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Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

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Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#511

Post by giancarlostoro »

bastawhiz wrote: post #63
leonidasrup wrote: post #8

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…

> nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" the country.

It's not hard:

* They're trying to build nuclear weapons, and they're one of the worlds leading sponsor of terrorism (if not the sole leader).

* The country ran out of water, people started to protest their government, and were killed by the thousands (some say tens of thousands potentially more).

Water is one of the most basic human needs, if they're willing to kill their own people protesting for the most basic human need, what would they do with Nuclear to the rest of the world? I feel like people don't understand the gravity of Iran with nuclear.

Iran having nuclear will not end well for its citizens or the world.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#512

Post by tharkun__ »

adriand wrote: post #490
tharkun__ wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US did not keep bases in all of West Germany though. There were different sectors. The US had essentially the South. There were also the British sector and French. The Soviets were the fourth sector but we all know how that one was quite different from the other three. While the French and British have mostly left, the US stayed. Though to be fair even the British still do have some bases it seems as NATO troups.…

> The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force. To provide for European security! That’s the deal in terms of Europe and NATO and also specifically to handle Germany. The idea was that America would provide security to Europe including the nuclear umbrella, and one benefit - among many others - was that Germany would not need to have a powerful military. Can you perhaps guess why people might be con…

Which is now out the window.

And yes I definitely remember Colbert quite some time ago quipping about exactly that (paraphrased from memory): US no longer reliable NATO partner and nuclear deterrent. So Europe needs to step up. Let's have Germany have nukes. What could possibly go wrong!

The obviously funny thing being, that the US has, for a long time and Trump doubled down, asked Europe including Germany to spend more on military. And the "moderate forces" in Germany are not an issue in that regard. Those are the ones not wanting Trump to use Ramstein airbase in a war he started.

But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces? The party that was ruled as "definitely extremist right wing aka neo nazi" in some federal states by Germany's own "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution". Oh and also was that not the party a certain Elon Musk and Trump were trying to prop up? Which is doubly funny because of the AfD's alleged ties to Putin (sometimes more than alleged).

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#513

Post by archonis »

lokar wrote: post #477
Lio wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, As a third party watching I just assumed it was a “dead cat”[1] to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files. Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys either but the timing of this war… it just looks very odd. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy

Also trump seems to have this weird thing about Obama. He is obsessed with him. He tore up the Obama Iran deal, and is now seeking a better solution.

Trump is the sort of old school racist whose entire model of the world couldn't tolerate Obama as POTUS.

...and then of course, this didn't help:

https://youtu.be/HHckZCxdRkA?si=axixDO1Cm1i3Su0k

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#514

Post by UltraSane »

carlosjobim wrote: post #496
UltraSane wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It was always a terroristic, offensive force." Even during WW2?

WWII was won by terror bombings of German cities, and terror nuclear bombing of Japanese cities. That's common knowledge. Not mentioning the Soviet terror in Germany during and after the war, since the topic is the US.

It isn't really accurate to describe those bombings as terrorism when they happened during the largest war in human history.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#515

Post by hackermatic »

eucyclos wrote: post #495
tptacek wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're defense contractors the same way IBM and Oracle are. Palantir has a huge USG business, but they're also widely used across the Fortune 500. From the coverage of Palantir online you'd think the company actually manufactured Palantirs , but they are in fact a database consultingware company; one person described them to me as "Oracle but with the benefit of the Web 2.0 technology stack". People read things like…

Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.

There's at least one company that straight-up reverses a pacifistic cultural reference: a Ukrainian autonomous weapons company called The Fourth Law, as in Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to prevent humans from coming to harm.

Apart from my own thoughts on the Ukraine war and autonomous weapons, that name makes me feel like the company's founders either haven't engaged with the moral questions of their technology, or want to mock them.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#517

Post by nickburns »

alterom wrote: post #510
nickburns wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equating eating meat with martyrdom in the year 2026 is, in fact, the same cognitive dissonance you personally deny. I eat meat. And I'm highly, highly morally conflicted. I'll leave it at that to avoid sounding hypothetical—except to mention that the only logical reason I don't go vegetarian/vegan is the work and personal development that'd be required of me. (I'll take being called lazy over disingenuous any day, i…

>Equating eating meat with martyrdom in the year 2026 is, in fact, the same cognitive dissonance you personally deny You completely missed the point. In the context of picking battles, martyrdom is (self) sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, with no direct gain for the cause. Abstaining from meat, to me , will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life, without possibly making a meaningful impact on unet…

> In the context of picking battles, martyrdom is (self) sacrifice, with no direct gain for the cause.

On the first clause, exactly. (The second clause appears to be a bit of ad lib.)

> Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life

I don't think the concept of 'martyrdom' encompasses self-interest. It does however consider the cause/s of other beings. So I maintain, not a very cognitively consonant use of the term.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#518

Post by cramsession »

Lio wrote: post #404
bastawhiz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, As a third party watching I just assumed it was a “dead cat”[1] to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files. Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys either but the timing of this war… it just looks very odd. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy

> Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys

I'll believe this when it comes from someone other than the Epstein people. As it stands, the worst people in the world do not like Iran, so they're definitely doing something right.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#519

Post by cramsession »

quickthrowman wrote: post #387
pphysch wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we didn't want Iran to have nukes, so we rugpulled the JCPOA and murdered the guy who declared a fatwa against nukes. We wanted to save the Iranian people from the regime that murdered 100,000 peaceful protestors (don't ask for evidence) so we butchered 170 school girls and didn't apologize. We wanted to stabilize the region, so we greenlit Israel's rampage in Lebanon and directly induced Iran to close the Stra…

> We wanted to stabilize the region, so we greenlit Israel's rampage in Lebanon Consider this hypothetical situation. Iran funds a terrorist group operating in Tijuana to fire rockets across the border into San Diego. Assume the Mexican government is not organized enough to stop the terrorists from firing rockets. What do you think the response of the US Government would be? Please recall what we did after 9/11 befor…

Israel are the terrorists who invaded Palestine and have committed crimes against humanity all across the Middle East. Your hypothetical situation is nothing at all like what's going on in reality. Iran is our ally against Zionist occupation of our own government.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#520

Post by Forgeties79 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #63
leonidasrup wrote: post #8

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…

I was under the impression the name was not actually formally changed, just like how the “Department of government efficiency” was never actually a department but was just a rebranding of an existing department done totally by mouth (like a lot of nonsense this administration does)
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