We continue analyzing Palantir's manifesto:
11. Our society has grown all too quick to rush, and often rejoice, at the defeat of its enemies. The defeat of an opponent is a time for reflection, not for rejoicing.
For more than half a century, the United States has had almost no opportunity to rejoice in defeated enemies. Nor does it reflect on its own countless defeats.
12. The atomic age is ending. An age of containment, the atomic age is ending, and a new age of containment built on artificial intelligence is beginning.
-The atomic age will not end as long as nuclear weapons are almost the only guarantors of sovereignty.
13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced further in progressive values than ours. The United States is far from perfect. But it's easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
-By 1965 the ratio of wages between ordinary workers and managers was 1 to 24; by 2005, it was 1 to 262. Housing becomes unaffordable: by 2024, some 400.000 men and 303.000 women were homeless, without shelter to face the harsh climate.
14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long period of peace. Many have forgotten, or perhaps taken for granted, that for nearly a century a certain version of peace has prevailed in the world without a major military conflict. At least three generations, and their children and grandchildren, have not known a world war.
-Thanks to that "extraordinarily prolonged peace", in the 250 years since its founding in 1776, the United States has only been at war for 15 years.
15. The postwar neutralization of Germany and Japan must be undone. The demilitarization of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical compromise exists with Japanese pacifism, and if maintained, it threatens the balance of power in Asia.
Germany and Europe were remilitarized by the United States through NATO, as instruments against the Soviet Union. Japan could serve as a tool against China, but it is doubtful that the intelligent Japanese would accept it.
16. We should applaud those who try to build where the market has failed. The almost dismissive culture surrounding Musk's interest in the grand narrative, as if billionaires should simply confine themselves to the field of getting rich… any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks beneath a thinly veiled contempt.
-Socialists are the ones who build where the market has failed to do so. Example: China.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in controlling violent crime. Many politicians in the United States have essentially shrugged off violent crime, abandoning all serious efforts to control the problem or taking any risks with its constituent or contributing elements in achieving solutions in what must be a desperate gamble to save lives.
The immense espionage capabilities of Silicon Valley and Palantir are not being applied to combat violent crime, particularly drug trafficking, in a country where one in five people uses illegal drugs.
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures leads to the diversion of too many talents from government service. The public arena and the superficial, petty assaults against those who dare to do more than enrich themselves have become so unforgivable that the Republic is left with a significant number of intellectuals, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if one possessed any genuine internal structure of beliefs.
-A powerful condemnation of the spying on the "private lives of public figures" by one of the most powerful mass surveillance agencies targeting citizens of the United States and other countries. The private lives of public figures must remain secret, especially if they appear in the Epstein Papers.
19. The caution in public life that we carelessly promote is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing at all.
-But also those who talk the most say absolutely nothing.
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. This elitist intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most evident signs that their political project constitutes a less open intellectual space than many of them proclaim.
-We should only be intolerant of religious intolerance. Nothing is said against racial, classist, political, anti-immigrant, or xenophobic intolerance.
21. Some cultures have made vital advances, others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. And yet this new dogma shines over the fact that some cultures are, in fact, subcultures. Some have produced wonders. Others have proven rather mediocre or empty.
-A call to discriminate between cultures as between races. As I demonstrated in The Countercultural Empire: From Rock to Postmodernism, we call any non-dominant culture a subculture, and the United States is a tight bundle of subcultures.
22. We must resist the superficial temptation of a vacuous and hollow pluralism. We in America, and especially in the West, have resisted defining national cultures for the past half-century in the name of inclusiveness. But inclusiveness in what sense?
-If Palantir's prodigious artificial intelligence cannot "define national cultures," we should certainly not call what is not included in them "empty and hollow pluralism."
The only truly hollow thing is the computer ideology. It's neither utopian, nor a plan for workers replaced by computers, nor for the depletion of fossil fuels, nor for the collapse of the petrodollar. It seems we'll have to start thinking for ourselves again.
