The woman gets punched in the face by a police officer. If you watch closely, you see that someone else tosses water on the cops, but they are claiming that this woman used silly string to assault them or somesuch. We don’t see that in the video, but even if that were true, this was a disgusting and despicable act by that thug in a uniform.
It contains the usual cold war propaganda and that Silicon Valley owes its existence to the government. However, I like what it admits; that the CIA funded most of the early technologies and kept them to themselves before releasing them to everyone else; that the CIA funded the research at many top universities; that eventually faculty and students at these universities were encouraged to form private companies that would be funded by the CIA; that many of those early people are now the successful and famous venture capitalists.
That much of Silicon Valley works for the CIA et al is admitted. One can only surmise that because these people were agents for the state, they continue to be agents for the state.
EDIT:
“So what?”, you may ask. Well, many professors at Stanford are “consultants” for the governent; so, it raises the question whether technologies, such as Google’s search technologies, which were developed by Stanford PhD students and financed by venture capitalists that had done work for the government, are being used the the government for nefarious purposes.
@The Muff: I love that lecture. And, BTW, re-read what you wrote and then you will understand the hubris of USG and politicians who mostly believe, like Al Gore, that they are responsible for most, if not all, new innovation in technology and every other realm of human endeavor. After all, they have their fingers in every pie!
Of course, we understand they deserve credit for new inventions as much as these guys deserve credit for a building’s construction:
P.S. also, I want to note the insistence on connecting web mail accounts to mobile devices. You must have an online identity, and this online identiy must be connected to your smartphone, which has a built-in GPS device that is always on and logging, even if you are not using GPS services. When you are pulled over in a traffic stop, the police officer can insist that you render your mobile phone to have its data extracted using a “MORIS” device (4th and 5th amendments be damned). All this courtesy of Google, Apple, the cell phone giants and the old telcos (which were always plugged into the Establishment/intelligence agencies).
Cool to see Woods has added a logic course to his Liberty Classroom lineup.
One small correction: “Criminals want to eliminate the state and so do libertarians, so libertarians must be criminals” and “Dogs are animals and so are humans, so dogs must be humans” are both examples of equivocation,* not the fallacy of the excluded middle.
I point this out not to nitpick, but to make the larger point that most of what is called “logic” (in argumentation) is simply about noticing, calling out, and avoiding the pitfalls of language. If we recognize that the issue typically stems from being careless with how things are phrased, the task of clear thinking and argumentation becomes much easier.
*The equivocation is between the implied “A has property X” and “A is identified by its having property X.” In this case, the arguer starts out saying “Libertarians want to eliminate the state” and immediately equivocates to “Libertarians are those who want to eliminate the state.” (Notice the argument actually works if we accept the premises that libertarians are precisely that subset of the population that wants to eliminate the state, and so are criminals; in the fact the unavoidable conclusion from those premises is that all libertarians are criminals and all criminals are libertarians. Under some definitions of “libertarian” the first is true, but the second is surely not because many criminals are clearly pro-state. This makes the equivocation relatively easy to slip into.) Language obscures the difference between these very dissimilar statements, especially if words are used loosely.
What I found when I delved deeper in to these technologies that apparently originated from the public sector, DARPA, CIA etc. The method these organisations use, is to seek out and find new technologies under the guise of potential defense applications. They then offer the inventors the choice of selling out and joining the organisation in future developments or have their technology stolen from them and suffer unfortunate consequences.
Most of the the technologies that came out of these organisations were actually from private sector organisations and individuals that eventually became contractors of those organisations.
