The hype and angst that some people are raising over fake news articles is reaching a fevered pitch. I don't think I've ever seen such a dichotomy between what the left and the right believe to be true.
I might be really uneducated here - I'm not American. All I know about ICE is that they're immigration and customs enforcement - they're basically the US's border force. The quality of the conditions they keep migrants in is poor, and has been for years.
OK. Why is that worthy of a boycott? Your democratically elected governments create the laws, and determine the funding for things like beds and toys etc. Boycotts in some cases may make those conditions worse instead of better.
There will always need to be a border force. Wouldn't it be better to focus on improving conditions, increasing funding, and stopping people from crossing the border in the first place?
ICE isn't the border force. All border security operations, stopping people from crossing and customs inspections and such, are done by a different agency called CBP.
Most people trying to boycott ICE don't think undocumented migration should be legal. They just don't think ICE is a good agency. (Again, ICE is not the only agency responsible for undocumented migration, so undocumented migration isn't automatically legal if they can't do their job.)
Indeed, Customs and Border Patrol are the ones on the border. ICE are the folks that find and deport people already inside the US.
Under the last administration ICE was only targeting folks who had committed serious crimes, but now they're targeting all undocumented folk. A lot of our economy actually depends on these people, as they tend to be the ones picking vegetables and working in factory farms, preparing livestock for sale - nasty jobs most people don't want. Trump's golf courses and hotels have also knowingly employed undocumented folk, but they don't do much to the people employing undocumented folks (which is actually illegal - being undocumented is not).
Oh, and we're a country of immigrants. (Except the native folk.)
It's a very interesting gradient that you bring up.
Most of us probably have no issue with the baker who sold Hitler his daily loaf of bread.
But many of us do have problems with Hugo Boss for designing Nazi uniforms, even though the design work would have been before most of the Nazi war crimes had occurred.
Does not resisting to the fullest of your ability constitute enabling evil?
Would you take Pablo Escobar's donation to build a children's orphanage?
Should gun store owners share the blame when a gun purchased in their business is used in a mass shooting? If you say no, what about if the gun is used in a mass shooting within 30 minutes of the sale and the shooter comes across as under distress, and the gun store owner is worried enough to call in a warning to the authorities.
A gradient is a gradient, mapping it's multiple values to just two: blame/no blame, will be problematic. In your gun store owner example, the blame itself has a gradient.
As for the donation, who is going to disagree with the idea of getting money out of bad hands and into good ones. What do you want to do otherwise, burn it? And that's got nothing to do with removing the Escobars of this world.
Plenty of people have issues with taking money from bad people.
Why did Bernie Sanders have to return Martin Shkreli's donation? Even if the donation doesn't buy any influence or soft power it allows the "bad" actor to clean their reputation.
Why did Bernie Sanders have to return Martin Shkreli's donation?
From a political perspective there is also the reputation cost to consider. Even if you're morally fine with taking "bad" peoples money, having to answer "why is Shkreli funding you campaign" all the time has a pretty big political cost, even if you have a perfectly legitimate answer.
>So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer?
No, can you explain it? It sounds like a way to justify to yourself that "those people are bad", but you're "just doing your job". Are you principled about who you do business with, or not?
Most enterprise software sales aren’t as low touch as an Excel license, and Palantir is very much on the high touch side of the spectrum. When Palantir sells software to a large government agency, that means squads of Palantir employees go to the government agency and help them run it, and that consulting effort is a huge component of what the customer is paying for.
Having said that, some people do think Microsoft should refuse to sell to ICE too.
Is it not easy to see that there's a moral space between creating a tool that can be used for something you dislike (basically all software falls into this category) and working specifically for a company making software that will explicitly be used for something you dislike?
MS has professional services and they do send people to ICE to help use Excel. They also have an extensive partner network. Any large software company sells consulting services. I don’t know about Python, but RStudio sells professional services to help with use of R.
That is not their core business. Their core business is data analysis. If I remember from some tech book, they were spun out from the fraud department in PayPal detecting fraudulent transactions and then selling services to FBI.
I became familiar with them through their disease prevention activities trying to evaluate bug transmissions and food borne diseases.
Certainly, you can analyze innocent people, but it’s not like they are a face recognition camera company or something.
I’m not employed by Palantir and not a fan or anything, but am surprised at how mischaracterized they seem to be.
Palantir is private so hard to know revenue breakdown. But hard to believe that over 50% of their revenue (what I would consider core) comes from ICE, military and police.
I found this article [0] from 2018 that said half of its $1B in revenue comes from government and the other half from corporate.
So if every penny of government work comes from ICE and ICE-likes maybe that’s core.
I think the expectation is that Palantir should make lots of money selling software to other people, and then a portion of their profits and employee's salaries is required by law to go to funding ICE anyway. That seems to be what everyone else is okay with.
What about OSS projects like R and Python that also enable ICE to analyze data to find people.
Is the expectation that Palantir should not sell software to ICE?