Comment by smackeyacky
5 hours ago
Personal insults only weaken your argument.
Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
If somebody proposed to you that you could have a lucrative contract in exchange for an intrusive system that provides a bedrock for authoritarianism, you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
It doesn’t.
>Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
The issue with this broken argument you keep repeating is that it only works in a fantasy setting where the world only runs on morality, where countries could also decide to not have nuclear weapons and never got to war with each other and share resources fairly, and end world hunger and all that, while my argument is based on how things work in the real world which isn't run on morality but on rule of law enforced by force of violence, and such power corrupts, so the world is run in a corrupt fashion by powerful and corrupt people, meaning the existence of various Palantirs is virtually inevitable unless the voting population heavily protests to force the governments' hands.
>you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
No, I never said that. You're good at pretending to misunderstand things I never claim to have things to build arguments upon.
There are several things that make Palantir uniquely objectionable, though:
1) They're private-sector and have low hiring standards, which can lead to Boeing-esque quality control issues
2) They have every incentive to fleece US taxpayers, becoming another over-fattened rice-bowl defense contractor
3) Exporting Palantir products could create diplomatic crises and conflicts of interest undermining American security (see: NSO Group)
We can't ever avoid spyware since Google, Microsoft and Apple already built the perfect surveillance state a decade ago. But we can prevent taxpayers from being scammed, and reject the enshittification of the federal government's defense budget.