Israeli people and the Palestinian people are victims of their and each other’s respective warmongering hardline governments

Overwhelming majority of Israelis support the genocide.

It’s tens of thousands of Palestinians that are dying, not Israelis. It’s the Palestinians that had their airport blown up decades ago. It’s Palestinians that live in an apartheid regime. It’s Palestinians that did not have the right to leave their prison. It’s Palestinians that had to deal with MK84 2,000lb American made bombs blowing up on their homes. It’s the Palestinians that are going without food and water and electricity.

There is no equality here. This is not a both sides thing. One side is committing a genocide and the other side is being genocided. That’s it. That isn’t an excuse for Oct 7. That isn’t to mean that Hamas is blameless.

But if you took all the crimes of the Palestinians and put it on one side of the scale and all of the crimes of the Israelis and put it on the other, there is no comparison.

I think the question already contains a sort of ideological trap: it assumes that a specific company can be uniquely evil, as if morality were some trait that varies between company to company.

I’m sure everyone’s heard this before:

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

It’s not just a slogan. It gives us insight into the very structure of capitalism. That doesn’t mean every individual act is equally bad, but the system demands a sort of baseline complicity.

CEOs and executives are legally required to maximize shareholder profits. Not just encouraged— legally obligated. So when Coca-Cola, for example, hires paramilitary death squads to kill labor leaders in Colombia, it’s not because it is uniquely monstrous. Replace Coca-Cola with Pepsi, or Nestle, or Amazon, or Raytheon… whatever. The logic of the system would produce the same result. If I gave the same chess position to 30 different Grandmasters… if there is a best move they will all see it and choose that best move.

Think of an ant colony. An ant colony doesn’t decide to be cruel; it expands, consumes, protects its territory, destroys threats. Is it evil when some colony wipes out another for resources? A colony committing what we could term ant genocide? No it’s not. The colony is simply acting in its nature. Much like a slime mold would expand in a radius looking for food in a petri dish.

Large corporations are like ant colonies. Complex emergent behavior resulting from a large number of individual units acting by a set of rules. The intelligence or perspective of the individual does not actually matter for the organism as a whole. As long as the individual units follow a set of rules it creates a sort of “hive-mind” pseudo-intelligence that acts in its own interests and has an almost Darwinist natural selection process.

So this is all to say that I reject the question. I don’t believe in uniquely evil companies. The horror is precisely that they’re all, in a sense, innocent. They act not out of hatred or sadism or cruelty, but because the system itself has carved out the pathways where the ball inevitably rolls down the hill following the path of least resistance.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Peter Thiel is the financier behind JD Vance and one of the co-founders of PayPal- later on with Elon Musk. They’re part of the same group of people, along with various other Silicon Valley tech executives, who subscribe to what has been called the “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy

JD Vance, for example, has openly expressed his support for Nick Land and cited him as a major influence.

Both Yarvin and Land believe that gradual, incremental reforms to democracy will not save Western society; instead, a “hard reset” or “reboot” is necessary. To that end, Yarvin has coined the acronym “RAGE” – Retire All Government Employees – as a crucial step toward that goal.

Does that sound familiar?

Yarvin advocates for an entirely new system of government – what he calls “neocameralism.” He advocates for a centrally managed economy led by a monarch – modeled after a corporate CEO – who wouldn’t need to adhere to plodding liberal-democratic procedures. Yarvin has written approvingly of the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism.

They’re essentially trying to reshape the government to function more like a corporation. Something akin to the Chinese or Singapore method of governance. Democracy is not compatible. What’s interesting is that this isn’t happening in secret. They’re out in the open about it.

I’m guessing you refuse to see what’s in front of your nose out of fear, which is why you keep saying everyone else is afraid. Me personally, I’m not afraid at all. I’d say I’m more morbidly curious to see how it all ends up. I’m fairly privileged and I’ll be fine no matter what. As long as you shut up and do your job most people will be fine. Just don’t be an immigrant or openly anti-Israel

But it’s happening. We’re witnessing a coup right in front of our eyes. They are purging the federal government and Trump has started to ignore court orders- dipping his toes in the water. There’s a lot more to this if you’re interested. There’s many articles out there and you can even read stuff by Vance, Thiel, Yarvin, Land, etc. They’re not shy

then please wise one- assuage my fear by showing me how the purge isn’t a purge. release me from this trembling terror by convincing me that the administration is not actually breaking federal law. save me from this horror and show me the light

what does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment really mean? explain to me please how these ideologically aligned billionaires (who happen to control the white house) that say they want to end democracy aren’t actually planning on ending democracy

Roman history didn’t end after Julius Caesar. In fact, Rome would reach its peak a couple hundred years after that moment and then continued to dominate for hundreds of years afterwards.

