We received a presentation/demo of their products when I worked in the gov (not the US gov. though) a couple of years ago.
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.
Ex FDE here. Part of Palantir's pitch for Foundry back in the day is connecting disparate databases from agencies that don't collaborate well. They're also really good at getting demos up and running in a few days. The tech was good back when I was employed.
They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
The thing is, Palantir doesn't enable that, their software does. And if Palantir didn't exist, the government could simply create it. (Some will say that the government is too incompetent to write software, to which I point to the US Digital Service, and also point out that trusting hyperbole is always a bad idea).
My point isn't that you shouldn't hate on Palantir, but that in doing so often the cause and effect get reversed in people's minds. They think that Palantir is the cause and eroded civil liberties is the result, when the opposite is true.
Sounds like the poster is saying we should also hate them for scamming everyone out of their country/state/municipality’s public money by jacking up the price of contracts once they hook them in?
I am not sure what government you are thinking of, but not in the US government. There are some trimmings and some consolidation that may shift people and function in or under something else, but the programs, as generally defined by activities (because the nature of a “program” often morphs over time, even if everything else remains the same) basically never really get shut down anymore, if ever.
There may be a loss of interest or focus, often related to technological changes causing an atrophy over time, but that usually also just leads to long tail existence that seems to mostly be defined by the duration of the career length of those involved and/or any kind of special interests that can maintain their nepotistic/corrupt advocacy.
It is a function of the empire and the reserve currency status of it, i.e., the “infinite” money printing that causes profligacy that is also an existential threat because it distorts perceptions and reality, e.g., the belief that it does not matter and that no discipline in spending or budgeting is necessary, hence why America has essentially for 56 years now (ignoring the anomaly in 2001) not produced a balanced budget.
That's a great summary, especially the part about Palantir's strategic customer approach being the middle squeeze (high + low buy-in being used to override middle manager blockers).
The problem as enunciated also 100% tracks with my time as a consultant -- delivering solutions was 40% people-fixing and 60% code-fixing.
Ontologies, semantic relationships, data pipelines, data provenance (I suppose a.k.a. lineage), etc. are all things that quickly become familiar to anyone working on knowledge management.
All of these things are pretty fascinating, as they concern the meta of the meta; the nature of knowledge itself; how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people.
Many software engineers are happy not knowing any of those terms. This perceived boredom is part of the reason why companies, some indeed with questionable ethics, like Palantir (is there even more than one in this space?) have very little competition and are making big bucks on big contracts (and only stand to make more once ML becomes less chaotic and more structured).
- the real power of Foundry is that it is REALLY scalable. Palantir is selling all the knowledge management+data management that you mentionned BUT at a level of integration and scalability that I had never seen in any other product.
- someone in the discussions mentionned IBM InformationServer as an alternative. Functionnaly that sounds quite similar to Foundry. The question is whether the implementation choices are as clever as in Foundry. #toBeInvestigated
I would love to know an alternative to that superbly integrated stack .
[be aware that none of those tools require coding knowledge, nor any DB administration, nor scalability consideration.
But for me the most important part is that the data workflow is not dataFrame driven, but semantic entity/relationship driven. Think of that as if you had an ORM magically wrapping your Spark cluster, and make it look like a graph database. Oh, and the sync with ElaticSearch is built-in for a no-brainer semantic search feature on your objects]
> be aware that none of those tools require coding knowledge, nor any DB administration, nor scalability consideration.
These are slogans with marketing grade truth, not engineering truth. The moment you leave the happy path wizards you run straight into Python, SQL, JVM knobs, and cluster limits. The visual Pipeline Builder drops you into a Code node the second you need anything beyond basic joins/filters. Here is an example: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/code-workbook/getting-...
99% of our pipelineBuilders are purely based on the available building blocks [that cover most of PySpark functions: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/pipeline-builder/funct...]. Most notably we do join/filters/explode/group, Dozens of them, realigning data from different parts of the company.
Having most of those PySpark functions exposed visually as building blocks with debug points available at each step simply outperforms a codeWorkbook in term of maintainability and readability.
Yeah as a general rule, when something requires "no coding" I question if they're too zoomed-in. In reality, you can just hire a programmer instead of a box-clicker.
...Except in this case, there might be a lot of value in letting James Bond or Boris Badenov whip up a quick spy pipeline without putting up a job ad for a Python coder.
You are aware the product names are cognitive obfuscation that the underlying implementation is just vanilla open source data modeling services right?
Linux. Windows. Both are "operating systems"?
What actual novel data collating and anomaly detection algorithms does Palantir implement that no one else does? Oh that's right these services are all just different corporate branding atop the same old open source stacks and libraries everyone uses.
I doubt anyone has the $$$ horsepower to maintain a coherent stack as big as Foundry. So in the makeOrBuy, you probably will go for a buy.
And in that field, I still think SAP is way behind Palantir. Someone in the discussion mentionned IBM’s InformationServer, and I will spend some time to investigate its storage scalability strategy and the data model governance.
Yeah ok let me go expropriate other peoples systems.
They exist but are used in house not sold as products.
There are information theory texts with all these ideas written in them published back in the 1950s we just didn't have powerful enough computers
Thiel and Musk's only advantage is age. They were able to implement first due to a single property of physics.
Most "geniuses" today, like Tao, just like reading math. None of them have any truly novel net new ideas. They're parrots whose cages were in the nerdy section of a book store.
This is like the equivalent of "my girlfriend goes to another school, you wouldn't know her". Okay, so there's in-house systems as good as this. Big whoop if no one can actually see or use them.
I’d like to hear from others, but my assumption has been that they’re the ones that 1) have staff with the required clearance to work on DoD projects and 2) the required security and compliance certifications in their product. On the latter, it’s not easy to provide a product that is DoD IL5 certified, so that is a differentiator for them.
just speculating, but part of the "nothing special" piece may be that the best engineers/software devs who dream of "changing the world" for the better won't give them the time of day, but they can do "just good enough for government work" analytics / software dev for government work
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
They're blowing up because they've got allies in government right now steering them contracts, which is par for the course for big government contracting. Elections are to a certain extent a contest between different camps to swing at the Piñata of Federal funding, with the winner taking the current batch of candy.
I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:
There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
> because they've got allies in government right now steering them contracts
Is that because palantir takes them out for golf outings and steaks? Or is it because palantir promises certain results and outcomes to them once the product is in place?
> There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues.
Yea, it's just the ideology of their founders, it has _nothing_ to do with their actions and partnerships.
> I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
"They're evil and they don't care who's buying."
> but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives.
That's not how morality, ethics, or the law works.
> People voted for this.
Literally _no one_ voted for this. The people who wanted DOGE to clean up government spending did not in any way think that all federal data, including their own private medical data, would be, or even need to be, fed into a private company to be used in service of the problem.
This is ridiculous apologia for evil. What is wrong with this site? If there's even a single dollar of profit on the table then civil rights are the first thing the "hacker news types" sacrifice. It makes you all seem gross and unapproachable.
My intent was to express skepticism about the idea that Palantir alone is anything other than a contractor behaving like a contractor. They’ll bid on anything and so will any other contractor. I get skeptical when something like that is held up as a big bogey man. I think it’s a distraction.
The real issue is that people voted for this. All of it.
Anyone who voted for Trump after J6 knew what they were getting. All the people with buyers remorse about Trump make me think of this parable:
I will comment only on the Foundry stack that we work extensively with, at my company.
Given the complete havoc that the other IT ecoaystems has become, we are constantly struggling with proper data access data exchange data transformation and data alignment. To a point where a political layer has appeared on top of that, which looks like the middle age baronies.
Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company.
The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterpriseData work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.
And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !
Truth to be told: data barons rarely consume their own data, and are not at all focused of the data customers needs.
So data customers have simply taken over the Palantir platform and manage the data import, data pipelines and data exposure (both general purpose exposure, and custom project-specific exposures) without caring very much about the data barons.
Those ones simply deny the need for such a data integration platform.
So we really are in a situation where users have embraced the platform and live in it on a daily basis, and the barons spend their days pretending that it is a minor useCase.
> are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data ?
I am pretty sure PoolParty and some other integration stacks exist.
But they lack the insane scalability and the proper stacking of layers that Palantir is implementing.
For the moment, the killing stack that Palantir proposes is:
- Spark
- PipelineBuilder
- OntologyManager
- Workshop
And I see nothing like that anywhere else.
[but I would love to]
I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pass just because of their perceived political leanings.
hmm. i read the whole thing and i'm not sure the point you're making. in the first paper, Wilson points out:
* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.
* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?
> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:
"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.
And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."
Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
I mean, it's also the bedrock of the Constitution as compared to the Articles of Confederation. Most of the "founding fathers" haaaaaaatttteeeedd democracy, equating it with Mob Rule.
The Great MAGA Cultural Revolution has shifted the overton window enough among right wing elite that anti democracy propaganda is now strong and spreading. But it's still our foundation, "we the people" and all that. If the right keeps pushing dictators I see a civil war in our future.
The MAGA cultural revolution fundamentally is an opposition to Wilsonianism and liberal universalism. That's why MAGA's authoritarian impulses are directed to the organs of Wilsonianism--such as executive agencies permanently captured by one party--rather than the public at large.
I had really hoped that by now you'd have seen that the things that you voted for and hoped to see come to pass are not the universal sweet that you thought they would be. But all I see is that every time more news about the disastrous political direction that USA has taken is that you shift your goalposts with it and declare that this too is what you wanted. As a dad of bi-racial kids I would be super worried that those chickens would come home to roost. These are not just paper games and plenty of people who thought their situation in the USA was a safe as houses - and who voted for Trump - have seen that assumption invalidated.
But as they say: a conservative is a liberal with a daughter.
The deeply unpopular destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives is not democracy. It is a billionaire coup, they're blowing up all the safeguards that generations of Americans put in place to protect us from them.
> destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives
Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.
In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.
Not only is it true, it's not even debatable. 84% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Kamala Harris: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... If you exclude DOD, it's like 90%. In State and Commerce, it was like 95%.
This is perhaps confounded somewhat by the fact that Trump's platform included mass layoffs of federal workers. Trump, contrary to past Republicans even, represented an existential threat to the livelihood of every federal worker.
> Those donation totals may be explained, at least in part, by the former president’s policies related to those agencies. Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate Education if he is elected. He maintained an adversarial relationship with EPA, proposing in each of his annual budgets to decimate the agency’s spending and meddling in its scientific work. Trump instituted a longstanding hiring freeze at State and referred to it as “the Deep State” Department. Trump has also vowed to do away with a merit-based civil service for much of the federal workforce.
"Employees at institutions being threatened to be dismantled by a presidential candidate do not support that candidate" does not prove what you think it proves. In fact, the same link says Trump got 40% of federal employee donations in 2020, which is much more balanced.
> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.
We'll need more substantial evidence to believe that these institutions are "permanently controlled by Democrats."
Really? Wow. It does not matter one iota who employees vote for. That is a dark and ugly slope. Maybe we should extend such dystopian views to the periphery, too, such as lobbyists.
It is not a surprise to anyone that people who see themselves as Republican, "the party for smaller government" are less likely to work for said government.
But the insult (and I am not even a public servant) that because people are democrats, they are somehow beholden to that over doing their job professionally, is a strong one. You've basically accused them of having a loyalty to party over their jobs.
I'd point out that, at the time American went to war against the Nazis, it was in the 3rd decade of an immigration policy so restrictive that the foreign-born population dropped from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. Even though Europe was utterly devastated from war in the post-war period, there was no mass immigration of europeans to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration laws.
So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
>Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”
Now I haven't read the book "Looking Forward." If I can get my hands on a copy it promises to be an interesting read. But I would like to follow up on the other ideas presented.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill
Democracy for all its imperfections, is symbolic of the idea that the people give power to the government, and that it is the government's duty to give power back to the people. To me, this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Did the people not give money (taxes) and power (accept rule of law) to the government? Is it so bad for the government to return some of that money and power to the people through the New Deal? Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to?
I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda. From the quotes you can see how they are twisting the ideal of democracy "power to the people" to instead focus solely on power (to the government), and thus authoritarianism. To disregard that the government is a powerful institution is foolish, of course, as is to assume that it somehow will magically work toward the betterment of the people. But to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane, and the article you posted, when read in its entirety, agrees.
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 can also sign up to Curtis Yarvin's Substack and read the kind of thinking that Thiel likes to surround himself with: https://graymirror.substack.com/
Or watch Peter Thiel's interview on the anti-chris and if he thinks humanity should survive (uhhh, well, ughh, ummm, you see). Wild scary stuff. Go watch the whole interview but a taste:
Here’s a more contextual excerpt of the transcript which features the 5 questions prior to this and his answer. When I listened to it, to me it seemed like he was thinking about how to weave answers to those into his response, which he does after the exerpt. It’s an entertaining memed clip but we owe it to intellectualism to understand the full context and not simply consume YouTube shorts as the be-all, end-all.
———-
Douthat: … It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
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 “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
I have knowingly voted for less freedoms for myself multiple times and I know it, for example I have voted:
- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.
- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.
- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.
I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.
And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
I understood your comment as restricting my own freedoms was a fully bad thing, and I therefore tried to provide examples of positive freedoms being afforded to you by restricting my own negative freedoms.
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 increasingly against American citizens.
I don't disagree with any of your conclusions, but he is not even a libertarian ideologically. Somebody who is a boss (owner or manager) in a private company can't be considered to put freedom of his subordinates above all else; it's an authoritarian arrangement. If he was truly a libertarian, he would be either a lone contractor or consider his coworkers to be his peers (e.g. would start a cooperative instead of private company, or he would find a similar position as Linus Torvalds).
This is part of the fundamental contradiction of libertarianism. Why would those with the power and the purse strings curtail the government (including spending) when it doesn’t suit them? Instead it’s things like environmental regulations and social programs that get cut, tipping society’s imbalances further.
