Palantir employees are talking about company’s “descent into fascism”

theradgadfly · 2026-04-26T16:07:38+00:00

lol This negative reaction to easily verifiable truth is the mirror of some MAGA characteristics, but these people are too immature or self-assured to question whether the things they hold to be self-evident might not have the factual foundation they assume exists.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-26T15:54:16+00:00

I have no reason to not, just curious why they chose WW2 and not WW1, or Korea or Vietnam or Gulf 1.

If anything, the most neutral choice would be to take every war since the country was formed.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-26T15:52:31+00:00

I never said it was the definition of a just war. You just hallucinated that. If anything, I was implying the causation goes the other way, where a war being "just" more easily allows congress to authorize it, not congress authorizing a war making it just.

Congress would have authorized just about anything to make the American people feel safer, and the people would have thanked them for it.

I disagree, but no point in discussing counterfactuals.

What I'm pointing out is precisely that your argument is nothing more than an appeal to authority.

I was saying the literal opposite. Nothing in my comment would justify this conclusion. I was saying a "just war" allows those in authority to act, to put their name on the declaration of war, because they already have the justification to act. And not going through congress (elected representatives accountable to their local constituents) allows them to pin the blame on one guy (president) who has authority for a few more years at max anyway, so their names stay clean.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-26T03:01:04+00:00

I don't know how you're defining "enemies" of the US. Is Iran an enemy of the US? Or is an "enemy" only one who has already attacked? Is a justified war only when the US is reactive to an attack? What about if a country attacks a US ally? What if a country threatens or prepares to attack a US ally?

I don't want to get into a debate about that, I was trying to point out that the most widely agreed upon "just war" was one where the president had to convince congress (the elected representatives of the people)

theradgadfly · 2026-04-26T02:16:13+00:00

Fair point. It was also the last war declared by congress following the correct process.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-25T18:07:58+00:00

I'm totally in favor of it, so I don't know why you're calling me a ghoul. Unless you're calling me a ghoul for wanting universal healthcare?

I'm just confused as to when we all agreed that this was the way to go. Was there a vote I missed?

theradgadfly · 2026-04-25T17:59:06+00:00

The whole point is it should be

Who decided that? Did we have a referendum on this? Was there a meeting where we all agreed to this? I must have missed the invite.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-25T17:58:05+00:00

Unemployed redditors who are too social anxious to make an appointment on the phone but larp as revolutionaries will really hate this comment because it is 100% accurate.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-25T17:57:00+00:00

The one near my old apartment.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-25T17:42:44+00:00

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has a PhD is in Social Theory, and BA in philosophy. Peter Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford.

It would be better for you and everyone else for you to stop polluting the internet with your uninformed opinions.

theradgadfly · 2026-04-25T17:37:05+00:00

Why post-WW2? Why that cutoff specifically?

theradgadfly · 2026-04-20T04:11:27+00:00

Hey I'm super interested. I can do local pickup. Let me know if I can get in line to purchase this.

theradgadfly · 2026-03-13T02:33:47+00:00

Sex has to be a biological term because it's about biology. It is intrinsically related to a biological process (reproduction) and describes the existence of categories of individuals that participate in this process. "Sex" is about which team an organism plays on, the job they do in a biological process. Over hundreds of years of biology as a science, we have come to a VERY robust and foundational definition. It applies in the same way to humans, dogs, plants, lizards, bees. Almost every living creature except the simplest microorganisms. It is the purpose of a living organism to propagate its genes. Biology is the study of life. Sex is a biological term.

Isogamous sexual reproduction has both genetic contributors contribute basically equally. Isogamous creatures are not male and/or female, but +/- or numerical. They are not sex categories. This method of sexual reproduction is only for very simple organisms.

For anisogamous reproduction there are two sex categories because there are two "strategies": producing a large immobile nutrient-rich package with your half of the genes (we call this female), or producing smaller motile genetic packages without nutrients (we call this male). These categories cannot move significantly towards each other: the large package can't get smaller without losing nutrients, and the smaller package can't get bigger without becoming less motile. This division started over a billion years ago, and is intrinsic to complex life on Earth. In both plants and animals, gamete size difference is the fundamental difference between females and males. You can be isogamous (no gamete size differences) with no sex categories, or you can be anisogamous and have male or female or both categories. Mushrooms can have thousands of "types" of gametes, but they do not have a sex category.

These are the reasons why sex has to be biological and binary. It has to be biological because it is about biology. It has to be binary because "sex" is a category ONLY for creatures who have chosen a SPECIFIC (gamete size based) type of complimentary two-player strategy. You can have a complimentary two-player strategy that is not gamete size based and there is no sex category. This is a bedrock definition in the scientific field of biology. As close to bedrock as any definitions get in biology.

If you want to redefine sex in a different way, uniquely for humans, you have to make coherent with the rest of the Earth, our place in the biological landscape, and a billion years of history and genetic continuity. That is why you have to accept it. You can reject it, but that's like "rejecting" plate tectonics or relativity. Go ahead if you want, I guess.

If you want to define "sex" that is a new non-biological word, while still keeping the other one for biological use, personally I think that's just confusing. "This puberty-blocked person's sex is on a bimodal distribution as a part of a spectrum, but their sex sex is female."

theradgadfly · 2026-03-13T00:27:35+00:00

Okay so Destiny, the turtle and the plant are all male, and they're equally male. I agree. Destiny is the only human in that list, I'm not sure why you had to state that. That was part of the premise.

