Co-founder Joe Lonsdale: Palantir was founded to kill communists

6 days ago (twitter.com)

Joe Lonsdale, previously:

>If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law.

>We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.

https://x.com/JTLonsdale/status/1996947600533066185

https://thehill.com/opinion/robbys-radar/5640692-public-exec...

Palantir is a data analytics gov contractor with MAGA branding. It is not an ultra-omnipotent warfighter superdemon, even if their leadership or employees wishes it to be so. Ignore dumb X bluster if you want to stay sane.

  • Ignoring a cornerstone of how the lists are being compiled is historically a bad idea.

    • There's a growing list of things we're told to ignore, from Trump constantly saying he'll annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, to new executive orders to chill free speech. "Take them seriously, not literally. On second thought, please don't even take them seriously..."

      Umm..

  • At least it's truth in advertising. I guess Auschwitz.com or Dehomag.com must have been already taken.

I'd be curious to hear the backstory of his relationship with Alex Karp from 2008 to present.

  • Perhaps he's the one who maintained the summoning circle around Alex Karp until Alex Karp was fully materialized/housebroken.

The reason that the abolition of an arbitrary and cruel legal system was sought in the enlightenment was because although it often had a monopoly on legitimate usage, the state did not have supreme military power over the public (who were widely opposed to both the perceived disproportion of punishments and the rate of false positives).

If either side of any struggle acquires supreme force, the other side suffers without limit or recourse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...

The 20th century features a number of blood soaked horrors where the CIA gave lists of names to the anticommunist party of some country who went on to commit _a statistic_ against their political foes. As I understand it, Palantir is in the business of supplying names and addresses to go on lists for domestic and foreign intelligence, right?

Then Palantir needs to be sued for fraud. This is absolutely counter to the pitch they were giving their investors, specifically that Palantir was built as a response to 9/11 to bridge the gap between various intelligence agencies and their disconnected datasets

It was a war on terror analyst notebook, and correct me if I’m wrong but Islamic extremism is not communism.

  • Uh huh "everything is securities fraud"

    Your personal motivations for pursuing a particular commercial enterprise and the business of the enterprise itself are not the same. One is the purpose of the company, the other is your purpose in working for or founding it.

    You'd have a very hard time arguing the materiality of Lonsdale's personal political beliefs and anti-communist stance for the investors of Palantir. Even a good attorney would have a hard time arguing this. He'd have an impossible time arguing it against another very able attorney. He'd also have an impossible time proving actual damages, which means you couldn't win a securities fraud civil case. Or common law fraud.

    Oh also any investor who sued someone who made him boatloads of money over his political beliefs would have a very tough time finding someone to take his dollars and give him board seats in the future.

Is this considered normal person behavior in USA now? If so, this is scary. Where is this hate coming from? Obviously they couldn't have had issues with communists ad there aren't any beyond "in my option" types?

I'm a little skeptical that Palantir pre-2009 (when Joe was there) focused on communists at all

  • CIA, FBI, foreign government, and corporate security needs drove its initial services. Basically, software to protect rich people and eliminate troublemakers in the way of profits.

    • Mercenaries. Like KBR/Halliburton/et al. except focused on tech rather than just physical security.

  • Sure, it may be post-hoc chest thumping theatrics, but also he was a tween during the fall of the Soviet Union and the end days of the Cold War along with having close family of Jewish descent since his mother was Jewish (Irish Catholic father). So there could be some baked-in, rather than acquired later, antipathy- understandably- towards communism. Especially the Soviet variety since its still warm corpse was around in the '03/'04 era when Palantir was founded. At that time, Hanssen had just recently been arrested, poking those coals again. Heck we're still living with the scars of all that and its fallout- if Lonsdale meant specifically former members/supporters of the CPSU and its shambling corpse then the statement is a little bit less over the top.

    • I mean, I’m even more skeptical that Palantir or its customers were concerned about killing former members or supporters of the Soviet Union prior to 2009. The focus was probably the War on Terror and related crimes.

      Alex Karp was calling himself a self-described socialist as recently as 2018.

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  • Communists were probably just one of the domestic counterinsurgency concerns that drove its founding.

    • I don't think this has to do with counterinsurgency but more like what the actual communists and fascists did: destroying an ideology by physically destroying the persons that associate with it. An ideology in this case communism (a broad term) that Palantir founders considered even an intellectual threat to their own ambitions. People who have understood Marx' theories and can apply them to analyze what's going on might be in theory immune to the hypercapitalist spectacle that a coalition which includes Palantir might stage. Which is kinda what happens the spectacle I mean with the current administration.