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.
At Alligator Alcatraz and CECOT, people are held without charges, denied timely access to legal counsel, and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention. At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so. The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials. Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
You do not have to be criminally charged to be deported under civil immigration statues. The years of leftists smugly proclaiming "it's a civil violation, not a crime" ended up being a self own.
>denied timely access to legal counsel
Again, civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
>and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention
They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge. The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
>At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
Not in the US. Deportations to CECOT follow the same practices and statutes as deportations to other countries.
>The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so.
I'll give you this, detention/prisons/etc. centers in the US are universally bad.
>The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials.
It's not punishment, it a temporary holding before deportation.
> Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
Illegal immigrants do not have a constitutional right to stay in the US.
CECOT is part of US mass deportation operations. Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country. In fact the US plans to expand the number of domestic and foreign concentration camps.
> civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
You’re appealing to the law. But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it. It is a human right not a legal right. The history of concentration camps is full of legal supports placed there by authoritarian governments. But legal justifications don’t exonerate governments mass incarcerating people without due process.
> They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge.
Sure there is. Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging.
> The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
Average detention times are around 50 days. Some people crossing at borders for example can be turned back fairly quickly. Others are held indefinitely.
> It’s not punishment
Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
>Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country.
If illegal immigrants were to voluntarily deport before becoming detained, could they avoid incarceration at CECOT? If the answer is "yes", then it seems their own actions/decisions cause this. Why then should I have sympathy for them?
>But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it.
What is the exact nature of their due process rights in that situation?
What process is due, exactly, someone who is detained because they have no right to be in this country?
>Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging
The only people who have a say in the matter on whether or not a non-citizen should be allowed to stay or forcibly deported is a citizen. If you'd like to make the case that they should be allowed to stay (as a citizen), then I am willing to hear your argument.
I'm not willing to hear theirs, and as much as I can influence my government, I will demand that it be unwilling to hear their (non-citizens') arguments as well. In court, or otherwise.
>Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
If you remove a trespasser from your property, it is not punishment... it is remedy. If the remedy (for some reason) deters future trespassing, that still doesn't make it punishment.
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.
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 myself have no interest in it. It's enough that they leave.
>You’re assuming that all people ICE sends to concentration camps deserve to be there?
I don't know what you think the word "deserve" means that it is relevant. It does not matter where they deserve to be, they can't be here. It's our property, they're not welcome.
>But these determinations have been made without fair hearings
There need be no hearings at all. They are not citizens, they have no right to be here. None. You seem to think that some legal right is being revoked, which would necessitate courts... but they have no such legal right. No need for hearings.
>Due process is not afforded these people.
The only process due an illegal immigrant is checking to make sure they're not a citizen. If that process has been followed, no more process is due them. They are not criminals, they get no trial.
> Treating people this way is unjust.
Possibly. But I do not care, not even a little. It is our obligation to make a place for foreigners to live here. This isn't their country.
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.
>The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true.
None of the detainees are claiming citizenship. Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them. One might think that even someone ignorant of the law might start babbling "you can't do this, I'm a citizen" or similar.
They know the score. They know they're not. Now if only the left would clue in too.
>and punishment.
What punishment? Not all legal remedies are punishment. No criminal charges are levied. No one intends to incarcerate them (hell, that would mean they get to stay). They're just being deported.
> Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them.
Due process is a human right not a right of citizens.
> What punishment?
The conditions of these concentration camps are inhumane, which itself is punishment. Besides, as stated by public officials, Alligator Alcatraz is intended as a deterrent. How can it deter if it doesn’t punish?
And being deported if you don’t deserve it is punishment. And being deported to foreign concentration camps where you are tortured is punishment as well.
And individuals can indeed claim citizenship and get no hearing for their claim. Claims don’t get hearings. That’s because there is no due process. In fact, many people are kidnapped without any formal accusation whatsoever being levied at them - for example Mahmoud Khalil, who had a green card and was retaliated against for protesting genocide, without ever being formally accused of anything.
> No one intends to incarcerate them
Detention at a concentration camp constitutes incarceration. On average ICE detains people around 50 days domestically (although those are dated numbers). Some are detained indefinitely. At CECOT, prisoners are incarcerated for life. And the US plans to increase the numbers of foreign concentration camps it uses as part of its operations, which don’t even have to be the person’s country of origin.
I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are? Can you (without cheating)? You've heard the term before (in school most likely), and if you were in the 10% of the students who weren't borderline flunking, you might even be able to name which amendment enumerates due process rights, but in my experience that's about the most any non-lawyer can even manage.
I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
>I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are?
It's because most people don't have a good grasp of how diverse and often flimsy administrative and civil process (in cases where one party is the .gov is in reality. Typically the answer is "whatever the enforcing agencies come up with", which isn't very reassuring.
Like for a traffic ticket they at least haul you before a judge in a public court anyone can attend to give some pretext of the accused having serious rights that protect them. It makes sense. Traffic tickets are a "mass market" product so to speak and so the .gov has to put on a good show even if at the end of the day someone facing a $200 civil traffic fine doesn't actually have the same rights as the guy facing a $200 criminal public urination fine.
When it comes to stuff like code enforcement, arcane industry enforcement, fish and game, ICE and everything else federal the process is far less "due", so to speak and is far more likely to not have separation of powers on the government side (i.e. administrative ppl in the enforcement agencies will be making decisions that would be made by a judge in other contexts)
I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil (traffic ticket and the like), which itself is a joke compared to criminal matters.
I would really like to see all this shit thrown out by the supreme court. If the .gov, be it fed, state or local, is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals bet it a fine or jail then they ought to meet the same bar. Allowing people to be jailed (in the case of ICE) or fined large sums (in the case of many other types of administrative matters) because it's not nominally a criminal matter is 100% an end run around the constitution.
>I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil
Then let's explore that. There are some rights which aren't fundamental human rights... that is, you don't get them just by virtue of existing. Voting comes to mind, that's a citizen's right only.
The right to be present within the borders of the United States is another such right. If you aren't a citizen, you do not have this right. We might extend the temporary privilege to non-citizens, but it is absolutely at the prerogative of the United States... subject to revocation at any time. The idea that it can't just be subject to revocation (arbitrary or otherwise) is the dimwitted notion that there is a sort of second-class citizenship... that some not-really-citizens can be here permanently and we can't decide that we want them to return home.
So, if they can be deported (for reason, or none at all), the only recourse such people have is "I can prove I'm a citizen". If ICE isn't letting them do so, if they protest that they are a citizen and the ICE agent sticks his fingers in his ears and chants "I can't hear you" repeatedly, then that would be a violation of due process. The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
I reject the idea that it is necessary or desirable to drag each of these foreigners before a judge to perform this function.
> is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals
I don't want these people punished at all. Punishment would be putting them in prison (where they would stay in the United States). If someone is trespassing on your property and you call the police, the police would punish them by prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating. When they drag them from your property and tell them to get lost, that's not punishment. It's just removal from where they aren't permitted to be. It's still not punishment even if they cry that they don't want to go home.
> The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
A DOJ lawyer literally said they haven't been doing this sufficiently and then he got sacked by Pam Bondi. SCOTUS then reaffirmed 9 to 0 that the original lawyer who admitted this failure in court was actually correct, that DOJ wasn't giving people their due process rights.
I find it extremely hard to believe you have not heard about the Kilmar Abrego case?
Which does not preclude him from having due process rights, as SCOTUS ruled 9-0 (and has been reaffirmed unequivocally by about 180 years of case law).
His due process rights were "if he protests that he is a citizen, then they must make effort to determine if that is the case with haste, and release him if it checks out".
He did not assert citizenship, they did not violate due process rights. No other process is due him. Anyone claiming that it's a violation of due process rights doesn't know what they mean, though for a moment I had hope for you... you sort of described them, or at least hinted at them, but you're unable to apply what you described to this situation. Due process rights can't and won't keep non-citizens in this country if they are trying to avoid deportation, and shouldn't ever. Non-citizens only have the revocable-for-any-reason-or-none privilege of visiting, and that only if they get the visa.
OK, but if I am part of a large flow of people fleeing country X for country Y, more often than not, I cannot move around country Y as I please: I am restricted to a refugee camp. Also more often than not, I am not entitled to a hearing in front of a magistrate to dispute that restriction.
Most refugees don’t live in camps. Some camps don’t restrict movement, and those that do restrict it to widely varying degrees. Some do have features of concentration camps. Typically, even in closed camps, there’s no claim that refugees have violated the law as justification for detentions. Refugees are typically fleeing to escape dangerous situations.
As of the end of 2021 there were around 6.7 million registered refugees from
Syria globally. This figure is reported by the UNHCR (United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees) in their Global Trends report for 2021. These
refugees were primarily hosted in neighboring countries such as Turkey,
Lebanon, and Jordan -- and most of those are restricted to refugee camps -- and the ones who enjoy the freedom to move around the country probably achieved that through bribery, which of course is not the same thing as having due-process rights.
Refugees admitted into Europe are not restricted to camps and do have some due-process rights, but they have at most times been a distinct minority of the refugees in the world.
According to UNHCR, 22% of the world’s refugees are in refugee camps. Camps vary in their quality. And some are more or less closed than others.
Some refugees do live in inhuman conditions. Even if these conditions affected a majority of refugees, that doesn’t justify treating human beings this way.
All people have a right to due process. It’s a human right. Whether this or that government honors this right is a separate question.
We should be trying to emulate governments that honor human rights, not take our example from those that don’t.
Exactly, you can paint "it's a concentration camp" on the immigration detention facility and it is miraculously still the same thing. Glad you agree, it's not a concentration camp.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Haha I like that quote, but to her unintentional credit Ayn Rand did force me to think about why she was wrong, whereas if my main exposure to capitalist propaganda were the plausibly apolitical econ classes offered in school I might never have even realized that they were propaganda.
These sound like the exact reasons we don't have a direct democracy.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”
- not Peter Thiel
It's a nice soundbite, but in reality people (maybe not Peter Thiel though) understand the value of the common goods quite well. (If you happen to be an uneducated American, who doesn't, you can come here to Europe and see.)
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 Democratic process has been performed, and therefore the outcome is just. There's an apt George Carlin quote...
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.
That's exactly how it works already, albeit through the middlemen representatives figuring out what block of voters is cheapest to buy. The only meaningful difference in a representative democracy is that the representatives can choose not to deliver on their promises (in other words: lie), thereby consolidating real power in a smaller group of people.
Except somehow it's the opposite? The Big Beautiful Bill is one of the most regressive bills in decades - the vast majority of the benefits went to the richest while the biggest cuts went to the poorest. The MAGA base is definitely not on the richer end of that spectrum. I.e. they didn't really even get anything for their undying loyalty besides "owning the libs" I guess.
The market already exponentially concentrates wealth, just piggy back on that. There will always be a market for promoting the self-serving politics of the rich.
The idea is that smaller group of people actually have some integrity and sense of duty to the people they represent and the country at large, rather than just pulling the lever for the thing that benefits them the most in the immediate term.
That idea has always been tested, with the current times being the largest test in several decades at least.
The argument that somebody else has better integrity and sense of duty representing my needs or wants is dead on arrival. Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person has a representative.
The founding fathers and many others would disagree. Based on human history, your assessment of the average human's level of integrity and reasoning is irrationally optimistic.
Also, I assume you meant to say "Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person *is* a representative."
It doesn't matter because everyone only has to represent themselves so they don't really need to have integrity or ability to reason in some larger sense, they just have to be selfish — which is a lot easier than reasoning your way to what maximizes societal good, or some average of the opinions of the 100'000+ people you are supposedly representing.
And the amount of power an individual has is negligible so a bad vote is diluted much more than it is in a representative democracy.
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?
The founders created a representative government with a limited franchise and express protections for private property and economic liberty, precisely because of the concerns over populist democracy. That's why they provided for an electoral college rather than direct election of the president, and for senators to be selected by state legislatures. The push towards making that republican system more democratic started half a century later with Jacksonian democracy and expansion of the franchise, culminating in the early 1900s with direct election of senators and extending the franchise to women.
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
That's still not more or less. That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
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.
> 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 regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!
I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
It's not just about who is the "head" of the agency. In practice, the career civil service has tremendous power and discretion to run the agency; political appointees can't do much without their cooperation.
And the career civil service overwhelmingly is Democrats. 85% of federal employee donations went to Kamala Harris, 90% of you exclude the DOD: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... The proportion of republicans in AOC's district in the Bronx and Queens is more than twice as high as in the federal government outside the DOD. And given that federal workers tend to be highly educated, and more educated people tend to be more politically ideological, you get a federal government that's a true monoculture.
Certainly, we can debate about the degree to which the career civil service zealously carries out the agenda of the current elected administration. I suspect it depends on the agency. What's disturbing to me is the people who think the career civil service should serve as a "check" on the elected administration. These are the people who cite political appointees overruling career civil servants as itself an example of "dismantling democracy." They are the ones who cheered on civil servants who declared their "resistance" to Trump in 2017 at the start of his term. This view--which I think is fairly widespread--nakedly embraces the idea that "democracy" is where one party always runs the government, and that electing a President from the other party simply means that he gets to cajole and try to persuade civil servants into carrying out some of his agenda.
>That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
What's so great about voting? The things that people think they love about democracy are many, but voting isn't one of those. We love the idea that in principle, any child might grow up and become president. That (in principle, it's less and less so each day it seems) there is no ruling class and no political dynasties. That public discourse at least influences outcomes within government. Voting might have (at one time) helped to make those things a reality, but those things can all be had without voting.
Anyone who has heard of sortition and still wants voting to occur is a fool. Even the Greeks who invented democracy thought voting inferior to sortition.
