doing what I can to strike here from Portland, today.

People hiding in their homes or those dying in ICE custody can't wait until mid-terms for action... and that action can't be "oh, we'll train them more"

They're being trained to do exactly what the federal government wants them to do. Anyone selling "more training" needs to be forced out of government.

If you know someone working at Palantir, shame them. Disinvite them from stuff. Don't deliver their groceries, don't let them into your book club, refuse them service, don't wish them happy birthday. Boycott them from everything.

@aud And FFS don't let them send pull requests, feature proposals, etc. to your software or programming language project. Some folks are failing the lowest possible bar. Anyone associated with Palantir should be banned from all of our projects, for life, no exceptions.

@aud

First let me state that I agree with you. Though a reality check would inform us that our politicians are part of the Oligarchy so they are not going to fight against it. That would be contour intuitive to them. It needs to be total reform. Banning and outlawing lobbyists, doing away with Citizens United and banning anyone that owns or is part of a corporation from government. The lobbyist/ Congressman revolving door will make sure the Oligarchy is always taken care of. Furthermore no one that is now or ever was a lobbyist should ever be allowed to be in politics and no one that works for or worked for a large corporation should be allowed to vote on items that effect that corporation.

@dalias @aud

Some unsolicited advice from the UK...

Its not just Palantir... anyone involved with the Federal Government or MAGA/Republicans should be frozen out of the rest of society.

The problem is they want a fascist racist state and if everyone freezes them out of existing society they will de facto have what they want

@dalias @aud "Issue closed, tagged as 'wontfix' & 'wontimplement', this software will stay bad for authoritarian or evil purposes to spite those who have just made it known that they want to use it for evil, this software will not become more useful for doing evil."

@jackemled @aud Um, no. You're supposing a false premise that it starts bad and the nazis are there to fix it. That is absolutely not the case. They are imposing direction that aligns with their wants and excluding far better contributors who will not work with nazis.

@dalias @aud I should clarify, "Bad for authoritarian use". I did not word that well & I should have thought it through more. I think you're right; I would want to give the correct impression that nazis are here to scare software developers, & everyone else, away from supporting their communities, at least if the cost is that it supports nazis too. I would rather leave people with a usable but less than ideal program, tool, or supply if it means that they can get by with it but nazis can't. I would rather continue supporting the community some other way than to improve something in a way that benefits nazis without giving much to the community, such as pausing feature updates so nazis don't get more use out of it but continuing security updates so people don't get hacked by nazis.

However, any software developed by me will be bad, because I don't know what I'm doing yet lmao

@jackemled @aud There's nothing inherently wrong with accepting an obviously-correct bugfix because the person who wrote the patch was a nazi. But that's *not* what the Palantir dude who's still allowed in the Rust project is doing.

Anyone who's working with other people on projects like this ends up influencing if not outright making social and technical decisions that impact the direction of the projects. And nazis should not be allowed to do that. They should not have a voice at the table.

@jackemled @aud Even if the software you write is "bad" because you feel you're unqualified to do it well, it's nowhere near as bad as it would be once people with malicious motives start twisting it to their will.

Software that "works better" and has fewer obvious bugs, but that's under the control of bad people who can use their role in it to wield power, is *worse* than software that "doesn't work well" because it gets people to use it and become dependent on it, cementing the power of those in control of it.

@dalias @aud I did not know about that specifically, but I did know about Rust having terrible people in general

Nazis should be made too uncomfortable to say even a single word. I try to do this whenever I encounter them. They should be embarrassed for doing the horrible things they do & saying the horrible things they say.

@dalias @aud Lmao yeah, just look at suckless. They're all pretty qualified to make software, but despite that the software they make is awful & unusable, because they're shitty, arrogant people who think they can't possibly be wrong about how they do things first try.

Yeah, see Telegram. It has been run by nazis since the beginning, it has always been buggy & anti-security, but that's not obvious to most people & they have good marketing. So lots of people use it & are vulnerable in so many ways because of it. People that realize that & stop using it become afraid to try alternatives because they're made to think they'll be even worse than Telegram.