zlacker

[return to "I'm the CTO of Palantir. Today I Join the Army"]
1. slg+C2[view] [source] 2025-06-13 18:15:53
>>amrrs+(OP)
This article is clearly written with an attempt to frame this as a purely patriotic and yet somehow an apolitical ideological decision, but it reads as incredibly fascistic.
◧◩
2. cyberd+Gw[view] [source] 2025-06-13 21:59:35
>>slg+C2
> incredibly fascistic.

What do you mean by this? Is its some feeling you have or do you have any objective measure?

◧◩◪
3. slg+tE[view] [source] 2025-06-13 23:29:58
>>cyberd+Gw
Since fascism is more a political philosophy than an economic one, it is hard to define an "objective measure" for this type of thing, but the formal merging of corporate interests with military interests by commissioning C-suite officials is probably as close as we could get.

It might help to contrast it with an authoritarian left-wing approach to this same problem of private and state collaboration. In a system like that, we might expect these companies to be nationalized. But a right-wing system would generally be against that. They would instead keep those companies private, but the company could effectively still become state controlled by intertwining leadership such as we see here.

A free and open society should generally be against the merging of corporations and the state as it allows for too much concentrated power which can lead to both corruption and tyranny. These two sides will of course be aligned generally on the well-being of the nation, but having leadership literally splitting time between the two functions goes way beyond that as it creates problems like inherent conflicts of interest and allows for the circumvention of laws and regulations around how both the government and corporations should work. For example, the government might be prevented from spying on its people such as collecting internet histories and corporations might be prevented from exerting physical power over people like imprisoning them. But if the two groups are acting as one, this distinction doesn't matter. The corporate side can do the data collection to find who needs to be imprisoned and then the state does the dirty work of rounding people up. This would be much easier to implement and hide when it can all be orchestrated by a single person delegating their desires down whatever chain of command can legally accomplish the specific subtask at hand.

And wrapping this all up under the general banner of patriotism is doing them no favors here either as it comes off like the nationalistic propaganda that often accompanies fascism.

[go to top]