What's great about voting is that it gives the government a mandate from and therefore legitimacy to the electorate. It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
Even theoretically that's not true. But if we stoop to the pragmatic, sometimes they win without even a majority of those still not disillusioned enough to stop voting.
>It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
If not that, then there's nothing about voting that I give much of a shit about. Nor do tens of millions of others. And if he helps to rain destruction upon such systems as you would create, then more power to him.
You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
It seems like maybe you read my "it has nothing to do with X" as meaning "it is not desirable if X." Otherwise not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
>You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
A "mandate" isn't what you just described above. It's always true that those who weasel their way into office have been influenced by someone or someones, but to call that a "mandate" when it amounts to some tiny non-majority fraction of the (even voting age) population is bizarre. Is this some meme joke that I'm just clueless about, because it's difficult to take you seriously.
>not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
An even hand typed the words with a calm heart, and no other emotion other than exasperation. Your takes are pretty far from reality.
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.
> The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s.
The youngest delegate to the Constitutional convention was Johnathan Dayton of New Jersey, who was 26, and there were three more under 30. There were more over 60 than than under 30.
The people that are frequently cited as being "Founding Fathers" in their "early 20s" (or "between 19 or 21, because we're not sure exactly when he was born", in Hamilton's case) are people who were that age in 1776 and ended up playing an important role. But the Constitution was drafted more than a decade later -- there was a war, plus time under the first system of government under the Articles of Confederation in between.
> Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.,
No, that was not a "doctrine of the founding fathers", it was a belief of Thomas Jefferson expressed later in a letter to, as I recall, John Adams, specifically (the upper limit of the period at which he held any law or constitution needed to expire was actually 19 years, based on actuarial data and a set of assumptions he had about what was necessary and acceptable in terms of avoiding the living being ruled over by the dead.)
You can tell it was not a widely held "doctrine of the founding fathers" (or, more to the point, of the Framers, who are the ones actually relevant to the Constitution, though the two groups have considerable overlap) because instead of expiring by its own terms in 19 years or less, the Constitution was permanent, with a very difficult method of amendment, and that method of amendment was specifically barred from changing certain parts.
There weren't really very many widely shared "doctrines" of the Founders or the Framers. They weren't a hive mind or a cult or even a group as ideologically aligned as the coalition that makes up either of the US's current major political parties. The idea of shared doctrines or a single unifying vision behind the Constitution are mythologies created after, and requiring deliberate disregard of, the facts.
They certainly were not infallible, but the question is whether they were unwavering advocates for democracy.
All of the restrictions they put in place, such as the electoral college and who was able to vote at all, along with the writings we have, suggests as a group they were not.
I think he was saying the antichrist would be more likely to be a person like Greta, not Greta herself, but the clip cuts off the context at the beginning so it is hard to say.
Why is our media literacy so in the gutter? A few second clip of an easily accessible and free interview from a NYT podcast would not be accepted as gospel fact in the hn of the past.
You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
What? GP didn't even contradict anything I said, just claimed there's some ambiguous problem with citing a few second clip of the person saying the thing I accused them of saying.
My claim: "he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist"
Thiel's words:
> Thiel: ... The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate....
> in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world.
> In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
He's talking about the Antichrist dude... he's a devout Christian... they believe in things like the Antichrist.
People really do be bending over backwards not to hear the words spoken to them if they seem too wacky to be palatable. Dark secret though: billions of people believe truly wacky shit. Some of those people are unbelievably wealthy.
Anyone can go read the transcript. It's quite clear he's saying he believes Greta might very well be the Antichrist.
Sure. There's a big difference between believing a 20 year old climate activist is a clown versus a harbinger of the apocalypse as foretold in an ancient text 2000 years ago.
Also its named after a technology that most often causes its user to die or lose a war by exposing them to disinformation. That's an odd bit of messaging for a surveillance company.
Would it make you feel better if they publicly pledged allegiance to democracy and flag and all those sorts of things and privately just ignored all that (like majority of big corporation management)?
Just because Palantir founder was being more open about how things are doesnt not make him or rather the company more evil.
Just for disclaimer, I do think Palantir is evil, but not any more or less than Google or Microsoft or any big tech corporation to that matter.
When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.
I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
I don't believe this is true. The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe. It's frequently expressed online, but a lot of that is not from human Americans.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
> The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
Sorry, this is Orwellian doublespeak. I don't know exactly what "democratic institutions" you're referring to, but you seem to be referring to administrative agencies and adjuncts that are the exact opposite of "democratic institutions." They're anti-democratic checks that are permanently in the control of one party, regardless of who wins elections.
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
> You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
> Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
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.
They didn't ask you to define racism. They asked you to find sources for your claim, which you have conspicuously forgotten to include.
It's a public source too, so it doesn't cost you anything to support your claim. Are you recalling something that actually exists, or trying to warp the narrative into whatever supports your perception?
They raised the definition of racism by preemptively asserted that articles leveling “legitimate” accusations of racism wouldn’t count.
For example, here’s an article trying to tie Trump’s growing support among minorities to “multiracial whiteness” and minorities “embrac[ing] white power movements.” From where I’m standing that sure seems like calling minority supporters of Trump white supremacists.
Aren't you supposed to be a Washington DC lawyer? How is it even fucking possible that you forgot what happened in January 2021? Were you in a coma when this was published? Were you get hit on the head in the ensuing years? It's incredulous that such recent history is so readily forgotten.
In case the context is lost on you (and I can't believe I'm explaining this), this article was published following a violent and lethal political protest endorsed by the president. If the NPR did not publish some sort of examination on that event, it would have been disgusting negligence on their behalf.
January 6 involved a multiracial band of wackjobs storming the capitol for reasons that had nothing to do with race or racism. Framing J6 as involving “multiracial white supremacy” is a great example of how NPR tries to make everything about white people being racist.
In this case, NPR’s ideological blinders caused them to miss the real story. Racism in the country is decreasing, leading to less racial polarization in politics. Trump gained minority vote share in each election, culminating with winning a record number of minorities in 2024 for a republican in the modern era. The GOP is becoming an increasingly multiracial coalition united by distrust of institutions and experts, conspiracy theories, and memes.
> 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 figure that?
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 cultural friction that’s happening. Stephen Colbert would call it “truthy.”
[1] When I was a kid, my muslim immigrant mom told me not to marry a white girl because “they eat snakes.” I married a white girl, and she had in fact eaten a snake before. Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
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.
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.
This analysis would seem to exonerate even Pat Buchanan, who by the 1990s had learned to couch all his rhetoric in terms of culture rather than race.
> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?
Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.
Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.
> Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though.
And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.
Like it was racist when Nazis said that Jews control the world and ate children and whatever nonsense you can think of.
Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism. The couch fucker treated them differently, by lying that they specifically are eating pets.
> Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism
Nobody targeted anyone’s immutable characteristics. If you object to 10,000 Appalachians being resettled in your New England town, that’s not “racism.” It’s an objection based on not wanting them to do to your town what they did to their hometowns in Appalachia. It’s about peoples’ culture and how that manifests in the communities they create.
I think this is hard for liberals to understand because they’re so steeped in cultural relativism. They assume that cultural differences cannot be substantive—cannot shape the communities people create in substantive ways. So they cannot understand why anyone would object to mass settlement of culturally distinct groups except out of prejudice against immutable characteristics. Oddly, they seem to have this blind spot only for non-white people. Most would agree that West Virginia is the way it is because of West Virginians. But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka.
Being a Haitian immigrant is an immutable characteristic. That aside, these were legal immigrants welcomed by the city and assimilating into the community, used as a scapegoat with a baseless conspiracy to stir anger on a campaign trail. I’m not sure what about this incident is defensible but it has nothing to do with culture. Are you being intentionally provocative or do you really believe this?
> But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka
And that's fine to say. However, it isn't acceptable to invent a story that these Bangladeshis are eating pets with the goal to get everyone else to hate them though, especially when the place in question actually majority likes them, and was even asking for extra resources to help them.
I'm not saying that people don't think that the US should be a democracy. I'm saying that people don't think the US is a democracy. When the president of the country is a criminal and blatantly ignores the constitution and the courts, what does democracy even mean?
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
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.
it would not be treason for drone armies of automated bots deployed in the field because they aren’t human?
if there were the same number of people standing on street corners collecting the same data as ring doorbells and waymos in san francisco, to sell for political and military applications, where does the treason begin?
how many humans need to conspire to erode democracy for it to count to your standards?
Whataboutism is designed to deflect attention from a particularly egregious example of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence etc. by claiming "everyone's doing it, why pick on my guys?"
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
To give my own view of Foundry and the products - pipeline buider, Ontology Manager, and workshop.
I think that pipeline builder is a good tool for building pipelines - however maybe its just my company but there is a sea of very similar tables that have been generated and pipeline builder makes things a lot messier. Personally I would prefer to use data bricks or even M$ Fabric to do pipeline processing - its like a lego version of those tools.
At my company I don't think that the ontological layer is really any more useful than a strict RDBMS warehouse system. It feels like marketing speak when I hear engineers/product managers talk about it. I certainly don't think that it has added any more insights/interlinking. I would like to see clear examples of benefits to this data structure over traditional warehousing approaches rather than hype.
I'm not blown away by Workshop - for reporting/visualization I would use PowerBI/Tableau (far superior). For app development (i.e. some kind of intelligent spreadsheet to allow opps people to use it) its ok - but quite clunky. Its a lego like system - and I'm not convinced as an app its better than excel on sharepoint (broadly speaking its worse). Again I think its all marketing.
It's still wild to me that someone named their company "dangerous and corruptive object that will lead you to ill ends while making you believe you are powerful and wise" and people go, "yeah, that company seems above board."
Do you even know what Palantir actually do? Because I see so many people talking about Palantir, but it seems apparent they've no idea what the business does, or sells, or how it even makes money except "through the government".
Like...they're a software firm. They specialize in government contracting. They sell software to the government, to fulfill tenders and requests asked for by the government (which is its own subset because government contracting generally sucks and is it's own skillset).
Basically they're selling BI-solutions for tyranny, usually by convincing government officials that it's a good idea to aggregate data sets that are separate for good reasons and then they'll achieve greater power over their subjects. That's the idea in the NHS project, that's what they're doing in the US and so on.
Their stock has tripled since november, they are way to overvalued. Either way I would not put my money on their stock, I do not want to support such company.
Vote with your wallet.
Speak for yourself....Writing was on the wall the minute I saw where the funding for Palantir was coming from. Been in since $12 a share, holding tight until they take over.
Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
Missed jumping in at $16 and ended up watching and waiting for a year.
Eventually jumped in at $40 just before the election, as well as picking some bargain shares in critical mineral mining/processing. All are looking very good right now.
Oh, you think the price of equities will mean anything when Skynet takes over.
I'll be seen as a friend of the bots. A Godfather who funded their existence in the first place. The Digital Gods will favor me and my 100 shares as one of their own creators
/s (hope that was obvious. In reality, I'm pretty sure Theil's influence on the current admin will only increase Palantir's influence in the gov, but I don't think we're here for my speculative DD)
Classic backseat financial analysis - earning report last night showing they exceeded all analyst expectations (yet again) and further showed that the valuations is definitely holding. They exceeded pretty much every financial area they could and have just crossed $1bn in revenue. The proof is in the pudding, currently they are domination the market and for good reason. Sure there will become a point of uncertainty where people think they can't keep riding the price wave and people sell, but I think they have way more to deliver whether you like them or not
I wonder if the VCs have given up on growth. AI isn’t really profitable. Unless you can get government to pay for it (“socialism for me, capitalism for thee”). That means military contracts. So we have a top heavy system with a perverse incentive to justify itself with war. Unsurprisingly, I guess, the US is gearing up to do just that in 2027 with China.
I don't buy it. The money for government contracts is so much lower than the money from regular economic activity. It seems like every other business should be conspiring to avoid war, even if a small group wants it.
That's the meme. It's not going to happen IRL because it doesn't look like China is rising to the bait, because Russia is still advancing in Ukraine, because American industrial production capacity is by every estimation not equal to the task, and because the Middle East is as bad a mess as it has ever been and is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
When your Navy literally can't defeat the Houthis, you know for an ironclad 100% certainty that there's zero chance they're capable of beating China -- right off the coast of China!
Too cryptic. So what is war and why does it happen?
> "You actually need a balance of power"
Yeah, but it has to be credible. If it's not credible, or hinges on vague wunderwaffen or failed concepts, then it only exists if both sides swallow one side's propaganda. (Or unless nukes come into play, but then you get MAD game theory and it's unwise to open that can of worms unless necessary.)
I seem to remember a few months ago reading about wargames and/or scenario planning for a hypothetical US/China war, and the conclusion was, the US Navy gets thoroughly and quickly rekt.
It's important to take these wargames with a grain of salt. The US knows a direct naval conflict with China won't be pretty, there's almost certainly no intention of fighting them if China decides to press their advantage. But we don't have to "beat" China, we simply have to deter or outlast their desire to capture Taiwan.
There are innumerable possibilities if the US assists Taiwan, especially through the lens of hybrid warfare and not pitched battles. We have no motivation from a strategic standpoint to give China the naval war they want, so why would we?
Even if we grant that China is anything like Iraq (it sure ain't!), that was more than 20 years ago.
Last year, and not for want of trying, the US Navy sure didn't do anything to destroy the Houthi's conventional military capabilities. They're still sinking ships left and right! So much for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas.
Now imagine the USN actually has to fight a war in shallow waters against a foe that's literally 10,000x better armed and equipped than the Houthis, and with a capacity for industrial production that dwarfs its own.
War is a measuring rod. Before it begins, each side guesses at its own strength and the other's will. Often it guesses wrong. (In Ukraine, NATO overrated its weapons and tactics, Russia both overrated its own capabilities, and underrated Ukraine's resolve.) But if both sides know the truth beforehand, they don't fight to begin with. Thus there's literally zero chance that there's a war between the US and China in 2027, because the outcome is not really in doubt.
