The shrouded sinister history of the bulldozer
73 comments
·March 10, 2025kens
rkosk
The P-80 might not have seen any action but the Gloster Meteor was introduced into service in July 1944 and saw a fair bit of combat through to the end of the war in Europe. Not a massive impact and wasn't really that important in the grand scheme of things, but it's still an allied jet powered plane that made some contribution to the war effort.
NoahKAndrews
It says "aircraft engine" for me
jsheard
You're both right, it says aircraft engine in the article body but jet engine in the pull quote. They caught the error but forgot to update the latter.
null
out-of-ideas
great catch - deff seems inaccurate of a statement (more like lack of jet engine used against)
tangentially, had to dig up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37945006 as it triggered the ol brain
foxyv
They had an impact, just in the wrong way.
karaterobot
Bulldozers can be used to grade surfaces prior to buildings being constructed... Buildings in which crimes are committed, from financial fraud to outright murder.
thijson
Something interesting I read about building a foundation for a structure is that the soil below the foundation should be undisturbed. So can't grade below the surface for the future foundation.
Doxin
A church which owns land, much land. Land on which houses have been built. Houses in which it is statistically probable that private acts of lesboid love have been committed![0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVRODdXVI3Q content warning: extensive presentation of lesbianism as some sort of crime. I do believe the sketch is however poking fun at people who do seem to think that way and not promoting it as a valid viewpoint itself.
QuercusMax
Stephen Fry has been out as a gay man for a very long time. It's very hard to believe he could be promoting homophobia.
Doxin
If you think this skit is promoting homophobia you need to work on your media literacy. If anything it's lampooning homophobia. The entire situation is portrayed as being absurdly focused on the witness' (alleged) sexual orientation.
Just because you portray something doesn't mean you endorse it. Alan Howard portrays the ring in the Lord of the Rings, That does not make him (or the movie) evil incarnate. Similarly Stephen Fry portrays a barrister with a weird obsession with lesbianism, that does not make him (or the skit) homophobic.
aprilthird2021
Bulldozers themselves have been used to murder. There were examples given in the article? Not sure the point of this comment?
Qem
> Bulldozers themselves have been used to murder. There were examples given in the article?
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelpa...
theogravity
killdozer? although "No one else was injured or killed,[1] in part due to timely evacuation orders"
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
I believe the comment's point is sarcasm
PhasmaFelis
I believe it was what we call a joke.
CobaltFire
Relevant to the part about the brown tree snake on Guam, the inspectors for Hawai’i just had their building lease canceled by GSA/DOGE and barely kept their jobs:
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2025-03-10/brow...
I was stationed on Guam for a bit, on the aviation side. We had to do quite a few inspections for those snakes, and worked with the people in the article I linked. In three years we found 7 on birds I inspected (a few hundred I imagine), all just before deployment overseas. Those snakes got into the oddest places.
tedunangst
What kind of safeguards are we imagining the bulldozer should have? Should we attach an AI camera to the engine to prevent bulldozing the wrong things?
dullcrisp
It sounds like the article is advocating something more along the lines of, buy a copy of a newspaper and if the front page has a picture of your customer committing war crimes with your product maybe ask them about it.
karaterobot
We have to keep bulldozers out of the hands of criminals. Honestly, the only protection against a bad guy with a bulldozer is a good guy with a bulldozer.
mandmandam
The author pointed out that commercial machinery can be fitted with a kill-switch, which would have been easy to activate had Caterpillar decided that genocide was against company values.
> What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as “VIN-locking,” which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products ... When it suits their purposes, then, the technology exists for heavy machinery companies to monitor, control and even disable products. Human rights abuses against Palestinians and Indians apparently don’t rise to the level of violating company values, let alone cause enough concern for the company to brick their machines
You can imagine more complicated safeguards if you like, but there's a simple solution sitting and waiting right there. All that's requires is for Caterpillar to decide they have any principles other than money...
> In 2017, an investigation by The Guardian and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that after the conclusion of the Corrie case, Caterpillar hired the corporate espionage company C2i* to spy on the family and report back on any subsequent actions they might be planning.
... Not fucking likely though.
* Think this was actually the Increment Group, Intelligence Company. C2i were in the same investigation for spying on environmental 'activists'.
fc417fc802
It's surprising to me that the conclusion reached here is "they should use the kill switch more" instead of a horrified "kill switches and remote monitoring in purchased products shouldn't be a legal practice".
mandmandam
That was not the conclusion, in either the article or my comment.
Hypothetically - if you learned that your product was being used to run over people "dead and alive, in the hundreds", so that "everything squirts out", would you shrug and fob off responsibility? Even when you already had the technology to shut down those machines installed, and major human rights orgs are warning of genocide?
... Or would you just argue that your machines shouldn't have had that capability in the first place? ... Do you see how far that's missing the point?
Tbh even that would be better than Caterpillar's likely response, which was probably to try and book even more sales based on the 'success' of their machinery and the pending reconstruction.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
More regulation, of course. It's worked so well for guns, after all. Because making more laws prevents people who disregard laws from breaking other laws.
