Wtf is up with the Guardian lately and these headlines? Not as bad as the “slams” or “politician did this one thing slop” but getting there. I digress…

They are invincible. That fine is a pittance. Thats a get out of jail free card.

Holy crap. Do you live in a bitcoin server farm? Thats insane.

The article is correct. You are misinterpreting the writer: “…forcing the evacuation of more than 150,000 people. More than 2,000 die in the process.” An event (Nuclear plant disaster) forced evacuation of people. That evacuation (from the area due to the nuclear plant disaster) resulted in 2000 deaths.

There were over 2000 deaths directly related to the evacuation order. No known deaths from radiation related events. Here are some links and quotes from a few places to show consensus on this.

“Official figures show that there have been 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture. Disaster-related deaths are in addition to the about 19,500 that were killed by the earthquake or tsunami.” - World Nuclear Association, a think tank and pro nuclear policy group.

No deaths nor discernible increase in cancer rates - UNSCEAR Report, 2013, a UN agency

And if you want to deep dive:

https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en-1-2-1.html

https://fukushima.jaea.go.jp/en/report/database/

I’m calling it now - Palantir and others of their ilk will be the ones leading this nonsense.

Circling around to say I thought about this over the last four days. In brief, my perspective that you can have a surveillance apparatus and a contemporary democracy in the 21st century were misguided. You are right.

That’s a fair set of arguments.

That’s a good read, thank you for sharing. I do not believe that a lack of privacy and surveillance are a given. You can have a strong Democratic state with surveillance, if you have strong privacy guarantees and the means to enforce them. I’ll point to the, for the time, rapidly expanding surveillance state of revolutionary America in the 1770s and 1780s for that, but I admit, this is a much larger discussion, but your article and point are well taken.

Edit: Update based on additional thoughts and comments below. This reply is to the perspectives and argument offered by /u/euxotic and my response is: “Circling around to say I thought about this over the last four days. In brief, my perspective that you can have a surveillance apparatus and a contemporary democracy in the 21st century were misguided. You are right.”

Quite well said.

This is an important point. But I’d also like to convey that the abuses that are there are not broadcast the way they are in the US. So there’s also a thick fog of obscurity that hides the problems in the PRC. The PRC is repressive, especially to minority groups, but there’s a consistency and predictability to it that is not there in the US. A rule of law if you will. I am not condoning that, it is awful, but they plan, pass, and rule predictably with a long term agenda. That is not the case with the repression in the US where the violence has an agenda, but comes and goes without the same degree of process. If I were to distill it, I’d say that PRC is procedural, prioritizing national unity and party loyalty. The US is haphazard, prioritizing cruelty and personal fealty.

Lesser of two evils perhaps? A moralist can discuss that, not I.

Way way back in the day, I wrote a graduate symposium paper on why China was going to become a global power. I was right, and in my presentation at a hotel in Carmel-by-the-Sea (so posh…) I stated that many younger people weren’t viewing China as any worse than the US. Some were viewing China as the lesser of two evils in a world plagued by, for lack of a better term, oligarchical bull shit.

No nation at the top of the world stage is great, but when you look at thing amorally, China is beating out other countries in a number of places right now, the seeds of which were sown 15 years ago. These include infrastructure, renewable energy spending, mass production of higher (note I said higher, not high) quality consumer goods (cars and battery tech came out on top), education, and well-being for the population. Yes, you can double take, but China has actually invested pretty heavily in healthcare outcomes and population well-being in a way that makes places like the US or UK look laughable because I include transportation infrastructure in that measurement. I’ll have an aside below you may find interesting…

On the flip side, today’s younger people don’t know about the violence of the 1980s and 1990s. China’s invasion of Vietnam. The abhorrent human rights abuses then, and the abhorrent human rights abuses of now. The now is important because, China is socially engineering it’s population and using very hard engineering via a party approved justice system to ensure China is what the CCP and Xi want. But they don’t see it. They see Epstein, Putin, endless wars, inflation, christo-fascism, and a stable and non-confrontational China.

So I get it. And, as RejZor said, Tsingtao beer is pretty good when you compare it to the other “national” brands.

Aside: There’s a story from a British journalist I can’t find, but is burned into my memory. I think it’s from Ken Burns’ The West. He observed the Americans built the state capitol of Montana way off in the middle of seemingly nowhere. Might have been a city hall, but whatever. The Americans said the city would grow over to it, and they were looking ahead. That’s what China is doing now with their high speed rail, highways, and solar projects. They are building for tomorrow. That’s huge and people who are living in a world of potholes, education cuts, and rising prices see that and say, “Hey, they’re doing some good shit over there.”

Take anything Palantir says about democracy as either a dog whistle or a threat. Palantirs product is mass surveillance and criminal behavior prediction (location, whereabouts, movement patterns). That’s authoritarian, but not necessarily antidemocratic. You can still vote and be a democracy with mass (edit: typo was with ass survelliance…might still work) surveillance, don’t conflate it.

Where the anti Democratic comes in is using that surveillance to prevent people from exercising their right to vote and manipulating their information so they vote how you want. That’s what Palantir is enabling.

Aside: Its nuts how accurate their name is in spirit. Almost commendable they carried through embracing the name and the power behind it.