What conventional military capabilities? The Houthi's aren't sinking military ships, they're sinking unarmed, unarmored freighters in a stretch of water so narrow you could use a towed artillery gun to bullseye a freighter moving through it.
The problem they're facing is they can't reduce that capability to zero without starting a half-dozen other wars to deal with a logistical supply chain.
But it was turned around and reframed a little bit, where the inability of the USN to achieve anything tangible represents an absolute failure on their part. This is a more sober and credible read of the situation. If your tool doesn't work, what good is it? And if you think that the same tool is up for the job of fighting in the South China Sea, it seems to me that you ought to reassess your opinion. Expeditionary naval forces don't work very well these days. (Something that Russia also learned in the Black Sea.)
The Houthis somewhat inconveniencing global shipping in a protracted conflict defined by "our available missiles are too expensive to be using against the targets being sent against us" and the US defending Taiwan from a seaborne land invasion which would require the bulk transit of men, vehicles and supplies across a narrow body of water are in no way equivalent scenarios.
The Houthis aren't invading or occupying anything they didn't already own. No one is trying to take it from them. They are an insurance risk.
China trying to invade and occupy Taiwan is an existential threat for the people of Taiwan, and the volume and value of materials and men China would have to move across the Strait of Taiwan would vastly exceed the value of the missiles which would be targeted against them (and in fact would be targeted more aggressively since the US in part avoids expending missiles so as to retain reserves against more serious opponents - in a straight up fight with China though, you'd be much more liberal in your targeting priorities), which is what the US Navy is built to do. A platform being vulnerable to some new tactic does not make the platform useless, and if a minor upgrade would fix it then it just means you're in a transition point. If laser-equipped American destroyers with fleets of mixed capability interceptor UAVs in 2 years time are ensuring nothing touches a ship in the Red Sea, your theory would be in immense trouble - and that technology isn't theoretical, it's being deployed right now.
But perhaps if you really want to consider the problem, then just take a look at what China is building: missile destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers and stealth fighters. If all these things are so worthless and could not fight and defeat China, then why is China spending so much money trying to exactly replicate those capabilities if the future is all drones all the time or whatever other internet sensation of the moment (i.e. a year back when "the end of the tank was nigh" according to the internet).
> But perhaps if you really want to consider the problem, then just take a look at what China is building: missile destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers and stealth fighters. If all these things are so worthless and could not fight and defeat China, then why is China spending so much money trying to exactly replicate those capabilities if the future is all drones all the time or whatever other internet sensation of the moment.
Because: One of their best opening moves is a blockade of Taiwan, and that requires naval assets.
And because: There is such a thing as hedging your bets. No matter what anybody thinks, it is unwise to bet everything on your missile forces or new drones. You don't want to overcommit to one strategy or one way of waging war and later realize that you need to fall back on older means and methods. (As experienced by the Russians in 2022-2023.) So building a navy may be nothing more than a hedge against the possibility that other ways of making war won't work out.
But there's really no avoiding the fact that mobile launchers like the DF21/26/41 can launch a small LEO SAR constellation (i.e. just a few satellites) and a few ~10 minute contacts per day would provide enough targeting data to pinpoint any US surface fleet in the western Pacific. It's easy to see how a sufficient volume of missiles removes them from the board.
As an aside:
> If laser-equipped American destroyers
It's almost laughably easy to harden drones and missiles to high-power lasers. You can even retrofit old ones. Various different methods have been known since the 1970s. Lasers might work against trash-tier weapons and DJI drones, but the minute they become common on the battlefield countermeasures will become ubiquitous.
So either the war goes immediately nuclear, in which case no one wins but the US has a significant missile advantage, or it doesn't in which case China will be facing down an adversary with a 11 aircraft carriers and their support flotillas, as well as deep magazines of long range antishipping missiles and the largest submarine fleet in the world and the largest airforce in the world.
China has a lot of resources, but they have not turned those into the type of resources which can fight and defeat the US military conventionally and have a serious power-projection problem compared to the logistical mobility the US military enjoys mastery of.
Which again highlights the absurdity of saying "couldn't defeat the Houthis, can't defeat China" as though you're comparing apples to apples.
The other absurdity is of course the supposition that anyone wants a war to be good for business: checkout how that's going for Russia's defence contractors. No: the fear of a war is good for business. An arms build up or modernization program is good for business. An actual war is ubiquitously terrible for business.
Just how long do you think the US would be able to deploy the full force you describe here in a world where all commerce with China ceases abruptly and Pacific ocean trade is severely disrupted?
They can blow up some dams and cause enormous civilian suffering. After having lost in Ukraine I expect certain states to be on the look-out for actions that will cause massive destruction that they can consider quick wins.
A lot of VCs are Zionists and personally dedicated to making war and violently attacking Muslims. If you doubt, go read the twitter feeds from Sequoia MDs like Shaun Maguire. They're very open about their goals and very pro-Palantir, which has also been very open with their Islamophobia and explicit desire to ethnically cleanse Palestine.
We must see the privatisation of government not as a new Palantir project but as a long ongoing effort by most major tech companies and a growing number of politicians, republicans and billionaires. I suggest researching Dark Enlightenment and Neo-feudalism
Palantir is aiding and abetting multiple instances of genocide and repression worldwide. Their entire upper leadership should be thrown in prison. Along with other holocaust tabulation machine companies such as Microsoft and Oracle.
People always talk about Thiel, but hardly ever mention the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp. Another Zionist Jew to-the-core in charge of another shady American tech company.
Most countries use Palantir or similar data-analysis systems today. This fear-mongering spiel is aimed squarely at most uninformed peasants, but I guess they do it because it works.
What is the solution? Is it more corporate controlled, incompetence in government? Or is it less government that is focused on core issues and building competency and trust?
Rule of thumb: If a corporation mostly sells to consumers or other corporations, the government can save a lot of money and get a great result by buying from it at consumer prices. If a corporation mostly sells to the government, the government can steal every last taxpayer penny while delivering shit by buying from the corporation at government prices.
See for example (and yes I’d get cancelled for pointing this out) govt purchasing from ULA vs govt purchasing from SpaceX
Also there is the result that from IP to service and support the Gov will get washed.Leading to a lack of expertise and ownership. It essentially becomes little more than a rental - not owned, serviced or extended unless at the whims of the lowest bidder .Who inevitable qccrues cost overruns.In the space examplein the 70-80s a gov department was arguable more competent/effecient and on spec within its given budget.Not so much now.
> Following massive contract terminations for consulting giants and government contractors like Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte, Palantir has emerged ahead.
Just swapping different big consulting firms around.
I remember when Booz Allen was the bad guy. I just checked and apparently this is what they call themselves these days "an American company specializing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
BAH was the “bad guy” in the sense that they were grifters competent at only winning contracts and then extending them indefinitely through incompetent delivery to suck as much money out of the government as possible at the expense of having good systems and taxpayer money.
Just kind of summarizing from the comments in this topic (I also couldn’t be bothered to Google Palantir’s thesis): sticky/useful tools to combine and enrich data sources with a focus on a sector where there is a lot of compliance-driven security, data sources that aren’t easily queryable outside of their direct users, and high barriers to entry.
From the parts I've seen (Foundry et al), the promise is ability to sense of data and controlling its stocks and flows. There is a bit of Pachyderm-like versioned pipelines, notebooks, lots of access controls and audit logging. This is a place that was bought into Oracle "data democracy", reluctantly used Foundry and then was won over by the product.
We received a presentation/demo of their products when I worked in the gov (not the US gov. though) a couple of years ago.
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.
Ex FDE here. Part of Palantir's pitch for Foundry back in the day is connecting disparate databases from agencies that don't collaborate well. They're also really good at getting demos up and running in a few days. The tech was good back when I was employed.
They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
Yes. In practice, Palantir enables obfuscation of the "fruit of the poisonous tree".
Enabling a parallel construction in a surveillance state should draw hate, as it weakens the fourth amendment.
The thing is, Palantir doesn't enable that, their software does. And if Palantir didn't exist, the government could simply create it. (Some will say that the government is too incompetent to write software, to which I point to the US Digital Service, and also point out that trusting hyperbole is always a bad idea).
My point isn't that you shouldn't hate on Palantir, but that in doing so often the cause and effect get reversed in people's minds. They think that Palantir is the cause and eroded civil liberties is the result, when the opposite is true.
> They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
Right. That's exactly why they get hate. So what's the problem with that?
Sounds like the poster is saying we should also hate them for scamming everyone out of their country/state/municipality’s public money by jacking up the price of contracts once they hook them in?
OK, agreed, there's at least two good reasons.
Oh, they also bought thw VP of the USA. no biggie, just fascism.
Hate?
True, but government programs get cancelled all the time.
I am not sure what government you are thinking of, but not in the US government. There are some trimmings and some consolidation that may shift people and function in or under something else, but the programs, as generally defined by activities (because the nature of a “program” often morphs over time, even if everything else remains the same) basically never really get shut down anymore, if ever.
There may be a loss of interest or focus, often related to technological changes causing an atrophy over time, but that usually also just leads to long tail existence that seems to mostly be defined by the duration of the career length of those involved and/or any kind of special interests that can maintain their nepotistic/corrupt advocacy.
It is a function of the empire and the reserve currency status of it, i.e., the “infinite” money printing that causes profligacy that is also an existential threat because it distorts perceptions and reality, e.g., the belief that it does not matter and that no discipline in spending or budgeting is necessary, hence why America has essentially for 56 years now (ignoring the anomaly in 2001) not produced a balanced budget.
Didn't trump/doge just shut a ton of them?
Nothing that spends a lot of money on the scale of the Fed. Just low cost culture war stuff.
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
Yes, in that one of their cofounders and his buddies bankrolled the current administration...
This was an article that really helped me understand it
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
That's a great summary, especially the part about Palantir's strategic customer approach being the middle squeeze (high + low buy-in being used to override middle manager blockers).
The problem as enunciated also 100% tracks with my time as a consultant -- delivering solutions was 40% people-fixing and 60% code-fixing.
I've heard people say it's basically SAP with some spooky mystique for marketing.
Wake me up when SAP provides productivity tools of the level of PalantirFoundry’s Pipeline Builder, Ontology Manager, Data Lineage and Workshop.
I'm really glad I don't know what any of those things are.
Ontologies, semantic relationships, data pipelines, data provenance (I suppose a.k.a. lineage), etc. are all things that quickly become familiar to anyone working on knowledge management.
All of these things are pretty fascinating, as they concern the meta of the meta; the nature of knowledge itself; how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people.
Many software engineers are happy not knowing any of those terms. This perceived boredom is part of the reason why companies, some indeed with questionable ethics, like Palantir (is there even more than one in this space?) have very little competition and are making big bucks on big contracts (and only stand to make more once ML becomes less chaotic and more structured).
> how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people
So, lots and lots of pie charts?
I definitely agree.
Two comments here:
- the real power of Foundry is that it is REALLY scalable. Palantir is selling all the knowledge management+data management that you mentionned BUT at a level of integration and scalability that I had never seen in any other product.
- someone in the discussions mentionned IBM InformationServer as an alternative. Functionnaly that sounds quite similar to Foundry. The question is whether the implementation choices are as clever as in Foundry. #toBeInvestigated
They are the tools why PalantirFoundry is worth every penny
[not entirely true note: PalantirFoundry is a lowCode/noCode stack on top of a Spark cluster]
Pipeline Builder : https://youtu.be/WIQA7u1tbsY?si=iG-N9xHpUPPVAqDX
OntologyManager: https://youtu.be/SOW0IA_I0bk?si=u5eha0o-yrn4pHvu
Workshop: https://youtu.be/Uh0zpMUR6wY?si=BClTTbch70ZolRCb
I am sorry but these look like very basic ETL/UI Dashboard tools. Is this all they got?
I would love to know an alternative to that superbly integrated stack . [be aware that none of those tools require coding knowledge, nor any DB administration, nor scalability consideration. But for me the most important part is that the data workflow is not dataFrame driven, but semantic entity/relationship driven. Think of that as if you had an ORM magically wrapping your Spark cluster, and make it look like a graph database. Oh, and the sync with ElaticSearch is built-in for a no-brainer semantic search feature on your objects]
> I would love to know an alternative to that superbly integrated stack
This one has 10 years of precedence: https://www.ibm.com/products/information-server
> but semantic entity/relationship driven
This is marketing speak who means nothing. What do you mean? Something like this?: https://www.ibm.com/products/information-governance-catalog
Your data in Foundry are available both as tabular content and as a graph at the same time.
Here is a tool to visually explore your graph:
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/vertex/graphs-explore
And here is the search engine to search for your objects (free-text and/or types): https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/object-explorer/gettin...
And here is the tool to manage the ontology (the types and relationships of the graph, plus the mapping of the graph to the tabular datasets):
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-manager/overv...
The UI designer based on the graph data is called Workshop:
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview/
I still have to find a stack where this duality is as integrated as in Foundry.
> be aware that none of those tools require coding knowledge, nor any DB administration, nor scalability consideration.
These are slogans with marketing grade truth, not engineering truth. The moment you leave the happy path wizards you run straight into Python, SQL, JVM knobs, and cluster limits. The visual Pipeline Builder drops you into a Code node the second you need anything beyond basic joins/filters. Here is an example: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/code-workbook/getting-...
>> nor scalability consideration. Foundry Spark jobs expose tunable variables, you are expected to tweak them for performance and cost: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/optimizing-pipelines/s...
99% of our pipelineBuilders are purely based on the available building blocks [that cover most of PySpark functions: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/pipeline-builder/funct...]. Most notably we do join/filters/explode/group, Dozens of them, realigning data from different parts of the company.
Having most of those PySpark functions exposed visually as building blocks with debug points available at each step simply outperforms a codeWorkbook in term of maintainability and readability.
