by liberal japonicus
Not sure this will interest everyone, but this is an interesting piece on Palantir, which goes into (from 16:05) a discussion of Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, who has a background in philosophy which is detailed in the video. This piece is a good one for explaining what Palantir is and does.
The wikipedia page says that Karp’s thesis was in German, but I found this link, which is in English, which is a translation of the thesis. This substack by Kirstin de Montfort has her translation with a preface about what made her translate it. I’m reading them side by side and there are some fascinating translation differences that I’m noticing, but I’m still working my way thru it. Perhaps Hartmut can look at the German original and weigh in.
The New Statesman piece name checks Moira Weigel, and this podcast interview was fascinating, especially since it was done in Nov 2020, so was midway in Biden’s presidency, with the idea of a 2nd Trump presidency being pretty laughable. I wonder how different the interview would be if it were done today. Many of the same points are covered in this essay by her of the same vintage.
Some more recent stuff (Feb 2025) is this New Republic piece which transcribes this from a Karp talk about a year ago:
Americans are the most loving God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you’re waking up and thinking about harming American citizens or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you’re a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved.
I read that and threw up a little. The piece goes on to observe:
The performance was Karp distilled: using a buttoned-up, legacy media–moderated panel as a platform for a made-to-go-viral paean to American greatness in the form of a call for collective punishment. Since Palantir went public in 2020, Karp, even more than Musk, has turned himself into the consummate Silicon Valley aristo-populist: palatable enough to C-suite mores to grace the stage at Davos and the pages of the business press (The Economist named him its “Best CEO of 2024”), but sufficiently “based” to become a cult figure in the seedier precincts of X and Reddit, where retail investor “Palantirians” trade AI-generated memes of “Daddy Karp” as a glowering Roman gladiator or toga-clad philosopher-king.
Karp’s paean probably answers GftNC’s question about how much American voters hate dishonour. Or even think about people who are not Americans. As much as I would wish it to be otherwise, a PhD from Goethe University doesn’t prevent you from being a buffoon.
Weigel’s interview points out that one might be overegging the pudding by connecting Palantir’s development to Karp’s PhD and this NY Mag Intelligencer article, after discussing how Palantir seems like every other defense contracter, takes a turn to discuss Karp as a progressive beard for the company.
There are a couple of other interesting articles, [ed: I just saw this Grauniad profile. A quick metric, if the profile connects Karp to Habermas, the possiblity that it is a fluff piece increases exponentially) but are behind paywalls. Anyway, I went down this rabbit hole and wasn’t able to get a music thread up.
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No guarantee that I will find the time to read it (let alone compare the German and English versions).
That Karp piece you quoted from the New Republic sounds like a Roman senator preparing the next ‘imperial expansion by pure self-defense’ (although to my knowledge Rome never used drug smuggling as a pretense. They’d have gone British Opium War style anyway.).
Hartmut, no worries, It’s complicated by the fact that Karp is a non-native speaker of German, so it would be difficult to know what is from the translator and what is from Karp’s German. In the New Statesman podcast, they say that Habermas turned down Karp’s request to be the second reader on his dissertation because he didn’t think that Karp’s German was good enough, though softened that rejection by acknowledging that the ideas in the dissertation were probably difficult for native speakers of German to get across.
I will confess that I got about three paragraphs into the thesis and my eyes glazed over.
What I take away from the various snippets of statements by Karp is that he is kind of an odd guy. I’m not sure why it is – there seems to be some kind of self-selecting dynamic in play – but all of the techbro leadership seem to be… unique individuals.
To speak plainly, they seem like a bunch of weirdos. Listening to them speak publicly is like listening to bong-fueled late night dorm room conversations. They seem pretty detached from, for lack of a better word, normal real life, as lived by normal real people.
Maybe you have to have a kind of obsessive monomaniacal personality to rise to the positions they hold. But the absurd levels of wealth these guys – almost all guys – have accumulated gives them a truly outsize influence on public life.
So we end up being ruled by people with strange, anti-social, yet deeply held beliefs about the world.
