craner

Beast of Burden
how exactly did I violate it? I've read Hayek and Friedman in their own words. I read some (truly strange) Gary Becker. and so on.

how much text is a person required, by yr standards, to engage before they're not violating their own principle

the entire canon of neoliberalism ca. 1944-present, or what?

I'm happy to add another book to my reading list, but I object to being told I'm doing the same thing as stan

he by his own admission uses "neoliberalism" as a totemic catch-all, I use it to mean exactly what its proponents advocated

It's not about adding books to your reading list. It's just you said, engage with the text Stan (i.e. Road to Serfdom) and then immediately started going on about Pinochet and the University of Chicago. These things are slightly more complex anyway, than the way in which they are used, and that's fair enough, it's ideological warfare. But you went straight to engage in that, after saying that others should do rather more than that.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I mean, Luke is right. There are ways of reading.
who disagrees with that

I read these people to know what they think and if possible why they thought that. that's why I read anything.

if I just wanted to confirm my own assumptions I certainly wouldn't be reading books by people like Hayek and Friedman

it's an awful lot of effort to go to just to say "haha I was right after you guys are terrible"

I could just, yunno, say that without reading anything at all, if that was my only goal
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
then immediately started going on about Pinochet and the University of Chicago. These things are slightly more complex anyway, than the way in which they are used, and that's fair enough, it's ideological warfare. But you went straight to engage in that, after saying that others should do rather more than that.
those things are inextricable from Hayek, the Mont Pelerin Society, etc

this is not a belief I just picked up somewhere and jumped into ideological warfare

20 years ago as a teenager at the peak of anti-globalization movement, yes, you could probably have said that

but eventually I wanted to know why these things had happened, why these policies had come about, so I went out and read about them

I think you just have ideological differences with me - fine, no surprise there - and this is your way of expressing that
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
that is to say, "you've read Hayek, but you haven't read enough Hayek" is your own form of (gentle) ideological warfare
 

craner

Beast of Burden
who disagrees with that

I read these people to know what they think and if possible why they thought that. that's why I read anything.

if I just wanted to confirm my own assumptions I certainly wouldn't be reading books by people like Hayek and Friedman

it's an awful lot of effort to go to just to say "haha I was right after you guys are terrible"

I could just, yunno, say that without reading anything at all, if that was my only goal

I agree with that.

This, though, is politics, not thought, and suggests you didn't really engage with the texts you read in total good faith:

like it's no secret that Hayek, Friedman etc held democracy, and personal freedom in general - besides the freedom to participate in the market, which is what Friedman meant by Free to Choose - in utter contempt, even if they were usually savvy enough not publicize that contempt.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
This, though, is politics, not thought, and suggests you didn't really engage with the texts you read in total good faith:
it is not

I have to get ready for work, but either tonight or some time this weekend I will quote you those people in their own words disparaging democracy

presumably that will meet yr engage with the text standards
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I try to just slap disclaimers on my statements, but admittedly I tend to lose track of its importance, get complacent about it.

I view that as being the sort of trade-off I'd be willing to make: a green-light to make all the unboundedly extensive statements I can, at the cost of each one not being able to endure the audit, in the terms of the experts of its topics.

Just a trade off between extensive and intensive, which isn't to exempt one from engaging deeply with this or that text, in its own terms or not. More in the interest of mapping out, in broad strokes, the most complex systems imaginable. Pushing the limit extensively, rather than intensively. The latter being the conventional approach taken by scholarship, no?
 

version

Well-known member
In the 1970s, the historical significance of the ARPANET was not yet apparent. It would take more than twenty years for the Internet to spread into most American homes, and four decades would pass before Edward Snowden’s leaks made the world aware of the massive amount of government surveillance happening over the Internet. Today, people still think that surveillance is something foreign to the Internet—something imposed on it from the outside by paranoid government agencies. But history tells a different story. It shows how military and intelligence agencies used the network technology to spy on Americans in the first version of the Internet. Surveillance was baked in from the very beginning.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I watched this last week, and there was some interesting stuff.


Basically about how during WWII when the US and the british were orchestrating these precision bombings of Germany, they had to navigate and outfox the vast array of radio devices that Germany set up to get early warnings about incoming aircraft.

Believe the guy said that this marked the point when the US government started pumping money into universities for defense-oriented research and development.

Frederick Terman, "the father of Silicon Valley", I believe worked at Stanford at the time, which was nonexistent in terms of radio and microwave tech research, as opposed to the established Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard.



Anyway, Terman worked at Harvard for a while, before being able to get massive funding for Stanford to do the same research regarding radar jamming, radar jammer jamming, whatever. The especially unorthodox element was that relevant Stanford professors were encouraged to encourage students to put studies aside and instead work on startup tech companies.

So yeah, the point is that silicon valley was effectively born as a defense tech research hub.
 

version

Well-known member
It's a genius invention. A surveillance network that entertains as it surveils. A network you want to participate in.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah and I think the former enables the latter there. Being able to perpetually differentiate markets into more and more specific submarkets, group identities, communities.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Shoshana Zuboff once mentioned this since-whistleblown situation where social media ads were deliberately using algorithms that effectively targeted insecure teenagers. I guess you can boil that down to data in some way. If you can track traffic through sites heavy with suicide memes, perhaps.

edit: believe it was this one

 
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