It just wasn’t really a Republic anymore.

Of course that isn’t to say the US will get stronger, I think the opposite. Just that the end of democracy doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the country.

we’re watching an unprecedented purge in only a couple months of an administration. led by people who have openly admitted they want to destroy American democracy and institute a dictatorship.

me personally I think Trump already crossed the Rubicon. but in the very near future there will be an order by the Supreme Court for Trump to stop doing something. He won’t stop doing it. And then it will be abundantly clear to everyone we’re in a new stage of US history

but they’re checking off demographics at an alarming rate.

yeah those two arab protestor students that are getting deported- they’re essentially getting detained and eventually removed because they spoke out against Israel. it’s an attempt to put a damper on speech for the whole country. sort of sending a message to immigrants- you better watch what you’re saying or we will get you

Vast majority of immigration detention centers are privately owned

It’s a sharp contrast to private prisons where it’s less than 10%.

it’s very common in colonial societies like most of the Americas. without this type of law there wouldn’t be any American citizens. even before the 14th amendment we had birth right citizenship by common law precedence

you don’t just become friends with people to become friends. there needs to be some glue that brings you two together.

so for example back when you were in primary school, you had that glue- you took the same class as someone or rode home in the same bus, etc.

as an adult, if you want to make friends, you need to find some glue. it could be working together, or playing dungeons and dragons, or a deep appreciation of black and white cinema. who knows

so i will suggest one thing and it will only really work if you live in Florida. go to kava bars. just go with your laptop and hang out there drinking kava and doing your own thing. go every once in a while and you will meet people and make friends. it’s one of the few modern “3rd place” locations.

i got this spam too. i think it’s just someone who wants to grow some type of online community

i think fact that they feel comfortable sharing a picture with drug paraphernalia & spamming hundreds of people says all i need to know about the person

But they are mistaken. Europe is not giving in to that again.

how do you have so much faith? if you look at the Nazi elections it went something like

~2.5% ⇒ ~5% ⇒ 10% ⇒ 20% ⇒ 30something% ⇒ dictatorship

if you look at AfD it’s following s similar pattern and we’re currently at 20something%

Looking at past history, just one more successful election cycle and the far-right can consolidate and eliminate any democratic opposition

sounds nice in theory but i don’t think people realize just how integrated their economy is to the US

entire industries are completely dependent on US trade. they traded large swathes of their economic autonomy away for easy access to the US market. prosperity was deemed more important than sovereignty

it’s a decision that was decades in the making and it will likely take decades to reverse.

and if we’re being honest it shouldn’t have exactly taken Trump to make Canada realize the US acts in its own interests. Look at NAFTA signed by Bill Clinton. We pressured Canada into accepting a deal that forced them to maintain a certain level of oil export to the US even if there were domestic shortages.

It’s not the type of agreement equal parties or allies come to. It’s a relationship of domination. Always has been

i say be polite. you don’t have to be super friendly or anything

being a “homewrecker” is bad, but sometimes there’s more context you don’t know about. i tend to give people the benefit of doubt and give them an opportunity to show who they are before I make assumptions.

i do this because in the past i have judged too quickly and been wrong about people- in both directions

American trade is nearly worth half of Canada’s total GDP. something like 75~80% of total Canadian exports go to the US. if they actually retaliate in force they could be dooming their country to an economic crisis if Trump is spiteful enough. so far the Canadian tariffs have only touched about $30B worth of goods, or 7% of the total trade.

really it’s a cautionary tale about the intersections of different technologies. for example, csv going into a sql database and then querying that database from another language (whether it’s JS or C# or whatever)

when i was 16 and in driver’s ed, I remember the day where the instructor told us that we were going to go drive on the highway. I told him I was worried because the highway sounds scary- everybody is going so fast. he told me something that for some weird reason stuck with me: the highway is one of the safest places to be because everybody is going straight in the same direction.