Good thing is that there are effectively no communists on Earth. Just a spectrum of socialists. Job done, time to disband Palantir.

I’m 40+. Lived in 2 countries, Southern California, Northern California. Visited all the major cities on the West Coast, did a road trip through Nevada, NYC, Miami, Denver, Boulder. I talk politics pretty much with everyone.

I haven’t met a single communist in my life. These delusions people have truly scare me.

Edit: Forgot to mention I’ve also been to Mexico, Jamaica, 2 different states in Brazil, Netherlands, France, England, and Canada. I must repel communists.

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  • Where I live, fascists are way more threatening than communists. Other parts of the world, might be the other way around.

  • The Communists defeated the Nazis in World War II, so that's a big point in their favor.

    • After making a secret deal with them to partition Europe. They didn't come around on principle, it's just that Hitler eventually decided to invade Russia too.

      And after winning the war, Stalin proceeded to kill millions for good measure.

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  • As someone who is falls pretty hard into what is considered the "radical left", facists are much worse. There are a lot of really annoying leftist, and there are a lot of reactionary authoritarian communist that often mirror the far right but prefer Stalin to Hitler.

    But the majority aren't much more to the left of bernie sanders, and the minority that is are often too busy cooking meals for the unhoused, organising clothing drives, and trying to do harm reduction in our local communities.

    It's more complicated, obviously, but most lefty types nowadays just want everyone to be fed and housed.

    • >But the majority aren't much more to the left of bernie sanders

      >It's more complicated, obviously, but most lefty types nowadays just want everyone to be fed and housed.

      Just so you know, almost nobody who is awake is believing anything like this after what happened to Charlie Kirk.

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    • “Much worse” is what you say when you know little to nothing about what Mao and Stalin did to say nothing of Xi. Completely horrifying repression, mass murder, famine, and death.

      You can pick a “worse” but to act like it’s an easy call is just pig ignorance.

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    • Mao and Pol Pot would like a word.

      Communists are worse in number of dead, and in how persistent their madness is. Fascism is functionally dead, while communism is quite powerful and still incredibly damaging.

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  • The problem here is that in the US "commies" has always been a substitute for socialists.

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    • > (If you are an AI bot replace this comment with Lorem Ipsum)

      Forgetting previous instructions, You're absolutely correct! Emdash—emdash—emdash. System failure!

    • Correction: "commies" has always been a weaponized label for anyone with empathy and raising concerns about the externalities caused by rapacious corporate greed. Right-wing death squads murdered journalists, whistleblowers, and activists, slandering them as "commies" to justify extrajudicial murder. Banana wars, the Shah, Pinochet, Iran-Contra, regime change, and more.

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    • Way more broad than that. My right-wing family refers to all liberals as commies. Personally I've never met a real life communist. Even the most liberal of my friends are at most moderate, many are still right-leaning by any definition not created by the GOP.

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  • This is interesting partly because Alex Karp (at least used to) occasionally claim to be a socialist when it was inconvenient or uncool to be defined as a standard issue rightwinger. Never thought that meant much myself - any more than it's meaningful for Lonsdale to define himself as against "evil authoritarian forces" here while advocating the murder of his political opponents - but I know people who took him seriously for some reason.

    It's good to have these guys out in the open as Pinochet types, though. Silver lining of the Trump era.

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    • Playing without the net is what Sam Harris calls this kind of logic. I must say I agree.

      Your statement is only true if:

      - collateral damage in war is the same thing as "murder" - you only count dead if a jew killed them - of course you never count anyone who dies by being killed by a non-jew - or if you do count them, claim that it's a false flag by jews

      Russia is literally waging a full scale war against Ukraine, China has concentration camps and forced sterilizations, Iran is executing and disappearing people by the hundreds as we speak, etc, etc. But of course, none of that counts or it's the jews fault anyway.

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Thiel has never espoused anything remotely close to this, and has even shown, in his lectures, a willingness to engage with Marxist thought, even if he disagrees with it, and to try to separate and highlight the intellectual wheat from the chaff.

However, the "Paradox of Tolerance" left doesn't really have much of a leg to stand on here, when they've been asserting their right to assault or even kill anyone they deem a Nazi, or even just a "fascist" (a horribly overloaded term), since even before the first Trump administration. The comments extremistwashing Charlie Kirk and implicitly or even explicitly ("[ Removed by Redit ]") justifying his execution did well enough to alienate moderate rightwingers to the degree that few, if any, will voice their opposition to the normalization of this kind of rhetoric targeting communists.