> Thank you UN for not being able to do your job!
The UN is simply a forum for countries to meet and discuss international affairs. It is not a global governing body, and wields no power not authorized by its constituent member nations.
1,940 karma · joined June 23, 2014
The UN is simply a forum for countries to meet and discuss international affairs. It is not a global governing body, and wields no power not authorized by its constituent member nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_grants_in_the_United_S...
From "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology":
> Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment. Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway,they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.
http://abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf
And "Dead Zones of the Imagination":
> Consider the hegemonic role, in US social theory, of Max Weber in the 1950s and 1960s, and of Michel Foucault since the 1970s. Their popularity, no doubt, had much to do with the ease with which each could be adopted as a kind of anti-Marx, their theories put forth (usually in crudely simplified form) to argue that power is not simply or primarily a matter of the control of production but rather a pervasive, multifaceted, and unavoidable feature of any social life ... Foucault was more subversive, but in a way that made bureaucratic power more effective, not less. In his work on asylums, clinics, prisons, and the rest, bodies, subjects—even truth itself—all become the products of administrative discourses. Through concepts like governmentality and biopower, state bureaucracies end up shaping the parameters of human existence in ways far more intimate than anything Weber might have imagined.
> Foucault’s ascendancy, in turn, was precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that both became the haven for former radicals, and were almost completely divorced from any access to political power—or, increasingly, from any influence on social movements as well. This gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus—the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of social power—a particular appeal.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2....
I just have one part I found incredibly funny
> The idea that the British were somehow exploitative by resisting renegotiation is ignorant of this fact
If overthrowing a democratically elected government is not exploitative, I don't know what is. "Resisting renegotiation" is a very Orwellian way of phrasing such. I'm guessing something along the lines of "we will topple your government and hand over absolute power to a brutal dictator if the terms are violated" was also part of the the agreement?
What about all the other Iranians, the ones that had nothing to do with APOC or oil or the government. Did they also "deserve" their fate?
The agreement was re-negotiated in 1933, according to terms that the grandparent pointed out. At this point I have to wonder if you are being disingenuous on purpose. The rest of your comment is a moral appeal making a case for why D'Arcy "deserved" the profits. You have to pick a lane, are you arguing on the basis of who "deserves" a countries natural resources, or from the point of view of adherence to contracts and agreements?
I'm not accusing you of being inhumane. I'm wondering if you would apply similar moral standards when the shoe is on the other foot, or if you are a hypocrite.
I have noticed all such principled defenses of "property rights" and "capitalism" are built upon a very specific and convenient view of what exactly counts as "legitimate property". Was the oil even the Shah's to give away in the first place?
Very strange how oil underneath the Iranian soil can be considered a "British resource".
First I never said I'm not. Either way it is pretty irrelevant to the discussion.
If, in fact, I am not using a government run one right now, maybe it is precisely because the government hasn't yet stolen Google's? If the government already had something as good as Google, clearly there would be no point in them stealing Google's, would there?
> designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger
While google says:
> The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexi...
Seems like the government already has the expertise and equipment required to handle data at Google scale :)
Regardless of that, the datacenter can be appropriated by the government too.
The same approach that works for Google can also work for a public body supported by public funds. It can also use much of the same systems and maybe even personnel that Google currently employs for this purpose. I'm essentially asking for the search division of Google to be appropriated by the government.
> Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically.
I'm not asking for a search neutral index - public Google just needs to be (largely) open, transparent and accountable about its ranking algorithm. That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware.
> I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something.
Not for research purposes - other entities will be free to copy it for purposes like sovereignty (governments), less/more censorship or to build their own systems on top of it for profit, or any other purpose.
This is just something I thought up right now, and sure, there might be problems with the approach. But to pretend like there is absolutely nothing that can be done betrays a willful lack of imagination.
1. It isn't clear that the (real) cost of essentials like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education is actually going down significantly.
2. Even if what you say is 100% correct, this "extraction of wealth due to inflation" seems to be a somewhat stable scenario, and certainly hasn't lead to the apocalyptic visions of collapse that inflation hawks perennially create a ruckus about. So even if you think we are living through a hyper-inflationary doomsday scenario, certainly this is a very different doomsday than what one is usually led to imagine (Zimbabwe, Wiemar Republic, Venezuela etc.). Maybe inflationary Armageddon isn't so bad after all!
> Many economists want precisely this state intervention, but it presents clear risks. Governments which already carry heavy debts could decide that worrying about deficits is for wimps and that central-bank independence does not matter. That could at last unleash high inflation and provide a painful reminder of the benefits of the old regime.
Sounds more like a plea than a warning, coming from The Economist. Prophecies of inflation seem like a joke in a time of record low inflation with high government deficits. Just look at the case of Japan for one.