the most dangerous places to be, and the data backs this up, are actually intersections. the points where different roads converge. why? well, it’s pretty intuitive. it’s where you have a lot of cars in close proximity. the more cars in a specific square footage the higher probability of a car hitting another car.

that logic follows with software too. in a lot of ways devs are traffic engineers controlling the flow of data. that’s why, like you said, it’s up to the devs to catch these things early. intersections are the points where different technologies meet and all data flows through these technologies. it’s important to be extra careful at these points. like in the example i gave above…

the difference between

WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

and

WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

could be the difference between one guy living a normal life and another guy receiving thousands of speeding tickets https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

How do devs make this mistake

it can happen many different ways if you’re not explicitly watching out for these types of things

example let’s say you have a csv file with a bunch of names

id, last_name
1, schaffer
2, thornton
3, NULL
4, smith
5, "NULL"

if you use the following to import into postgres

COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

number 5 will be imported as a string “NULL” but number 3 will be imported as a NULL value. of course, this is why you sanitize the data (GIGO) but I can imagine this happening countless times at companies all over the country

there are easy fixes if you’re paying attention

COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

sets the empty string to NULL value.

example with js

fetch('/api/user/1')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    if (data.lastName == "null") {
      console.log("No last name found");
    } else {
      console.log("Last name is:", data.lastName);
    }
  });

if data is

data = {
  id: 5,
  lastName: "null"
};

then the if statement will trigger- as if there was no last name. that’s why you gotta know the language you’re using and the potential pitfalls

now you may ask – why not just do

if (data.lastName === null)

instead? But what if the system you’re working on uses JSON.parse(data) and that auto-converts everything to a string? it’s a very natural move to check for the string "null"

obviously if you’re paying attention and understand the pitfalls of certain languages (like javascript’s type coercion and the particularities of JSON.parse()) it becomes easy but it’s something that is honestly very easy to overlook

I mean, Bannon started this whole thing. He was pushed out of the inner circle but he was the one with the vision back in 2016.

Bannon is a visionary and he had the right idea. He just didn’t have the ability to execute. Trump took the ideas from Bannon and found new allies who have the ability to execute. Musk (and Thiel) were more than happy to jump on board

Edit: just in case it’s not clear I’m not endorsing his views. I am firmly anti-Nazi

look there was no plausible deniability when Elon did it. He pretended like he was a weirdo autist the night of with his weird head bobbing and his exaggerated gestures to try and give plausible deniability. but the Nazi salute was putting the toe in the water. feeling the room

it seems that the wannabe Nazis felt like the water was warm enough and they’re gonna start descending the staircase into the pool

I think his is absolutely the right course of action. We as humans have a weird psyche and we sometimes externalize internal issues and project them outwards either onto ideas or people.

So for example, incels have serious issues with self-worth and they externalize those issues into hatred of women and society at large for their position in life. They feel, perhaps, they are not the man they feel like they should be- strong, handsome, wealthy, etc. And so they take blame at external circumstances in order to lessen the cognitive dissonance that if they are lonely and undesired- it’s almost always due to their own decision making and perspective on life.

So for example a young male teen may feel all sorts of negative emotions and decide that gender dysphoria must be the diagnosis- when maybe he’s just a little feminine and attracted to men. But if they start to identify with the trans label prematurely, they could end up doing unnecessary damage to themselves and their development.

I wholeheartedly and unapologetically support trans people and in my opinion if transitioning is determined the most effective treatment to gender dysphoria by one or two clinical physicians, I would absolutely support my kid transitioning. Trans kids have a very high rate of suicide so this is actually a very serious life and death diagnosis. It’s more dangerous statistically than some types of cancer. And if my kid had cancer, I would want to obviously look at all possible treatments plans we could take.

But just like the dad, I would start with regular therapy and work our way up. See what else is going on. I would also spend time with my kid and really try to get a sense for what’s troubling them. I don’t think there is a substitute for a parent who cares.

Anyhow, interesting post, thanks for sharing this intimate exchange. It’s a reminder that we are all humans and even those who we may label as “conservative” cannot be condensed down to one statement. This is one of the reasons, for example, I love Florida even though it’s a red state. I’m the furthest thing from right wing, but you’ll find that many Latinos who identify as right-wing have many views that would be considered “progressive”.

We’re all ultimately people who hold multitudes.