Comment by jonnybgood
10 days ago
The US gov (including ICE) uses all of Microsoft Office for coordination and planning: email, spreadsheets, powerpoint, document generation, etc. Would you say Microsoft employees have blood on their hands too? If not, what makes Microsoft different?
From the article for context:
> Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address
So essentially, the relevant app here is custom built in order to help ICE raids.
That's substantially different from generic office tech where ICE happen to be one of millions of users.
You're going to have to explain to me why it's a bad thing or immoral for the government to be aware of where immigrants who legally need to be deported live.
You were arguing that the use of Microsoft office vs the bespoke Palantir app were equivelent, and I'm simply pointing out that they are very different.
I'm a stranger on the internet, if you don't already think that the USA's immigration raids and camps are a bad thing, I'm probably not going to be the one to convince you otherwise.
There's a lot of good journalism and commentary on the topic, so if you want to have your mind changed, do a web search and read from people much smarter and more knowledgable than me.
IBM made custom software and hardware to process Jews that legally needed to be in camps. I'm sure that was equally not a 'bad thing' or 'immoral'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
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Taking your argument in good faith: I think selling a tool with a narrow use case tailor-made for ICE is categorically different.
The same difference between a kitchen knife and an AK 47
Considering that Microsoft is also providing services to the Israeli government with the explicit intent of storing and cataloging all of the phone calls made by Palestinian citizens so that they can be analyzed by AI for potential bombing targets...yes I would say Microsoft also has blood on their hands. I wouldn't be surprised to learn they have deep partnerships with Palantir for compute services.
Office can be used for things that aren't objectively evil?
All things done with office must be evil by association.
(Except clippy, he's just a guy)
Maybe, but Office is evil itself.
Microsoft is a modern IBM holocaust tabulation machine. Yes, many of the people who work for Microsoft should be prosecuted and put in prison for war crimes, with varying degrees of culpability. There are people in MS who knowing negotiated deals that aided and abetted war crimes, and those who wrote morally repugnant military surveillance software that was used to automate mass murder in the Gaza holocaust.
Yes, absolutely. These are criminal scum, on par with pedos. Just look at how they are helping a people getting wiped out from their own territory in the Middle East.
Whataboutism, much?
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