Yeah as a general rule, when something requires "no coding" I question if they're too zoomed-in. In reality, you can just hire a programmer instead of a box-clicker.
...Except in this case, there might be a lot of value in letting James Bond or Boris Badenov whip up a quick spy pipeline without putting up a job ad for a Python coder.
Once you have used a visual block-based version of PySpark, going back to regular Python code will really look like going back to prehistory.
You are aware the product names are cognitive obfuscation that the underlying implementation is just vanilla open source data modeling services right?
Linux. Windows. Both are "operating systems"?
What actual novel data collating and anomaly detection algorithms does Palantir implement that no one else does? Oh that's right these services are all just different corporate branding atop the same old open source stacks and libraries everyone uses.
I doubt anyone has the $$$ horsepower to maintain a coherent stack as big as Foundry. So in the makeOrBuy, you probably will go for a buy. And in that field, I still think SAP is way behind Palantir. Someone in the discussion mentionned IBM’s InformationServer, and I will spend some time to investigate its storage scalability strategy and the data model governance.
At least Astronomer has Gwyneth Paltrow
Show me a fully graphical version controlled UI that hides PySpark behind visual widgets.
Show me a entity-relationship model management [with version control] that wraps Spark data frames into a fully ontology-based graph database.
Show me a low code/no code UI designer that is fully consuming the ontology layer abstracting your Spark dataFrames.
#meWaiting
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Yeah ok let me go expropriate other peoples systems.
They exist but are used in house not sold as products.
There are information theory texts with all these ideas written in them published back in the 1950s we just didn't have powerful enough computers
Thiel and Musk's only advantage is age. They were able to implement first due to a single property of physics.
Most "geniuses" today, like Tao, just like reading math. None of them have any truly novel net new ideas. They're parrots whose cages were in the nerdy section of a book store.
I still wait for my list of immediately available products, so my company can escape the evilness [and overefficiency] of the PalantirFoundry stack.
Pretty sure Tao’s had one or two new ideas.
This is like the equivalent of "my girlfriend goes to another school, you wouldn't know her". Okay, so there's in-house systems as good as this. Big whoop if no one can actually see or use them.
I’d like to hear from others, but my assumption has been that they’re the ones that 1) have staff with the required clearance to work on DoD projects and 2) the required security and compliance certifications in their product. On the latter, it’s not easy to provide a product that is DoD IL5 certified, so that is a differentiator for them.
since i was not sure whats included in IL5, i asked GPT: >> FedRAMP Moderate baseline (as a foundation)
Additional DoD SRG IL5 controls on top of FedRAMP
Physical and logical separation of IL5 workloads from lower-level workloads
U.S. citizenship and background checks for all cloud personnel with access
Hosting and data storage within U.S. territory
Continuous monitoring and incident response plans that meet DoD requirements
DoD-specific access controls and encryption <<<
Thats quite some strict list which most companies would just not pass...
This is the actual answer
I was in the IC when Palantir was being rolled out and took a bunch of their training courses at their facilities in Georgetown
They have the data storage that complies with DCID and RMF ATO requirements across every IL and compartment
Before Palantir the only thing that we had was Analyst Notebook and you had to have a CD to run it and manage your own data repos locally
Palantir was entirely browser based and you didn’t have to manage data at all so they killed AN almost immediately
just speculating, but part of the "nothing special" piece may be that the best engineers/software devs who dream of "changing the world" for the better won't give them the time of day, but they can do "just good enough for government work" analytics / software dev for government work
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
[0]: https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-former-chancellor-se...
Why would their pitch to prospective targets reflect their corporate aims?
Do facebook or google do this to their users?
They're blowing up because they've got allies in government right now steering them contracts, which is par for the course for big government contracting. Elections are to a certain extent a contest between different camps to swing at the Piñata of Federal funding, with the winner taking the current batch of candy.
I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.
SAP is also a good comparison, so maybe GenZ SAP.
There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
> because they've got allies in government right now steering them contracts
Is that because palantir takes them out for golf outings and steaks? Or is it because palantir promises certain results and outcomes to them once the product is in place?
> There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues.
Yea, it's just the ideology of their founders, it has _nothing_ to do with their actions and partnerships.
> I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
"They're evil and they don't care who's buying."
> but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives.
That's not how morality, ethics, or the law works.
> People voted for this.
Literally _no one_ voted for this. The people who wanted DOGE to clean up government spending did not in any way think that all federal data, including their own private medical data, would be, or even need to be, fed into a private company to be used in service of the problem.
This is ridiculous apologia for evil. What is wrong with this site? If there's even a single dollar of profit on the table then civil rights are the first thing the "hacker news types" sacrifice. It makes you all seem gross and unapproachable.
My intent was to express skepticism about the idea that Palantir alone is anything other than a contractor behaving like a contractor. They’ll bid on anything and so will any other contractor. I get skeptical when something like that is held up as a big bogey man. I think it’s a distraction.
The real issue is that people voted for this. All of it.
Anyone who voted for Trump after J6 knew what they were getting. All the people with buyers remorse about Trump make me think of this parable:
https://www.northerncherokeenation.com/boy-and-the-rattlesna...
“You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
I will comment only on the Foundry stack that we work extensively with, at my company. Given the complete havoc that the other IT ecoaystems has become, we are constantly struggling with proper data access data exchange data transformation and data alignment. To a point where a political layer has appeared on top of that, which looks like the middle age baronies.
Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company. The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterpriseData work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.
And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !
> more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects
Do data barons attempt to replicate silo control within Palantir?
> Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative
With this profitable existence proof in the market, are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data?
Truth to be told: data barons rarely consume their own data, and are not at all focused of the data customers needs.
So data customers have simply taken over the Palantir platform and manage the data import, data pipelines and data exposure (both general purpose exposure, and custom project-specific exposures) without caring very much about the data barons. Those ones simply deny the need for such a data integration platform.
So we really are in a situation where users have embraced the platform and live in it on a daily basis, and the barons spend their days pretending that it is a minor useCase.
> are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data ?
I am pretty sure PoolParty and some other integration stacks exist. But they lack the insane scalability and the proper stacking of layers that Palantir is implementing.
For the moment, the killing stack that Palantir proposes is:
- Spark
- PipelineBuilder
- OntologyManager
- Workshop
And I see nothing like that anywhere else. [but I would love to]
I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pass just because of their perceived political leanings.
Palantir is unique in that one of its founders has publicly stated he doesn't believe in democracy, the bedrock of the American system.
Hostility to democracy is literally the bedrock of the 20th century american federal government. We live in the nation Woodrow Wilson created: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad...
hmm. i read the whole thing and i'm not sure the point you're making. in the first paper, Wilson points out:
* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.
* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?
It's in your own summary, in your own words:
> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:
"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.
And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."
Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
i think i see the picture you're painting now. thanks for elaborating; i'll do more reading.
I mean, it's also the bedrock of the Constitution as compared to the Articles of Confederation. Most of the "founding fathers" haaaaaaatttteeeedd democracy, equating it with Mob Rule.
The Great MAGA Cultural Revolution has shifted the overton window enough among right wing elite that anti democracy propaganda is now strong and spreading. But it's still our foundation, "we the people" and all that. If the right keeps pushing dictators I see a civil war in our future.
The MAGA cultural revolution fundamentally is an opposition to Wilsonianism and liberal universalism. That's why MAGA's authoritarian impulses are directed to the organs of Wilsonianism--such as executive agencies permanently captured by one party--rather than the public at large.
It is an opposition to reality.
I had really hoped that by now you'd have seen that the things that you voted for and hoped to see come to pass are not the universal sweet that you thought they would be. But all I see is that every time more news about the disastrous political direction that USA has taken is that you shift your goalposts with it and declare that this too is what you wanted. As a dad of bi-racial kids I would be super worried that those chickens would come home to roost. These are not just paper games and plenty of people who thought their situation in the USA was a safe as houses - and who voted for Trump - have seen that assumption invalidated.
But as they say: a conservative is a liberal with a daughter.
The deeply unpopular destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives is not democracy. It is a billionaire coup, they're blowing up all the safeguards that generations of Americans put in place to protect us from them.
> destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives
Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.
In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.
> billionaire coup
Every objective analysis shows that the majority of billionaires supported Kamala Harris. She raised $1.65 billion against Trump's $1.05 billion: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-har.... She went into the home stretch with a huge cash advantage over Trump: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/campaign-fundraising.... This was the second time Trump won despite being outspent and swimming against the opposition of Wall Street.
> that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats
the lies is what got us here
Not only is it true, it's not even debatable. 84% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Kamala Harris: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... If you exclude DOD, it's like 90%. In State and Commerce, it was like 95%.
To put that into context, replacing the federal workforce with random voters from AOC's district in New York City would double the percentage of Republicans! (https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news/aocs-district-saw-mass...)
This is perhaps confounded somewhat by the fact that Trump's platform included mass layoffs of federal workers. Trump, contrary to past Republicans even, represented an existential threat to the livelihood of every federal worker.
From your first link:
> Those donation totals may be explained, at least in part, by the former president’s policies related to those agencies. Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate Education if he is elected. He maintained an adversarial relationship with EPA, proposing in each of his annual budgets to decimate the agency’s spending and meddling in its scientific work. Trump instituted a longstanding hiring freeze at State and referred to it as “the Deep State” Department. Trump has also vowed to do away with a merit-based civil service for much of the federal workforce.
"Employees at institutions being threatened to be dismantled by a presidential candidate do not support that candidate" does not prove what you think it proves. In fact, the same link says Trump got 40% of federal employee donations in 2020, which is much more balanced.
Also donation amounts don't map to votes. From another link on the same site, https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe... --
> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.
We'll need more substantial evidence to believe that these institutions are "permanently controlled by Democrats."
So what?
Really? Wow. It does not matter one iota who employees vote for. That is a dark and ugly slope. Maybe we should extend such dystopian views to the periphery, too, such as lobbyists.
It is not a surprise to anyone that people who see themselves as Republican, "the party for smaller government" are less likely to work for said government.
But the insult (and I am not even a public servant) that because people are democrats, they are somehow beholden to that over doing their job professionally, is a strong one. You've basically accused them of having a loyalty to party over their jobs.
I mean, the US did have literal nazis publicly espousing fascism in the US before Pearl Harbor.
There have always been portions of the US electorate enamored with authoritarianism.
I'd point out that, at the time American went to war against the Nazis, it was in the 3rd decade of an immigration policy so restrictive that the foreign-born population dropped from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. Even though Europe was utterly devastated from war in the post-war period, there was no mass immigration of europeans to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration laws.
So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
>Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”
https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt#
Now I haven't read the book "Looking Forward." If I can get my hands on a copy it promises to be an interesting read. But I would like to follow up on the other ideas presented.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill
Democracy for all its imperfections, is symbolic of the idea that the people give power to the government, and that it is the government's duty to give power back to the people. To me, this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Did the people not give money (taxes) and power (accept rule of law) to the government? Is it so bad for the government to return some of that money and power to the people through the New Deal? Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to? I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda. From the quotes you can see how they are twisting the ideal of democracy "power to the people" to instead focus solely on power (to the government), and thus authoritarianism. To disregard that the government is a powerful institution is foolish, of course, as is to assume that it somehow will magically work toward the betterment of the people. But to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane, and the article you posted, when read in its entirety, agrees.
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?
You can also sign up to Curtis Yarvin's Substack and read the kind of thinking that Thiel likes to surround himself with: https://graymirror.substack.com/
Really interesting stuff! Thanks for sharing
You can just listen to or read thiel directly.
Or watch Peter Thiel's interview on the anti-chris and if he thinks humanity should survive (uhhh, well, ughh, ummm, you see). Wild scary stuff. Go watch the whole interview but a taste:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0NkYxjE23JA
Here’s a more contextual excerpt of the transcript which features the 5 questions prior to this and his answer. When I listened to it, to me it seemed like he was thinking about how to weave answers to those into his response, which he does after the exerpt. It’s an entertaining memed clip but we owe it to intellectualism to understand the full context and not simply consume YouTube shorts as the be-all, end-all.
———-
Douthat: … It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: OK.
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 “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
The full essay https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
He’s right. You can see it every time people vote to restrict their individual freedoms, which in the west doesn’t stop happening.
Thanks in part, no doubt, to massive funding from Peter Thiel (and of course others) on issues/candidates that lead to restricting freedom.
I have knowingly voted for less freedoms for myself multiple times and I know it, for example I have voted:
- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.
- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.
- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.
I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.
And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
That is a lot of typing for a massive strawman that is more likely to belong in Reddit than here.
I understood your comment as restricting my own freedoms was a fully bad thing, and I therefore tried to provide examples of positive freedoms being afforded to you by restricting my own negative freedoms.
Explain why that is a straw-man.
It's not, you refuted their obviously poorly constructed argument directly. They just have an ideological axe to grind.
Ah yes, because of the vast freedoms enjoyed by the people of all those non democratic nations throughout history.
The freedom to own a slave. The freedom to treat women as property. The freedom to kill somebody who may have wronged you.
Just an array of freedoms.
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 increasingly against American citizens.
I don't disagree with any of your conclusions, but he is not even a libertarian ideologically. Somebody who is a boss (owner or manager) in a private company can't be considered to put freedom of his subordinates above all else; it's an authoritarian arrangement. If he was truly a libertarian, he would be either a lone contractor or consider his coworkers to be his peers (e.g. would start a cooperative instead of private company, or he would find a similar position as Linus Torvalds).
> We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned increasingly against American citizens.
Other countries got those without paying Palantir billions.
This is part of the fundamental contradiction of libertarianism. Why would those with the power and the purse strings curtail the government (including spending) when it doesn’t suit them? Instead it’s things like environmental regulations and social programs that get cut, tipping society’s imbalances further.
