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Protesters blockade Palantir offices over tech firm’s ‘totalitarian’ work with ICE (www.independent.co.uk)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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[–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Corporations aren’t people, my esteemed internet peer.

“But people’s livelihoods!” - Sure, but a not-evil company will cover that, right? Especially a multi-million dollar one. Rebuild or relocate.

Those who are resentful cogs forced to labor under them for a paycheck are not the issue.

My hypothetical is singular property damage for a multi-million dollar corp that amounts to pocket change for those who own it and are making sweeping policy changes that infringe on people’s rights in an unprecedented way. This is not a mom-and-pop or singular franchisee targeted for immutable traits.

The analogue to your suggestion would be doxxing those billionaires and blowing up their homes. That’s different.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    So property destruction is inherently peaceful as long as the property did not belong to a human being?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Who's arguing for peaceful protest here? And why is the binary of "peaceful/not peaceful" important to you? Are you trying to make the point that protests aren't valid or effective unless they're "peaceful?"

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Who’s arguing for peaceful protest here?

    Apparently no one here, though I think (possibly incorrectly) that the protestors in the article were intending to be peaceful.

    And why is the binary of “peaceful/not peaceful” important to you?

    I would ask why it seems to be so important to everyone else, given that there was so much resistance to the idea that blowing up buildings is not "peaceful".

    Are you trying to make the point that protests aren’t valid or effective unless they’re “peaceful?”

    It depends on what the goal of a given protest is.

    For example, this protest had the goal of interfering with a developer conference in order to disrupt the recruitment of new talent, and it would seem that they were very effective in this because there was evidence that the event was shut down. However, in the long run I am not sure how much this will help because I suspect that the event will just be rescheduled, and I suspect that the people attending the event probably felt intimidated as a result of all the people banging on the windows rather than guilty for attending the event. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that therefore this was wasted time on their part; I am just saying that celebrating might be premature.)

    Regardless, if nothing else, the protest succeeded very well in being very visible and unignorable, and I think that there is a lot of value in that. Certainly I would rather that they do this kind of thing than that they be casually blowing up buildings as many here would prefer.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Hmmmm. You smell like a troll trying to muddy the waters by arguing over minutia. You're writing a lot about something only tangentially related to the topic.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    I can understand that, but keep in mind that, from my perspective, my original comment,

    I think that you might not get to claim the mantle of peaceful protest when you start blowing things up yourself.

    was intended to be perfectly innocuous (if a bit wry). After all, the article was about a largely peaceful protest, and introducing demolition into the mix seems like it would be going against the spirit of that.

    Regarding, "only tangentially related to the topic", I think that you will note that the paragraph I wrote just now analyzing the effect of the protest on the developer conference and the likely effect it had on recruitment in the long term is more than anyone else in this post has said about what actually happened in this particular protest, rather than various fantasies of Palantir's destruction. I actually would have loved to have more interesting discussion along those lines (because my analysis is not the only valid one!), but there is not much evidence that anyone else here read more than just the title...

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