411–420 of 756 posts
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Me looking for the soviet military bases rn EDIT: I completely misunderstood the context here, nevermind.
I live in the Netherlands. The closest one was about 260 km from where I live. Of course, not any more.
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If we adopt their language because things are already bad we are saying that their power is now the only reality that matters, we are giving up any form of resistance. We killed people under the name of Department of Defense too. 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.…
As a non-American, I think that Americans treating concrete problems as less important than linguistic games does an awful lot more to legitimise the violence.
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I live in the Netherlands. The closest one was about 260 km from where I live. Of course, not any more.
I completely misunderstood the context of this discussion and revoke my mildly snarky comment. You are correct.
Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. 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.
> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. 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" t…
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> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. 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" t…
Great point. Labeling it as 'defense' instead of 'war' might be one of the more brilliant marketing tricks in the last century. 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.
Seems analogous to employees of a missile manufacturer being upset that their missiles were used for their intended purpose.
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You sound like you’re from a country with a parliamentary system? In the US, the “cabinet” is simply the President’s handpicked subordinates, not MPs. The President is the head of the executive, the government, usually understood as the executive, answers to him. They are not in a position to legally stop him. There are measures Congress could very easily take if they chose to, but modern Congresses are very much do-…
No, I am from the states, just been ignorant until it started bugging me. I'm sad that one geezer can turn the rest of the world against us without our say so and now we are wholesale opted in as villains. Not that the past was rosy, but it was more gentleman-ish? I am out of my depth here, just frustrated.
The election was our say so. "We" collectively voted for this.
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Neither... it is illegal when used against citizens
What law are you thinking of? Some tools used in riot enforcements would be illegal to use in wars, so it actually seems to be the other way around to me.
Posse Comitatus [1].
55% Palantir revenue comes from government contracts and 50% from the US govenment. 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…
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It's not really that insane. Don't overreact to Trump stuff - it leads you to make bad decisions and assumptions. 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 civ…
What's the recourse when they fall into a natural senile abyss like with the previous POTUS? Wait and see? I naively lived under an assumption there was a system of checks and balances that's not a coup d'état.
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.)