Live data from Hacker News

Reflections on Palantir

nabeelqu.substack.com

631–640 of 658 posts

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#631
post #13

Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755

Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read…

[flagged]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#632
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy spends an entire section talking about this. Just because he has different moral opinions doesn't mean he doesn't care about morality. To quote the author: Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on. Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on…

I love this discussion, and I think it's critically important for people to engage with it. However, I cannot more strongly disagree with your implicit assumption of innocence for "category 1." Facebook alone is unquestionably more harmful than Palatir, and any purely for profit entity is by necessity intentionally unanchored to any ethical foundation at all. Facebook is known for explicitly supporting genocidal regi…

To be clear, I was quoting the author. Those aren't my opinions.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read…

[flagged]

>I followed your link. The article is written in February of 2024, and it specifically is specifically referencing "the last 4 months". More than half of those 507 Palestinian deaths occurred AFTER October 7th. So you've deliberately misrepresented the conclusions of this article to bolster the idea that October 7th was just retaliation. That's a boldly revisionist take to proffer for something that happened barely a year ago.

Here is the correct article: " 2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank" PUBLISHED: 18 Sep 2023 i.e. BEFORE OCT 7 https://www.savethechildren.net/news/2023-marks-deadliest-ye...

"18 Sept 2023 - At least 38 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began, said Save the Children."

So my argument is perfectly correct and if you had a shred of honesty you could have checked what happened before October 7 yourself to realize that my argument is perfectly correct, but you preferred to engage in your little zionist projection rant and pretend that history began on Oct 7 because that's the only way you can uphold your cognitive dissonance.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#634
post #13

Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755

Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read…

ADDENDUM: "2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank" PUBLISHED: 18 Sep 2023 i.e. BEFORE OCT 7 https://www.savethechildren.net/news/2023-marks-deadliest-ye... (this is the actual article I should have referenced)

"18 Sept 2023 - At least 38 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began, said Save the Children."

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#635
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, that it can be a coping mechanism. You find something that's esoteric enough that you can project your goodwill onto it and use it to justify your weird behaviors. I also agree that if you're doing good, your work speaks for itself, and does not need to be justified. I think Rockefeller, for example, struggled with this a lot later in life when he tried to pay for the cruelty his career with a later devotion…

Marshall McLuhan was the most famous and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, and the one whose ideas are probably the most obviously relevant to Facebook. He’s not some sort of obscure figure at all. I’m sorry if he wasn’t your cup of tea and it’s totally possible that Facebook execs weren’t understanding and applying his ideas correctly but frankly I would be a lot more worried about th…

There's more to it obviously

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#636
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, that it can be a coping mechanism. You find something that's esoteric enough that you can project your goodwill onto it and use it to justify your weird behaviors. I also agree that if you're doing good, your work speaks for itself, and does not need to be justified. I think Rockefeller, for example, struggled with this a lot later in life when he tried to pay for the cruelty his career with a later devotion…

Marshall McLuhan was the most famous and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, and the one whose ideas are probably the most obviously relevant to Facebook. He’s not some sort of obscure figure at all. I’m sorry if he wasn’t your cup of tea and it’s totally possible that Facebook execs weren’t understanding and applying his ideas correctly but frankly I would be a lot more worried about th…

I didn’t say the author was obscure or that his ideas were not relevant, but rather that this particular text was rare.

I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential (it’s a framework for analyzing media that makes some vague but bold claims about what constituted effective content on varying mediums for media at different points in time).

But he can be “famous” and the material can be relevant and the original point can still stand — they found something sufficiently relevant and mysterious and famous enough to point to as an external appeal to authority to justify the sale ads on the serving of visual opium to children. I don’t think that would have been McLuhan’s cup of tea, eh? But if you do it in his name, maybe it’s easier to swallow.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#637
post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American medical professionals who served in Gaza certainly disagree with Israel. Do you believe them or do you believe the same Israel who made up "40 beheaded babies"? > The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other h…

Are they working in these hospitals only with the approval and permission of HAMAS, or are they free to voice an independent opinion without fear of reprisal from armed militants in the middle of a war where a doctor with their head blown off is just a statistic? I'm not just saying this as an argument, this kind of bias in reporting from volunteers in war zones is common. There was some war in Africa where medics fr…

> Israel was saying that HAMAS had built tunnels under the hospitals

If the tunnels are under the hospitals, why bomb the hospitals then? It won't destroy the tunnels. It will only destroy the hospitals.