I always thought the whole “sea steading” thing was a great idea. Go build your giant rafts out in the middle of the ocean, declare yourselves to be sovereign lords beholden to no-one, and leave the rest of us alone. Enjoy the fish!
If anyone has plowed through Karp’s oeuvre and can boil it down for a layman like myself, I’d be interested to know more about what makes him tick.
At the time I was watching “Succession,” I thought the icky uber-rich kooks being portrayed were caricatures. Now I think they were understated.
Since we are on the subject of philosophy here, and the philosophical justifications for one’s totalitarian tendencies, I ran across this piece at The Guardian, which highlights the cachet that Carl Schmitt has on the Christian Nationalist right:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/28/project-2025-heritage-foundation-hack
Note here the use of the phrase “Heritage Americans” as a way of othering anyone that does not fit the alt-right mold. It’s really interesting that Matheu is accusing “The Left” of being Schmittians. It’s particularly ironic because Schmitt was using the friend/enemy distinction to argue why liberalism was doomed to fail because it insisted on universal rights and the humanity of all subjects in the realm of the political – pretty much the opposite of what they accuse “The Left” of doing. Not a surprise, really, when most of these Heritage hangers-on seem unable to hold onto the distinction between liberals and leftists, and treat them as interchangeable.
Since I have mentioned Schmitt so many times before, I should probably quote him here to show the central reason for his popularity in the Christian Nationalist right:
So the Christian Nationalist project functions institutionally upon this one basic premise – that the only way to have a unified state is to refine it into a homogenous, elemental society that is not vulnerable to any sort of othering. Any attempt to try to base that essence in a universal humanity is, to their eyes, doomed to lose in the realm of politics.
This is what we are up against. Anyone not actively working for their Christian Nationalist agenda is not a Heritage American, and therefore can be excluded from political existence. Their attempts at gerrymandering are merely the least bloody and turbulent means to make their enemies cease to exist. Failing that, there are other means.
the only way to have a unified state is to refine it into a homogenous, elemental society that is not vulnerable to any sort of othering
There is one (and, I would argue, only one) way to achieve a “society” which is not vulnerable to othering: become a hermit on a desert island. Because as soon as you have multiple people involved (which is what a society involves), othering is not only possible but relatively simple.
Doesn’t mean it has to happen. But the risk is unavoidable. The most one can do is make othering socially unacceptable.
The term “Heritage Americans” is new to me, it’s interesting that it is seems like it is trying to plug into the terminology of heritage varieties (also called Heirloom varieties). You can see how, like anti-vax rhetoric, it pulls people who might have been previous placed on the left over to the right.
“Heritage Americans”.. blech.
linked from nous’ Guardian article, but worth calling out here:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/31/heritage-american-jd-vance-online-right-phrase-00481724
that this sounds like every other fascist movement that has ever popped up is purely coincidental.
“Heritage Americans”
Sonehow, when I read that the first time I took it to mean “people who buy the idiocy that the Heritage Foundation is peddling.” That it meant something like the DAR didn’t occur to me. And if it had, I’ve always thought the DAR was a bit daft (but mostly harmless). The reality is appalling.
I’m with cleek that “this sounds like every other fascist movement that has ever popped up ” Which, considering who is loudly embracing the idea, is unsurprising. Scum.
““heritage American” refers to the offspring of the Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish settlers — in other words, the white people — who populated the original colonies before heading west to settle the American frontier.”
That’s not going to be a very large slice of the US population. It’s not even a very large slice of the white population.
Notably, it excludes Trump, whose family history here starts around 1885.
“Heritage American” is a bit like “Originalism” in that the term is infinitely Humpty-Dumpty-able. Once you establish that the Founding Fathers were Christian Nationalists (the subject of so many books and church basement visits by “noted Bible-believing historians”) then the heritage in question becomes a spiritual heritage, and any American born Christian Nationalist regardless of ethnicity can be provisionally adopted into the family of Heritage Americans.