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.
> We now have concentration camps
Immigration detention facilities are not concentration camps.
They’re not death camps. But mass detention without due process - that’s a concentration camp.
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At Alligator Alcatraz and CECOT, people are held without charges, denied timely access to legal counsel, and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention. At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so. The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials. Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
>At Alligator Alcatraz and CECOT
CECOT is not in the US.
>people are held without charges
You do not have to be criminally charged to be deported under civil immigration statues. The years of leftists smugly proclaiming "it's a civil violation, not a crime" ended up being a self own.
>denied timely access to legal counsel
Again, civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
>and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention
They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge. The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
>At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
Not in the US. Deportations to CECOT follow the same practices and statutes as deportations to other countries.
>The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so.
I'll give you this, detention/prisons/etc. centers in the US are universally bad.
>The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials.
It's not punishment, it a temporary holding before deportation.
> Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
Illegal immigrants do not have a constitutional right to stay in the US.
CECOT is part of US mass deportation operations. Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country. In fact the US plans to expand the number of domestic and foreign concentration camps.
> civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
You’re appealing to the law. But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it. It is a human right not a legal right. The history of concentration camps is full of legal supports placed there by authoritarian governments. But legal justifications don’t exonerate governments mass incarcerating people without due process.
> They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge.
Sure there is. Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging.
> The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
Average detention times are around 50 days. Some people crossing at borders for example can be turned back fairly quickly. Others are held indefinitely.
> It’s not punishment
Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
>Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country.
If illegal immigrants were to voluntarily deport before becoming detained, could they avoid incarceration at CECOT? If the answer is "yes", then it seems their own actions/decisions cause this. Why then should I have sympathy for them?
>But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it.
What is the exact nature of their due process rights in that situation?
What process is due, exactly, someone who is detained because they have no right to be in this country?
>Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging
The only people who have a say in the matter on whether or not a non-citizen should be allowed to stay or forcibly deported is a citizen. If you'd like to make the case that they should be allowed to stay (as a citizen), then I am willing to hear your argument.
I'm not willing to hear theirs, and as much as I can influence my government, I will demand that it be unwilling to hear their (non-citizens') arguments as well. In court, or otherwise.
>Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
If you remove a trespasser from your property, it is not punishment... it is remedy. If the remedy (for some reason) deters future trespassing, that still doesn't make it punishment.
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 myself have no interest in it. It's enough that they leave.
>You’re assuming that all people ICE sends to concentration camps deserve to be there?
I don't know what you think the word "deserve" means that it is relevant. It does not matter where they deserve to be, they can't be here. It's our property, they're not welcome.
>But these determinations have been made without fair hearings
There need be no hearings at all. They are not citizens, they have no right to be here. None. You seem to think that some legal right is being revoked, which would necessitate courts... but they have no such legal right. No need for hearings.
>Due process is not afforded these people.
The only process due an illegal immigrant is checking to make sure they're not a citizen. If that process has been followed, no more process is due them. They are not criminals, they get no trial.
> Treating people this way is unjust.
Possibly. But I do not care, not even a little. It is our obligation to make a place for foreigners to live here. This isn't their country.
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.
>The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true.
None of the detainees are claiming citizenship. Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them. One might think that even someone ignorant of the law might start babbling "you can't do this, I'm a citizen" or similar.
They know the score. They know they're not. Now if only the left would clue in too.
>and punishment.
What punishment? Not all legal remedies are punishment. No criminal charges are levied. No one intends to incarcerate them (hell, that would mean they get to stay). They're just being deported.
> Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them.
Due process is a human right not a right of citizens.
> What punishment?
The conditions of these concentration camps are inhumane, which itself is punishment. Besides, as stated by public officials, Alligator Alcatraz is intended as a deterrent. How can it deter if it doesn’t punish?
And being deported if you don’t deserve it is punishment. And being deported to foreign concentration camps where you are tortured is punishment as well.
And individuals can indeed claim citizenship and get no hearing for their claim. Claims don’t get hearings. That’s because there is no due process. In fact, many people are kidnapped without any formal accusation whatsoever being levied at them - for example Mahmoud Khalil, who had a green card and was retaliated against for protesting genocide, without ever being formally accused of anything.
> No one intends to incarcerate them
Detention at a concentration camp constitutes incarceration. On average ICE detains people around 50 days domestically (although those are dated numbers). Some are detained indefinitely. At CECOT, prisoners are incarcerated for life. And the US plans to increase the numbers of foreign concentration camps it uses as part of its operations, which don’t even have to be the person’s country of origin.
I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are? Can you (without cheating)? You've heard the term before (in school most likely), and if you were in the 10% of the students who weren't borderline flunking, you might even be able to name which amendment enumerates due process rights, but in my experience that's about the most any non-lawyer can even manage.
I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
>I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are?
It's because most people don't have a good grasp of how diverse and often flimsy administrative and civil process (in cases where one party is the .gov is in reality. Typically the answer is "whatever the enforcing agencies come up with", which isn't very reassuring.
Like for a traffic ticket they at least haul you before a judge in a public court anyone can attend to give some pretext of the accused having serious rights that protect them. It makes sense. Traffic tickets are a "mass market" product so to speak and so the .gov has to put on a good show even if at the end of the day someone facing a $200 civil traffic fine doesn't actually have the same rights as the guy facing a $200 criminal public urination fine.
When it comes to stuff like code enforcement, arcane industry enforcement, fish and game, ICE and everything else federal the process is far less "due", so to speak and is far more likely to not have separation of powers on the government side (i.e. administrative ppl in the enforcement agencies will be making decisions that would be made by a judge in other contexts)
I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil (traffic ticket and the like), which itself is a joke compared to criminal matters.
I would really like to see all this shit thrown out by the supreme court. If the .gov, be it fed, state or local, is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals bet it a fine or jail then they ought to meet the same bar. Allowing people to be jailed (in the case of ICE) or fined large sums (in the case of many other types of administrative matters) because it's not nominally a criminal matter is 100% an end run around the constitution.
>I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil
Then let's explore that. There are some rights which aren't fundamental human rights... that is, you don't get them just by virtue of existing. Voting comes to mind, that's a citizen's right only.
The right to be present within the borders of the United States is another such right. If you aren't a citizen, you do not have this right. We might extend the temporary privilege to non-citizens, but it is absolutely at the prerogative of the United States... subject to revocation at any time. The idea that it can't just be subject to revocation (arbitrary or otherwise) is the dimwitted notion that there is a sort of second-class citizenship... that some not-really-citizens can be here permanently and we can't decide that we want them to return home.
So, if they can be deported (for reason, or none at all), the only recourse such people have is "I can prove I'm a citizen". If ICE isn't letting them do so, if they protest that they are a citizen and the ICE agent sticks his fingers in his ears and chants "I can't hear you" repeatedly, then that would be a violation of due process. The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
I reject the idea that it is necessary or desirable to drag each of these foreigners before a judge to perform this function.
> is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals
I don't want these people punished at all. Punishment would be putting them in prison (where they would stay in the United States). If someone is trespassing on your property and you call the police, the police would punish them by prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating. When they drag them from your property and tell them to get lost, that's not punishment. It's just removal from where they aren't permitted to be. It's still not punishment even if they cry that they don't want to go home.
> The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
A DOJ lawyer literally said they haven't been doing this sufficiently and then he got sacked by Pam Bondi. SCOTUS then reaffirmed 9 to 0 that the original lawyer who admitted this failure in court was actually correct, that DOJ wasn't giving people their due process rights.
I find it extremely hard to believe you have not heard about the Kilmar Abrego case?
>I find it extremely hard to believe you have not heard about the Kilmar Abrego case?
Yes. And to the best of my knowledge he is not a citizen.
Which does not preclude him from having due process rights, as SCOTUS ruled 9-0 (and has been reaffirmed unequivocally by about 180 years of case law).
His due process rights were "if he protests that he is a citizen, then they must make effort to determine if that is the case with haste, and release him if it checks out".
He did not assert citizenship, they did not violate due process rights. No other process is due him. Anyone claiming that it's a violation of due process rights doesn't know what they mean, though for a moment I had hope for you... you sort of described them, or at least hinted at them, but you're unable to apply what you described to this situation. Due process rights can't and won't keep non-citizens in this country if they are trying to avoid deportation, and shouldn't ever. Non-citizens only have the revocable-for-any-reason-or-none privilege of visiting, and that only if they get the visa.
Why do you think SCOTUS disagreed with you 9-0?
What do you know that they don’t?
That definition would make most refugee camps concentration camps.
People aren’t legally detained in refugee camps though. They are fleeing worse conditions.
OK, but if I am part of a large flow of people fleeing country X for country Y, more often than not, I cannot move around country Y as I please: I am restricted to a refugee camp. Also more often than not, I am not entitled to a hearing in front of a magistrate to dispute that restriction.
Most refugees don’t live in camps. Some camps don’t restrict movement, and those that do restrict it to widely varying degrees. Some do have features of concentration camps. Typically, even in closed camps, there’s no claim that refugees have violated the law as justification for detentions. Refugees are typically fleeing to escape dangerous situations.
As of the end of 2021 there were around 6.7 million registered refugees from Syria globally. This figure is reported by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) in their Global Trends report for 2021. These refugees were primarily hosted in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan -- and most of those are restricted to refugee camps -- and the ones who enjoy the freedom to move around the country probably achieved that through bribery, which of course is not the same thing as having due-process rights.
Refugees admitted into Europe are not restricted to camps and do have some due-process rights, but they have at most times been a distinct minority of the refugees in the world.
According to UNHCR, 22% of the world’s refugees are in refugee camps. Camps vary in their quality. And some are more or less closed than others.
Some refugees do live in inhuman conditions. Even if these conditions affected a majority of refugees, that doesn’t justify treating human beings this way.
All people have a right to due process. It’s a human right. Whether this or that government honors this right is a separate question.
We should be trying to emulate governments that honor human rights, not take our example from those that don’t.
You can put whatever paint you want on a turd and it is miraculously still the same thing.
Exactly, you can paint "it's a concentration camp" on the immigration detention facility and it is miraculously still the same thing. Glad you agree, it's not a concentration camp.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Haha I like that quote, but to her unintentional credit Ayn Rand did force me to think about why she was wrong, whereas if my main exposure to capitalist propaganda were the plausibly apolitical econ classes offered in school I might never have even realized that they were propaganda.
These sound like the exact reasons we don't have a direct democracy.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” - not Peter Thiel
It's a nice soundbite, but in reality people (maybe not Peter Thiel though) understand the value of the common goods quite well. (If you happen to be an uneducated American, who doesn't, you can come here to Europe and see.)
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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 Democratic process has been performed, and therefore the outcome is just. There's an apt George Carlin quote...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Democracy%3A+The+God+That+Fa...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qByWF30jKiw
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.
Its always projection with megalomaniacs
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That's exactly how it works already, albeit through the middlemen representatives figuring out what block of voters is cheapest to buy. The only meaningful difference in a representative democracy is that the representatives can choose not to deliver on their promises (in other words: lie), thereby consolidating real power in a smaller group of people.
Except somehow it's the opposite? The Big Beautiful Bill is one of the most regressive bills in decades - the vast majority of the benefits went to the richest while the biggest cuts went to the poorest. The MAGA base is definitely not on the richer end of that spectrum. I.e. they didn't really even get anything for their undying loyalty besides "owning the libs" I guess.
The market already exponentially concentrates wealth, just piggy back on that. There will always be a market for promoting the self-serving politics of the rich.
The idea is that smaller group of people actually have some integrity and sense of duty to the people they represent and the country at large, rather than just pulling the lever for the thing that benefits them the most in the immediate term.
That idea has always been tested, with the current times being the largest test in several decades at least.
The argument that somebody else has better integrity and sense of duty representing my needs or wants is dead on arrival. Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person has a representative.
The founding fathers and many others would disagree. Based on human history, your assessment of the average human's level of integrity and reasoning is irrationally optimistic.
Also, I assume you meant to say "Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person *is* a representative."
It doesn't matter because everyone only has to represent themselves so they don't really need to have integrity or ability to reason in some larger sense, they just have to be selfish — which is a lot easier than reasoning your way to what maximizes societal good, or some average of the opinions of the 100'000+ people you are supposedly representing.
And the amount of power an individual has is negligible so a bad vote is diluted much more than it is in a representative democracy.
You realize that a certain "institution" would have died out much slower (if at all) in the US if what you said was accurate?
I think that's the only example needed to prove that direct democracy is not a desirable form of government, let alone the ideal.
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?
He's expressing more or less the same sentiment as the American founders themselves expressed.
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.
The founders created a representative government with a limited franchise and express protections for private property and economic liberty, precisely because of the concerns over populist democracy. That's why they provided for an electoral college rather than direct election of the president, and for senators to be selected by state legislatures. The push towards making that republican system more democratic started half a century later with Jacksonian democracy and expansion of the franchise, culminating in the early 1900s with direct election of senators and extending the franchise to women.
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
That's still not more or less. That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
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.
> 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 regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!
I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
> 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.
It's not just about who is the "head" of the agency. In practice, the career civil service has tremendous power and discretion to run the agency; political appointees can't do much without their cooperation.
And the career civil service overwhelmingly is Democrats. 85% of federal employee donations went to Kamala Harris, 90% of you exclude the DOD: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... The proportion of republicans in AOC's district in the Bronx and Queens is more than twice as high as in the federal government outside the DOD. And given that federal workers tend to be highly educated, and more educated people tend to be more politically ideological, you get a federal government that's a true monoculture.
