristics and uses it to bash through cultural relativism and suppress criticism of cultural change. People have a moral right to use democratic means to create the kind of society they want to live in, and that includes policies to promote and protect their cultural preferences.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#238

Post by FireBeyond »

rayiner wrote: post #127
miltonlost wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove. The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise! > But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats reg…

> Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election

Yeah, uhh, citation needed.

Tell us about the 90% of executive agencies that are headed by democrats today.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#239

Post by FireBeyond »

bpt3 wrote: post #82
miltonlost wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More or less, "I don't believe in democracy" is the same as the people who founded the country? Ok, you have no idea of nuance.

That's not what Thiel said, and not what the parent poster said. How familiar are you with the writings of the founding fathers? The ones who very intentionally avoided creating a system based on direct democracy?

A few things:

The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s. They were not infallible, nor was the system they created.

That's why they created mechanisms for evolving that system.

Except we rarely do. "But Constitutional Amendments", people say.

Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.

Everything is very selective. Infallible when we want it to be. "Oh they didn't mean that/like that" when we want. And completely ignore other parts as inconvenient.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#240

Post by palmfacehn »

bpt3 wrote: post #172
palmfacehn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tyranny of the majority redux. I find it illustrative that so many here defend Democracy as an ends to be achieved or an unqualified good unto itself, rather than a process or a means to an end. It illustrates the arguments made elsewhere about how democratic processes and institutions have been succeeded by Democracy, the belief. As an unqualified good, one can simply claim that the majority has voted or that the De…

Hoppe is far too extreme for my tastes and did not seem too interested in rigorously supporting his (distasteful to put it mildly) preconceived notions, but yes direct democracy is undesirable for a number of reasons IMO. See Squid Game as a more recent commentary.

His arguments around the time preferences and incentives of elected officials seem relevant to the discussion.
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