Of course that heritage is instantly revocable as well, even for actual Heritage Americans. I have ancestors on my father’s side of the family going back at least to 1700, and possibly to Jamestown. I’m pretty sure that my status as a Heritage American was revoked the moment that it became clear to everyone that I was an exvangelical, a feminist, and in favor of LGBTQ+ rights. When my mother passed, the only people who spoke to my wife and I at her funeral were blood relatives or the two Taiwanese converts who were treated as adopted family. The pastor of the church was literally the only other member of my parents’ church who spoke to us, and he only did so enough to try to suggest that I read CS Lewis (as if I hadn’t already done that during my evangelical days).
There is a thought that nous’ comment puts in my mind. One thing that I note is how German fascism was underpinned by particular notions of science, while the current American instantiation seems to me to completely ignore science. The Germans had notions that we’ve pretty much abandoned (though they still float around in the cultural psyche, such as eugenics and biological determinism), but I feel like there was a culture of putting science on a pedestal. The discussion of Heritage Americans, which nous notes is infinitely malleable, is, like other MAGA snipes that are chased down, fundamentally unserious. Another example is something like this
https://www.newsweek.com/anti-government-militia-targets-weather-radars-2097670
I suppose that the MAHA movement has some sort of scientific notions, in the idea that science is being perverted to tout vaccines and other medical interventions, and ‘real’ science just needs people doing internet research (like putting forward invermectin).
I realize that the US has a strong ‘know-nothing’ streak, but it’s remarkable how easy it has been for Trump supporters to simply reject science and I’m wondering what others think.
Just chased one of the Newsweek links from the anti-weather militia article to see what MTG had to say about her anti-weather-tampering bill.
She is an idiot – I am not suggesting otherwise – but at the same time, I don’t think that it’s a bad idea to pass laws forbidding unauthorized geoengineering because we are already seeing startups that are attempting to kick start this sort of environmental hacking in the name of combatting climate change:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startup-says-its-begun-releasing-particles-into-the-atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate/
MTG is not the only idiot around, and in this case I’ll support one idiot in order to stop other idiots.
The point about geoengineering startups had me think about Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future, a science fiction work about climate change. Crooked Timber did a seminar on it if you aren’t into reading the fiction, but are interested in some of the ideas. I believe Donald mentioned the book for its horrific description of a heat wave in India, which then has India engage in geoengineering, specifically seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfur dioxide. I guess Robinson has a national effort because it avoids the question of capitalism trying to harness geo-engineering, but it seems to me the latter is much more likely than the former.
For capitalism to harness geo-engineering, there would need to be some way, probably some fairly obvious way, to profit from it. Profit directly, not just from having a better world to live in generally. I’m not really seeing one — probably lack of imagination on my part.
The actual alternative to a national effort would be a billionaire with an obsession, and a willingness to spend vast ssums of his own in pursuit of it. The example we have before us is SpaceX. Musk is obsessed with going to Mars, and was willing to personally fund a company to develop the technology so he could do that. Sure, it turned out he could sell launch services to NASA etc. But that was really just a happy unintended consequence as the technology developed.
Well, geoengineering could also be used to actually accelerate global warming since some would directly profit from that (e.g. fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic and ice-free transport lanes for the same).
Btw, this idea can already be found in Jules Verne’s 3rd part part of the Gun Club Trilogy (there it is about righting the rotational axis of the earth in order to get the Arctic ice-free to get at assumed large coal deposits).
lj – I think that Kim Stanley Robinson had the Indian government doing the sulfur geoengineering (rather than a private entity) is because India started doing it after it was clear that the world had already overshot the climate boundaries. It was part of a hodgepodge approach to solutions that was necessitated by our collective inability to make collective change.
The reasons for private entities to do this are more complicated, and get at wj’s thoughts about the profit motive. The tech startups that are working the geoengineering angle are doing so partly for public minded reasons, but that is also mixed with the conviction that whatever we do collectively must not interfere with the economy or their own business interests. They are trying to delay the moment of accountability in order to stretch the bubble for their own fortunes.
It’s an informative comparison, and it highlights the difference in priorities between the global north and south.
India started doing it after it was clear that the world had already overshot the climate boundaries
Yes, it plugs into the idea that Robinson said started the book, which was the observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It is difficult to imagine a profit motive sufficient to move the current titans of industry, though one could imagine a savior complex moving them to do it.