Certainly, we can debate about the degree to which the career civil service zealously carries out the agenda of the current elected administration. I suspect it depends on the agency. What's disturbing to me is the people who think the career civil service should serve as a "check" on the elected administration. These are the people who cite political appointees overruling career civil servants as itself an example of "dismantling democracy." They are the ones who cheered on civil servants who declared their "resistance" to Trump in 2017 at the start of his term. This view--which I think is fairly widespread--nakedly embraces the idea that "democracy" is where one party always runs the government, and that electing a President from the other party simply means that he gets to cajole and try to persuade civil servants into carrying out some of his agenda.
>That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
What's so great about voting? The things that people think they love about democracy are many, but voting isn't one of those. We love the idea that in principle, any child might grow up and become president. That (in principle, it's less and less so each day it seems) there is no ruling class and no political dynasties. That public discourse at least influences outcomes within government. Voting might have (at one time) helped to make those things a reality, but those things can all be had without voting.
Anyone who has heard of sortition and still wants voting to occur is a fool. Even the Greeks who invented democracy thought voting inferior to sortition.
What's great about voting is that it gives the government a mandate from and therefore legitimacy to the electorate. It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
Even theoretically that's not true. But if we stoop to the pragmatic, sometimes they win without even a majority of those still not disillusioned enough to stop voting.
>It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
If not that, then there's nothing about voting that I give much of a shit about. Nor do tens of millions of others. And if he helps to rain destruction upon such systems as you would create, then more power to him.
You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
It seems like maybe you read my "it has nothing to do with X" as meaning "it is not desirable if X." Otherwise not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
>You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
A "mandate" isn't what you just described above. It's always true that those who weasel their way into office have been influenced by someone or someones, but to call that a "mandate" when it amounts to some tiny non-majority fraction of the (even voting age) population is bizarre. Is this some meme joke that I'm just clueless about, because it's difficult to take you seriously.
>not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
An even hand typed the words with a calm heart, and no other emotion other than exasperation. Your takes are pretty far from reality.
In your model, is a simple majority a necessary feature of a mandate?
And what’s the scope of the majority? A simple majority on each individual decision?
Thiel doesn't want to replace voting with sortition. He wants to replace voting with high tech feudalism.
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.
> The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s.
The youngest delegate to the Constitutional convention was Johnathan Dayton of New Jersey, who was 26, and there were three more under 30. There were more over 60 than than under 30.
The people that are frequently cited as being "Founding Fathers" in their "early 20s" (or "between 19 or 21, because we're not sure exactly when he was born", in Hamilton's case) are people who were that age in 1776 and ended up playing an important role. But the Constitution was drafted more than a decade later -- there was a war, plus time under the first system of government under the Articles of Confederation in between.
> Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.,
No, that was not a "doctrine of the founding fathers", it was a belief of Thomas Jefferson expressed later in a letter to, as I recall, John Adams, specifically (the upper limit of the period at which he held any law or constitution needed to expire was actually 19 years, based on actuarial data and a set of assumptions he had about what was necessary and acceptable in terms of avoiding the living being ruled over by the dead.)
You can tell it was not a widely held "doctrine of the founding fathers" (or, more to the point, of the Framers, who are the ones actually relevant to the Constitution, though the two groups have considerable overlap) because instead of expiring by its own terms in 19 years or less, the Constitution was permanent, with a very difficult method of amendment, and that method of amendment was specifically barred from changing certain parts.
There weren't really very many widely shared "doctrines" of the Founders or the Framers. They weren't a hive mind or a cult or even a group as ideologically aligned as the coalition that makes up either of the US's current major political parties. The idea of shared doctrines or a single unifying vision behind the Constitution are mythologies created after, and requiring deliberate disregard of, the facts.
They certainly were not infallible, but the question is whether they were unwavering advocates for democracy.
All of the restrictions they put in place, such as the electoral college and who was able to vote at all, along with the writings we have, suggests as a group they were not.
That's on the tame end of Peter Thiel's rather demented belief system.
Another tidbit: he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ao_umPlSV6o
That sounds like something the real antichrist would say
Say what you will about Peter Thiel, he does have a sense of humor.
I think he was saying the antichrist would be more likely to be a person like Greta, not Greta herself, but the clip cuts off the context at the beginning so it is hard to say.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic... - Gift link
https://archive.is/mPjPq - Archive link
So yes, he does say it's more likely to be Greta Thunberg than an "evil tech genius", but does not outright say she's the Antichrist.
I still find it strange that he's afraid of her creating a one world government.
Why is our media literacy so in the gutter? A few second clip of an easily accessible and free interview from a NYT podcast would not be accepted as gospel fact in the hn of the past.
You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
I stated exactly what is true, which is that he believes Greta Thunberg might be the actual antichrist. He said it himself.
You've been handily corrected.
Are you wrong or were you lying?
What? GP didn't even contradict anything I said, just claimed there's some ambiguous problem with citing a few second clip of the person saying the thing I accused them of saying.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44786967
I actually went to listen to it too.
I've seen this nonsense before from journalists
My claim: "he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist"
Thiel's words:
> Thiel: ... The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate....
> in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world.
> In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
https://youtu.be/vV7YgnPUxcU?t=2748
He’s talking about
> downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and individual liberty
He's talking about the Antichrist dude... he's a devout Christian... they believe in things like the Antichrist.
People really do be bending over backwards not to hear the words spoken to them if they seem too wacky to be palatable. Dark secret though: billions of people believe truly wacky shit. Some of those people are unbelievably wealthy.
Anyone can go read the transcript. It's quite clear he's saying he believes Greta might very well be the Antichrist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
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Sure. There's a big difference between believing a 20 year old climate activist is a clown versus a harbinger of the apocalypse as foretold in an ancient text 2000 years ago.
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Wealthy, powerful, but weak, conflicted, terrified individuals:
https://youtu.be/NX3wH5t7D0g?t=84
https://youtu.be/NX3wH5t7D0g?t=202
Also its named after a technology that most often causes its user to die or lose a war by exposing them to disinformation. That's an odd bit of messaging for a surveillance company.
Would it make you feel better if they publicly pledged allegiance to democracy and flag and all those sorts of things and privately just ignored all that (like majority of big corporation management)?
Just because Palantir founder was being more open about how things are doesnt not make him or rather the company more evil.
Just for disclaimer, I do think Palantir is evil, but not any more or less than Google or Microsoft or any big tech corporation to that matter.
So basically he's saying the quiet part out loud?
When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.
I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
To be fair, I'm not sure there are very many people who believe in US democracy right now.
I don't believe this is true. The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe. It's frequently expressed online, but a lot of that is not from human Americans.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
> The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
Yes, that party has gone over to the dark side. That doesn't mean the majority of their voters necessarily agree with that.
Sorry, this is Orwellian doublespeak. I don't know exactly what "democratic institutions" you're referring to, but you seem to be referring to administrative agencies and adjuncts that are the exact opposite of "democratic institutions." They're anti-democratic checks that are permanently in the control of one party, regardless of who wins elections.
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
> You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
> Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
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.
They didn't ask you to define racism. They asked you to find sources for your claim, which you have conspicuously forgotten to include.
It's a public source too, so it doesn't cost you anything to support your claim. Are you recalling something that actually exists, or trying to warp the narrative into whatever supports your perception?
> or trying to warp the narrative into whatever supports your perception
We all know the answer to that question, unfortunately.
> They didn't ask you to define racism
They raised the definition of racism by preemptively asserted that articles leveling “legitimate” accusations of racism wouldn’t count.
For example, here’s an article trying to tie Trump’s growing support among minorities to “multiracial whiteness” and minorities “embrac[ing] white power movements.” From where I’m standing that sure seems like calling minority supporters of Trump white supremacists.
Forgot link https://www.npr.org/2021/01/24/960060957/understanding-multi...
Aren't you supposed to be a Washington DC lawyer? How is it even fucking possible that you forgot what happened in January 2021? Were you in a coma when this was published? Were you get hit on the head in the ensuing years? It's incredulous that such recent history is so readily forgotten.
In case the context is lost on you (and I can't believe I'm explaining this), this article was published following a violent and lethal political protest endorsed by the president. If the NPR did not publish some sort of examination on that event, it would have been disgusting negligence on their behalf.
January 6 involved a multiracial band of wackjobs storming the capitol for reasons that had nothing to do with race or racism. Framing J6 as involving “multiracial white supremacy” is a great example of how NPR tries to make everything about white people being racist.
In this case, NPR’s ideological blinders caused them to miss the real story. Racism in the country is decreasing, leading to less racial polarization in politics. Trump gained minority vote share in each election, culminating with winning a record number of minorities in 2024 for a republican in the modern era. The GOP is becoming an increasingly multiracial coalition united by distrust of institutions and experts, conspiracy theories, and memes.
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> 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 figure that?
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 cultural friction that’s happening. Stephen Colbert would call it “truthy.”
[1] When I was a kid, my muslim immigrant mom told me not to marry a white girl because “they eat snakes.” I married a white girl, and she had in fact eaten a snake before. Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
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.
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.
This analysis would seem to exonerate even Pat Buchanan, who by the 1990s had learned to couch all his rhetoric in terms of culture rather than race.
> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?
Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.
Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.
> Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though.
And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.
Like it was racist when Nazis said that Jews control the world and ate children and whatever nonsense you can think of.
Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism. The couch fucker treated them differently, by lying that they specifically are eating pets.
> Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism
Nobody targeted anyone’s immutable characteristics. If you object to 10,000 Appalachians being resettled in your New England town, that’s not “racism.” It’s an objection based on not wanting them to do to your town what they did to their hometowns in Appalachia. It’s about peoples’ culture and how that manifests in the communities they create.
I think this is hard for liberals to understand because they’re so steeped in cultural relativism. They assume that cultural differences cannot be substantive—cannot shape the communities people create in substantive ways. So they cannot understand why anyone would object to mass settlement of culturally distinct groups except out of prejudice against immutable characteristics. Oddly, they seem to have this blind spot only for non-white people. Most would agree that West Virginia is the way it is because of West Virginians. But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka.
Being a Haitian immigrant is an immutable characteristic. That aside, these were legal immigrants welcomed by the city and assimilating into the community, used as a scapegoat with a baseless conspiracy to stir anger on a campaign trail. I’m not sure what about this incident is defensible but it has nothing to do with culture. Are you being intentionally provocative or do you really believe this?
> But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka
And that's fine to say. However, it isn't acceptable to invent a story that these Bangladeshis are eating pets with the goal to get everyone else to hate them though, especially when the place in question actually majority likes them, and was even asking for extra resources to help them.
I'm not saying that people don't think that the US should be a democracy. I'm saying that people don't think the US is a democracy. When the president of the country is a criminal and blatantly ignores the constitution and the courts, what does democracy even mean?
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
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.
Source?
I posted it in another comment
definition of treason?
definition of treason.
Thank you for demonstrating you have not looked up the definition of Treason in the US legal system.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S3-C1-...
so if i understand exactly correctly
it would not be treason for drone armies of automated bots deployed in the field because they aren’t human?
if there were the same number of people standing on street corners collecting the same data as ring doorbells and waymos in san francisco, to sell for political and military applications, where does the treason begin?
how many humans need to conspire to erode democracy for it to count to your standards?
No. Because we are not at war, and have not been since WWII.
Treason requires a war.
hang on, the US has not been at war since WWII?
Yep. Messed me up too when I learned that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Un...
Matches the last treason charges too. WWII was the last time anyone was charged (and convicted) of treason.
ah yeah, that helps a lot— this conversation has really driven home the meaning of “the post-war era”
likely, we’ll never be at war again based on how we now do conflicts, waging language semantics and syntax
no war, no treason, no problem
we are evolved, there is no war in Ba Sing Se
Let's hope. Our "wars" post WWII, as bad as they were, were nowhere near the nightmares of the first two world wars.
100% agreed.
"Yeah the house may be on fire but we can't even begin to put it out until we make sure every other house in the city is not also on fire."
Whataboutism is designed to deflect attention from a particularly egregious example of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence etc. by claiming "everyone's doing it, why pick on my guys?"
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
Palantir is the sort of tech that originates in Isreal.
And they should have it given the multiple attempts to subjugate them.
To give my own view of Foundry and the products - pipeline buider, Ontology Manager, and workshop.
I think that pipeline builder is a good tool for building pipelines - however maybe its just my company but there is a sea of very similar tables that have been generated and pipeline builder makes things a lot messier. Personally I would prefer to use data bricks or even M$ Fabric to do pipeline processing - its like a lego version of those tools.
At my company I don't think that the ontological layer is really any more useful than a strict RDBMS warehouse system. It feels like marketing speak when I hear engineers/product managers talk about it. I certainly don't think that it has added any more insights/interlinking. I would like to see clear examples of benefits to this data structure over traditional warehousing approaches rather than hype.
I'm not blown away by Workshop - for reporting/visualization I would use PowerBI/Tableau (far superior). For app development (i.e. some kind of intelligent spreadsheet to allow opps people to use it) its ok - but quite clunky. Its a lego like system - and I'm not convinced as an app its better than excel on sharepoint (broadly speaking its worse). Again I think its all marketing.
It's still wild to me that someone named their company "dangerous and corruptive object that will lead you to ill ends while making you believe you are powerful and wise" and people go, "yeah, that company seems above board."
Pretty sure it's just the beginning. Palantir Will be the dystopian super company you see in sci-fi movies
Considering they run killbots, probably already there.
Already is
Least authoritarian libertarians
Do you even know what Palantir actually do? Because I see so many people talking about Palantir, but it seems apparent they've no idea what the business does, or sells, or how it even makes money except "through the government".
Like...they're a software firm. They specialize in government contracting. They sell software to the government, to fulfill tenders and requests asked for by the government (which is its own subset because government contracting generally sucks and is it's own skillset).
Yes, and a contract killer only fulfills tenders and requests asked for by their clients. We still call it murder, though.
They're proudly complicit in genocide and war crimes.
https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Basically they're selling BI-solutions for tyranny, usually by convincing government officials that it's a good idea to aggregate data sets that are separate for good reasons and then they'll achieve greater power over their subjects. That's the idea in the NHS project, that's what they're doing in the US and so on.