IDK what else to say, for some reason you are eager on believing that the same Israel who invented 40 beheaded babies, and the US intelligence who lies about Iraq WMD, are somehow a beacon of truth, despite them never providing a shred of evidence.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self defense is not seen based on how many skulls you collected. Hamas needs to go and that's how Israel will do it's self defense. Proportionality has nothing to do with self defense. Hamas the org was involved, and the other ones too, they are the target. But I do agree that Israel's policies regarding air strikes are fucked up

Proportionality is what makes self-defense defense , and not an excuse to kill people. The vast majority of the people who are killed in those strikes are not Hamas.

No? In india 2019, there was a terrorist attack where the jihadist organisation jaish-e-mohammad blew up a bus carrying soldiers via ramming a car filled with IEDs into the bus killing 40 people. In response, india did the balakot airstrikes, killing ~300 terrorists in a training camp [identified via the number of phones that were working in the area that was bombed.]

300 is clearly a bigger number than 40, so was the attack wrong? india used it as an excuse to kill more people than what should be considered a good proportional response!

Since that attack[and other operations], JeM and others became fairly inactive and terrorist attacks have gone down by an insane number, what used to be a daily occurrence and a reason to not attend local festival celebrations due to threat of bombs is now a rarity.

Proportionality has nothing to do with defence. Why on earth would u kill only a few terrorists as a response? Israels actions are fucked up but proportionality does not apply to defence. If a state is retaliating to a threat, why would it leave the threat alive, which would only cost lives of more of its people?

Israel's airstrike policy is bad and roof knocking is not enough, the way israel conducts war is wrong and there needs to be intervention that is able to chain israel while eliminating hamas, demilitarising palestinian jihadist groups and stabilising the region.

But proportionality has nothing to do with defence. you can be disproportional if that means the threat ceases to exist.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#639
post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marshall McLuhan was the most famous and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, and the one whose ideas are probably the most obviously relevant to Facebook. He’s not some sort of obscure figure at all. I’m sorry if he wasn’t your cup of tea and it’s totally possible that Facebook execs weren’t understanding and applying his ideas correctly but frankly I would be a lot more worried about th…

I didn’t say the author was obscure or that his ideas were not relevant, but rather that this particular text was rare. I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential (it’s a framework for analyzing media that makes some vague but bold claims about what constituted effective content on varying mediums for media at different points in time). But he can be “famous” and the material can be relevant a…

> I didn’t say the author was obscure or that his ideas were not relevant, but rather that this particular text was rare.

I’m frankly puzzled at your assertion that this is a rare, out-of-print book when it’s the top search result on Amazon for “Marshall McLuhan” and costs $31.22 in paperback: https://a.co/d/dhOl4EJ

Your claim that “you can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150” seems approximately true if you insist on only buying a first edition hardcover, which is fair enough. I don’t know what changed between the first edition and the 1994 edition currently available on Amazon. But if the Meta execs are sticklers for the first edition in particular, that’s an indication that they’re taking the ideas in the book more seriously rather than less.

> I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential

You also referred to it as “basically completely unfollow-able”. In other words, you weren’t really able to follow or grasp what McLuhan was writing. Maybe it’s not your fault and McLuhan was just writing incoherent nonsense—I can’t say either way since I haven’t read him—but this admission on your part undermines your attempts to assess the relevance of Understanding Media to Meta’s business model.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#640
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist. The counter narrative would be that preventing it gives power to American workers (of all races) but no one seems to discuss that.

>It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist. This is just such an absurd take. How much reality do you have to suspend to believe that corporations around the globe have all zoned in on a policy of somehow propagating a narrative through public life about immigration so that they can expl…

I am very pro capitalism, but as a worker under capitalism it is very clear that immigration benefits corporations. Why do you think the impacts of immigration on American workers are not discussed by media? My conclusion is that discussing it does not benefit those who own those media companies. They are shareholders in other businesses, they employ people, and likely sit on the boards of companies that benefit from immigrant labor. It does not need to be a conspiracy, just self interest of those who control the narrative.
Post reply on HN