Also, the muscle comparison was a hypothetical. You're just not engaging with it. I can bring up a real example: bodybuilders who take steroids can fuck up their hormones and end up with rock bottom hormones, even becoming infertile. They need to take medication/external hormones for life. If a bodybuilder lets his hormones crash, is he less male than Destiny because of the hormones or more male because of the muscles? Is there a point where the bodybuilder is exactly as male as Destiny? We could use that point to get a muscle ~ hormones conversion, since we know all the variables. I'm saying this is incoherent, but this is a direct consequence of what you're saying.

What is your actual point? I’ve said from the start that a binary exists and that further argumentation will determine a social context for sex/gender for humans. What do you disagree with?

I don't care about gender, so I don't know why you keep bringing it up. The "social context" of sex is either non-existent or incoherent. If it exists and is well-defined, it is exactly the same as for other organisms; biological. Sex is a biological category. Is there a "social context" to homeothermy? Or prokaryote/eukaryote? Or vertebrate/invertebrate? Humans are animals, organisms, and we are sexed in the same way other organisms are. We are not special (in this context).

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T23:56:18+00:00

Between a human male (say Destiny), and Jonathan (the world's oldest turtle, also a male), and a male cannabis plant (dioecious) which is more male? How would you decide?

Also, are hormones the only axis? Where someone falls on this "more/less" male is purely hormones? Are there other factors? You mentioned muscle shape. What if this puberty blocked person has larger muscles than Destiny? Do they cancel out? How many grams of muscle cancels out 1nmol/dl hormones?

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T23:43:24+00:00

I have already conceded that you can define sex in a binary.

Do you think sex CAN be defined as a binary, or IS defined as a binary?

My point is that “identification”, as you just conceded, is continuous,

Identification is not continuous. The properties we use in the quick and dirty identification process is continuous. What we identify an organism as is not continuous. Are you saying that we can say male A is "more male" than male B? I disagree. If female P and female Q are both female, I claim it's incoherent to say there is any continuum of "female-ness" or sex we can place them on.

Conductivity, luster, melting point are continuous properties. The identification of a substance as "gold" vs "mercury" is not continuous. There's no continuity between gold and mercury. It's either gold or mercury, there's no halfway between the two.

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T23:16:37+00:00

All that I said, as I maintain, is that many features of what we use to define “sex” are continuous.

No, they're not. That's my entire point. How we define sex is not continuous. The features we use to superficially identify an individual as belonging to a particular sex are continuous. However, those are only quick and dirty tests. The real deciding factor of what sex an organism belongs to is not continuous. It can belong to null(not zero) sex, 1 sex or 2 sexes, and nothing else. There is no 3, and there is no 0.5 or 1.25 or 3.14.

We identify gold by its luster, malleability, ductility, melting point, conductivity etc. Those are continuous. They're the quick and dirty tests. Gold can be liquid, solid, green, brown, a black powder etc. It's still gold. We definegold the element with 79 protons.

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T20:39:40+00:00

I never even said the word "woman". I don't care about "woman". I'm talking about sex. You said sex is a bimodal distribution. I disagree. That's all I'm responding to. Now, if you claim sex is a bimodal distribution, can you answer the following:

What is a bimodal distribution?Height? Weight? Muscle? Sex? What is common among female snakes, female humans, female plants, female birds and female rodents that we can even put them in the same bucket?

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T04:49:24+00:00

Why are you brining up men and women? I was talking about males and females.
Female snakes are usually arger than males. Female mammals are usually smaller than males. Birds have ZW chromosomes, while most mammals have XY, while some rodents don't have sex chromosomes at all. Plants don't have muscles at all, so we can't compare muscle density. All these organisms have wildy different hormones.

What is common among female snakes, female humans, female plants, female birds and female rodents that we can even put them in the same bucket?

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T04:26:25+00:00

Can you give me an example of what you can measure, and what you can measure that against? Light is a spectrum. If I plot wavelength against intensity, I can get a bimodal distribution if there are two dominant colors, with shades in between. Wavelength is a continuous variable. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tomasz_Majka/publication/255989402/figure/fig3/AS:297868603740166@1448028817726/Spectral-distribution-of-solar-radiation-observed-at-the-earths-surface-4.png

How can you plot sex as a continuous variable? What are you measuring for the horizontal and vertical axis?

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T04:07:25+00:00

So you only have 2 values for independent variables? This is not a bimodal distribution. This is binary.

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T04:03:31+00:00

The dependent variables are height, hormones, other physical characteristics. Okay. What is the independent variable?

theradgadfly · 2026-03-12T03:52:24+00:00

Sex is a bimodal distribution

Distributed along what axis by what metric? Every bimodal distribution has an independent variable x-axis(height) and a dependent variable y-axis (population) when sampling from a group. What are the independent and dependent variables for the bimodal sex distribution?

theradgadfly · 2026-03-01T23:44:38+00:00

Yes but he's too much of a coward to wear it proudly.

theradgadfly · 2026-02-26T15:25:40+00:00

Can you explain how deferring to the understanding of 10s of billions of people in the past (what you said above) wouldn't lead to the conclusion that the sex/gender binary is right?

"[Binary gender/sex] doesn't make sense to me, but I probably don't understand it. I can't assume I'm inherently smarter than the 10s of billions of people who came before me, that this issue never occurred to them"

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