Time to buy?
Their stock has tripled since november, they are way to overvalued. Either way I would not put my money on their stock, I do not want to support such company. Vote with your wallet.
Speak for yourself....Writing was on the wall the minute I saw where the funding for Palantir was coming from. Been in since $12 a share, holding tight until they take over.
Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
Missed jumping in at $16 and ended up watching and waiting for a year.
Eventually jumped in at $40 just before the election, as well as picking some bargain shares in critical mineral mining/processing. All are looking very good right now.
P/E ~700
Good luck with that
Oh, you think the price of equities will mean anything when Skynet takes over.
I'll be seen as a friend of the bots. A Godfather who funded their existence in the first place. The Digital Gods will favor me and my 100 shares as one of their own creators
/s (hope that was obvious. In reality, I'm pretty sure Theil's influence on the current admin will only increase Palantir's influence in the gov, but I don't think we're here for my speculative DD)
Classic backseat financial analysis - earning report last night showing they exceeded all analyst expectations (yet again) and further showed that the valuations is definitely holding. They exceeded pretty much every financial area they could and have just crossed $1bn in revenue. The proof is in the pudding, currently they are domination the market and for good reason. Sure there will become a point of uncertainty where people think they can't keep riding the price wave and people sell, but I think they have way more to deliver whether you like them or not
If nothing to hold until the holidays.
Was before the election
https://archive.is/9vPtt
Whenever I hear about palantir it ends up just being a basic cloud service provider like AWS
Can you elaborate?
Not really? I just hear about them providing mundane cloud services.
Think SAP. Software to do stuff and professionals to make it actually somewhat work for you.
I wonder if the VCs have given up on growth. AI isn’t really profitable. Unless you can get government to pay for it (“socialism for me, capitalism for thee”). That means military contracts. So we have a top heavy system with a perverse incentive to justify itself with war. Unsurprisingly, I guess, the US is gearing up to do just that in 2027 with China.
I don't buy it. The money for government contracts is so much lower than the money from regular economic activity. It seems like every other business should be conspiring to avoid war, even if a small group wants it.
Why 2027?
That's the meme. It's not going to happen IRL because it doesn't look like China is rising to the bait, because Russia is still advancing in Ukraine, because American industrial production capacity is by every estimation not equal to the task, and because the Middle East is as bad a mess as it has ever been and is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
When your Navy literally can't defeat the Houthis, you know for an ironclad 100% certainty that there's zero chance they're capable of beating China -- right off the coast of China!
This is fundamentally wrong on many levels, including what a War is and why they happen.
You actually need a balance of power to prevent an armed political conflict, so the adults in the room will maintain one.
Too cryptic. So what is war and why does it happen?
> "You actually need a balance of power"
Yeah, but it has to be credible. If it's not credible, or hinges on vague wunderwaffen or failed concepts, then it only exists if both sides swallow one side's propaganda. (Or unless nukes come into play, but then you get MAD game theory and it's unwise to open that can of worms unless necessary.)
I seem to remember a few months ago reading about wargames and/or scenario planning for a hypothetical US/China war, and the conclusion was, the US Navy gets thoroughly and quickly rekt.
It's important to take these wargames with a grain of salt. The US knows a direct naval conflict with China won't be pretty, there's almost certainly no intention of fighting them if China decides to press their advantage. But we don't have to "beat" China, we simply have to deter or outlast their desire to capture Taiwan.
There are innumerable possibilities if the US assists Taiwan, especially through the lens of hybrid warfare and not pitched battles. We have no motivation from a strategic standpoint to give China the naval war they want, so why would we?
Unfortunately there is a chance you are underestimating the hubris of our leaders.
This is like saying the American military couldn't defeat the Iraqis.
The American military could not successfully build a stable Iraqi democracy or completely suppress sectarian violence.
They absolutely destroyed the Iraqi conventional military and occupied the country for 8 years though.
Even if we grant that China is anything like Iraq (it sure ain't!), that was more than 20 years ago.
Last year, and not for want of trying, the US Navy sure didn't do anything to destroy the Houthi's conventional military capabilities. They're still sinking ships left and right! So much for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas.
> https://edition.cnn.com/world/middleeast/eternity-c-houthi-r...
Now imagine the USN actually has to fight a war in shallow waters against a foe that's literally 10,000x better armed and equipped than the Houthis, and with a capacity for industrial production that dwarfs its own.
War is a measuring rod. Before it begins, each side guesses at its own strength and the other's will. Often it guesses wrong. (In Ukraine, NATO overrated its weapons and tactics, Russia both overrated its own capabilities, and underrated Ukraine's resolve.) But if both sides know the truth beforehand, they don't fight to begin with. Thus there's literally zero chance that there's a war between the US and China in 2027, because the outcome is not really in doubt.
What conventional military capabilities? The Houthi's aren't sinking military ships, they're sinking unarmed, unarmored freighters in a stretch of water so narrow you could use a towed artillery gun to bullseye a freighter moving through it.
The problem they're facing is they can't reduce that capability to zero without starting a half-dozen other wars to deal with a logistical supply chain.
Military capabilities: The anti-ship missiles, drones, fast attack craft, etc. that the Houthis have and continue to use offensively.
> https://news.usni.org/2025/07/29/houthis-to-target-ships-in-...
As for "they can't reduce that capability to zero," the CFR made the same point a little while back: https://www.cfr.org/blog/houthis-have-defeated-us-navy-or-wh...
But it was turned around and reframed a little bit, where the inability of the USN to achieve anything tangible represents an absolute failure on their part. This is a more sober and credible read of the situation. If your tool doesn't work, what good is it? And if you think that the same tool is up for the job of fighting in the South China Sea, it seems to me that you ought to reassess your opinion. Expeditionary naval forces don't work very well these days. (Something that Russia also learned in the Black Sea.)
The Houthis somewhat inconveniencing global shipping in a protracted conflict defined by "our available missiles are too expensive to be using against the targets being sent against us" and the US defending Taiwan from a seaborne land invasion which would require the bulk transit of men, vehicles and supplies across a narrow body of water are in no way equivalent scenarios.
The Houthis aren't invading or occupying anything they didn't already own. No one is trying to take it from them. They are an insurance risk.
China trying to invade and occupy Taiwan is an existential threat for the people of Taiwan, and the volume and value of materials and men China would have to move across the Strait of Taiwan would vastly exceed the value of the missiles which would be targeted against them (and in fact would be targeted more aggressively since the US in part avoids expending missiles so as to retain reserves against more serious opponents - in a straight up fight with China though, you'd be much more liberal in your targeting priorities), which is what the US Navy is built to do. A platform being vulnerable to some new tactic does not make the platform useless, and if a minor upgrade would fix it then it just means you're in a transition point. If laser-equipped American destroyers with fleets of mixed capability interceptor UAVs in 2 years time are ensuring nothing touches a ship in the Red Sea, your theory would be in immense trouble - and that technology isn't theoretical, it's being deployed right now.
But perhaps if you really want to consider the problem, then just take a look at what China is building: missile destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers and stealth fighters. If all these things are so worthless and could not fight and defeat China, then why is China spending so much money trying to exactly replicate those capabilities if the future is all drones all the time or whatever other internet sensation of the moment (i.e. a year back when "the end of the tank was nigh" according to the internet).
> But perhaps if you really want to consider the problem, then just take a look at what China is building: missile destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers and stealth fighters. If all these things are so worthless and could not fight and defeat China, then why is China spending so much money trying to exactly replicate those capabilities if the future is all drones all the time or whatever other internet sensation of the moment.
Because: One of their best opening moves is a blockade of Taiwan, and that requires naval assets.
And because: There is such a thing as hedging your bets. No matter what anybody thinks, it is unwise to bet everything on your missile forces or new drones. You don't want to overcommit to one strategy or one way of waging war and later realize that you need to fall back on older means and methods. (As experienced by the Russians in 2022-2023.) So building a navy may be nothing more than a hedge against the possibility that other ways of making war won't work out.
But there's really no avoiding the fact that mobile launchers like the DF21/26/41 can launch a small LEO SAR constellation (i.e. just a few satellites) and a few ~10 minute contacts per day would provide enough targeting data to pinpoint any US surface fleet in the western Pacific. It's easy to see how a sufficient volume of missiles removes them from the board.
As an aside:
> If laser-equipped American destroyers
It's almost laughably easy to harden drones and missiles to high-power lasers. You can even retrofit old ones. Various different methods have been known since the 1970s. Lasers might work against trash-tier weapons and DJI drones, but the minute they become common on the battlefield countermeasures will become ubiquitous.
Not only is China a peer with vast resources and numbers of people, it is also a nuclear power. A full scale conflict would be disastrous for us all.
So either the war goes immediately nuclear, in which case no one wins but the US has a significant missile advantage, or it doesn't in which case China will be facing down an adversary with a 11 aircraft carriers and their support flotillas, as well as deep magazines of long range antishipping missiles and the largest submarine fleet in the world and the largest airforce in the world.
China has a lot of resources, but they have not turned those into the type of resources which can fight and defeat the US military conventionally and have a serious power-projection problem compared to the logistical mobility the US military enjoys mastery of.
Which again highlights the absurdity of saying "couldn't defeat the Houthis, can't defeat China" as though you're comparing apples to apples.
The other absurdity is of course the supposition that anyone wants a war to be good for business: checkout how that's going for Russia's defence contractors. No: the fear of a war is good for business. An arms build up or modernization program is good for business. An actual war is ubiquitously terrible for business.
Just how long do you think the US would be able to deploy the full force you describe here in a world where all commerce with China ceases abruptly and Pacific ocean trade is severely disrupted?
> US has a significant missile advantage
Doubt.
> an adversary with a 11 aircraft carriers
Didn't a couple of them literally tuck tail and run from the Houthis? Besides, three of them are scheduled for maintenance between 2027 and 2030.
> the largest submarine fleet in the world
Those subs are at a severe disadvantage in the very shallow waters of the South China Sea, which are riddled with all manner of sensors.
> serious power-projection problem
Irrelevant. Wouldn't we be fighting them over there?
They can blow up some dams and cause enormous civilian suffering. After having lost in Ukraine I expect certain states to be on the look-out for actions that will cause massive destruction that they can consider quick wins.
A lot of VCs are Zionists and personally dedicated to making war and violently attacking Muslims. If you doubt, go read the twitter feeds from Sequoia MDs like Shaun Maguire. They're very open about their goals and very pro-Palantir, which has also been very open with their Islamophobia and explicit desire to ethnically cleanse Palestine.
A lot of Muslims are dedicated to making war and violently attacking Jews
Police forces in many countries are also known to be signing deals with Palintir.
Palintir's reach is worrying
We must see the privatisation of government not as a new Palantir project but as a long ongoing effort by most major tech companies and a growing number of politicians, republicans and billionaires. I suggest researching Dark Enlightenment and Neo-feudalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
Further than the Vice Presidency?
Palantir is aiding and abetting multiple instances of genocide and repression worldwide. Their entire upper leadership should be thrown in prison. Along with other holocaust tabulation machine companies such as Microsoft and Oracle.
People always talk about Thiel, but hardly ever mention the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp. Another Zionist Jew to-the-core in charge of another shady American tech company.
Palantir is a government agency...
It's metastasing.
Most countries use Palantir or similar data-analysis systems today. This fear-mongering spiel is aimed squarely at most uninformed peasants, but I guess they do it because it works.
It didn’t work on you. You’re so smart and savvy.
Technologists who work on this are evil.
If government doesn’t want to be replaced by corporations, then government has to not suck so hard.
Worst possible take. The government sucks _because_ of decades of slip into corporate control and manufactured consent.
Your take and his take are not incompatible.
Exactly.
What is the solution? Is it more corporate controlled, incompetence in government? Or is it less government that is focused on core issues and building competency and trust?
Worse punishments for bribery. Higher rewards and lower risks for reporting bribery. Whistleblower protections.
Government isn't the problem here, it's the victim.
Rule of thumb: If a corporation mostly sells to consumers or other corporations, the government can save a lot of money and get a great result by buying from it at consumer prices. If a corporation mostly sells to the government, the government can steal every last taxpayer penny while delivering shit by buying from the corporation at government prices.
See for example (and yes I’d get cancelled for pointing this out) govt purchasing from ULA vs govt purchasing from SpaceX
Also there is the result that from IP to service and support the Gov will get washed.Leading to a lack of expertise and ownership. It essentially becomes little more than a rental - not owned, serviced or extended unless at the whims of the lowest bidder .Who inevitable qccrues cost overruns.In the space examplein the 70-80s a gov department was arguable more competent/effecient and on spec within its given budget.Not so much now.
That's probably on us then.
> Following massive contract terminations for consulting giants and government contractors like Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte, Palantir has emerged ahead.
Just swapping different big consulting firms around.
I remember when Booz Allen was the bad guy. I just checked and apparently this is what they call themselves these days "an American company specializing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
BAH was the “bad guy” in the sense that they were grifters competent at only winning contracts and then extending them indefinitely through incompetent delivery to suck as much money out of the government as possible at the expense of having good systems and taxpayer money.
Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.
> Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.
What's their promise?
Just kind of summarizing from the comments in this topic (I also couldn’t be bothered to Google Palantir’s thesis): sticky/useful tools to combine and enrich data sources with a focus on a sector where there is a lot of compliance-driven security, data sources that aren’t easily queryable outside of their direct users, and high barriers to entry.
Turnkey Panopticon.
From the parts I've seen (Foundry et al), the promise is ability to sense of data and controlling its stocks and flows. There is a bit of Pachyderm-like versioned pipelines, notebooks, lots of access controls and audit logging. This is a place that was bought into Oracle "data democracy", reluctantly used Foundry and then was won over by the product.