Really, we should just cut to the chase and outlaw murder.
awesome_dude
It has worked for guns - the countries where guns are a problem either have very lax regulation, or very lax enforcement (because of a breakdown of government)
coffeecantcode
Well, there are also countries like Switzerland where there is a substantially higher amount of gun ownership compared to that of the rest of Europe but very few of the same issues of other countries with similar ownership per capita. Though, that’s probably due to the required service training and the screenings that come along with it. And it being a relatively small country.
fc417fc802
I think there are several serious issues with such a claim. However I'll limit myself to pointing out that at absolute minimum you'd need to define "problem" and "working".
For example, I'd observe that organized crime pretty much everywhere in the world possesses weapons. The extent to which they resort to them varies of course, but it seems unreasonable to blindly dismiss that as being due entirely to regulation.
CoastalCoder
I have mixed feelings about outlawing concealed bulldozers.
Qem
null
immibis
Protesting Israel and getting murdered at the protest is one of those "sticking your hand into a lawnmower" situations. Do not anthropomorphize lawnmowers, Larry Ellision, or the state of Israel.
Qem
Lawnmowers don't throw parties to celebrate the hands they shredded: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-so...
genewitch
As someone who lives now in Louisiana and with someone born here, we did not know that the term was used to describe mostly white Democrats attacking black Republican male voters.
I wonder if there's any historical markers to that effect.
Also interesting is that "bullpup" to describe a type of firearm comes from this usage of bulldozer.
aerostable_slug
> Also interesting is that "bullpup" to describe a type of firearm comes from this usage of bulldozer.
It does? Can you point me to more information on this topic? I thought the etymology of "bullpup" was far from settled.
genewitch
it's in TFA - "bulldog pistols" and "bulldozer" rifles or whatever. bulldog -> smaller -> bullpup.
if there's some other etymology i'd be curious how convoluted it is, since this makes practical sense. Sorry i have no more information than that.
drjasonharrison
Bulldogs: dogs with short snouts? Bulls: temperamental male herbivores?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Bull_Dog_revolver
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bullpup
"Etymology
From bull + pup. The firearms sense originated from firearm designers in the United States during the 1930s. The unconventional configuration of bullpup rifles was compared by analogy to bulldog puppies, which were considered "squat, ugly, but still aggressive and powerful"."
Lammy
It usually really bothers me (not joking) when people use “sinister” when they actually mean “nefarious” or “odious” or whatever, because it perpetuates old superstition about left-handed people being evil even if does so unknowingly.
> “bulldozer” […] popped up in […] an Illinois court case to describe a manufacturing machine that had ripped off a worker’s left arm.
…but this time I guess I have to give it a pass :) Hug a lefty today!
CoastalCoder
That's hysterical! (geddit?)
But more seriously, there's a number of words like that, IIUC. E.g. cretin, barbarian, slave, hysterical, lesbian. Probably other terms as well, I'm guessing.
I'm not sure it's worth getting too worked up about the original usages of those terms, if most people using them aren't making the connection.
robocat
Too many words have gauche secondary meanings: we can't sidestep every nuance or there'd be no words left. I love me some wry leftfield connotations. Although I think maladroit and dextrous can rightly be left out.
Gigachad
I've never heard this, and I doubt many others have. Feels like this level of word policing is digging up long forgotten previous uses which don't have any relevance today.
dale_glass
Eh. This all seems very backwards to me.
It seems to be a human tendency to want to oversimplify problems. It seems very wrong-headed to me to concentrate on one particular machine than for instance on that one influential guy had no appreciation for the jungle, plus whatever politics surrounded that, plus the desires/needs/etc of the surrounding communities, investors, etc.
Because yeah, the right machine sure helps get wrong things done faster, but it's not like we've ever lacked means to be inventive when we really want to, or just sheer pigheadedness to do it even if it was hard. If it's not a bulldozer it might be flamethrowers, defoliants, repurposed tanks, chainsaws, etc.
If enough people (or a few rich enough people) want a jungle gone, then they'll probably get that done sooner or later with whatever means they can. It's this bigger and more complex issue we should be looking into solving.
hot_gril
I just took it as poetic, not that bulldozers are actually a problem. Innocent-looking machine can be used for grotesque things, which is creepier in a way than regular weapons. That's about it. Idk if that's what the author intended.
hot_gril
ISIS also used bulldozers, notably to destroy ancient cities like Nimrud.
thaumasiotes
> The bulldozer we know today took shape in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1917, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company advertised a bulldozer in their catalog: a huge metal blade pulled by mules that could cut into the earth and flatten the land.
Isn't that just a "plow"?
We had horse-drawn plows well before the 20th century.
sfilmeyer
I thought plows were more about tilling than flattening, but I'm no expert.
mikequinlan
A plow cuts furrows into the soil; a bulldozer just flattens it.
moron4hire
It's kind of like a sideways plow
ourmandave
Every time the Machines Become Self-Aware and Murderous a dozer is going to show up eventually.
It just takes a while since they top out around 8 mph.
Case in point: Shake Hands with Danger
CoastalCoder
Nice!
Obligatory RiffTrax version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_nqa6e6WV2o&si=d9eX8-vrPEZmd2de
6stringmerc
Marvin Heemyer may be relevant in some way to readers as well:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
The documentary “Tread” is something I recommend if available.
The article has a pull quote: “Bulldozers were as important to the Allied victory as the jet engine, the radar or the atomic bomb.”
That's a strange statement since the jet engine had approximately zero impact on the Allied victory; the P-80 Shooting Star was produced too late to be useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jet_aircraft_of_World_...