Live data from Hacker News

Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

washingtonpost.com

121–130 of 551 posts

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#121

500MM to avoid Harvard scrutiny - not a bad deal on 40MMM quarterly profit. It probably doubles as a tax deduction as well. Free market capitalism at its finest.

Free market means businesses decide the regulations placed on the public, for private gain

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#122
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> We've tried it multiple times and it's had disastrous consequences every time. But let's do it again! We also tried not doing it and it had even worse consequences so I don't see what you are trying to say.

The US has one of the highest median household incomes in the world. Please, tell me about the terrible consequences.

Now, tell me more about the fantastic results of

- North Korea

- Soviet Union

- Chinese Communist Party

- Venezuela

- Argentina

- Cuba

- India (under socialism)

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#123

I just read that this morning. I'm interested enough in the outcome that I put a calendar reminder 6 months out to check what happened. Doing so made me wonder if there's a service that would email me updates about legal cases like this that I would like to follow.

It's possible that a Google Alert[1] might be enough for your use case, depending on how well the legal cases are covered by Google. [1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en

Any non Google alternatives out there?

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#124
This shouldn't be surprising at all. Harvard and other American universities have taken "donations" from foreign countries for years to hire the "correct" professors to push agendas (and raise the next generation of leaders), just look at the amount money flowing from Qatar for example.

Why taking bribes from tech giants is any different?

Veritas indeed.

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#125
post #80

Colleges and universities are like little countries, rarely answer to anyone and focused on their own insular practices.

That's true of a lot of things. You really can't allow a system to police itself. Once you allow that, you've essentially given them carte blanche to run a fiefdom.

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#126
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't sit on our hands or whatever but wealth isn't a creation of laws, it's a bit of the inverse. Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.

Without laws, you have anarchy. Laws create the institutions necessary to have an economy capable of creating wealth.

> Without laws, you have anarchy. Laws create the institutions necessary to have an economy capable of creating wealth.

Without laws you don't have anarchy, you just have rule of strongest. Anarchy can have laws but no authority that enforces them.

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#127
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics (as in the game of power) and corruption are human nature. Pushing back against these are equally human nature. The worse it gets the more intense the push back. The push back seems to be at moment taking the shape of voting in far right or trump like politicians accross the world. They won't solve the issue. Therefore the next level of intensity may very well be revolution.

Clarify what do you mean by "revolution", because to me that words means either a coup, civil war, acts of terrorism, or, worse than that, a massacre like China's "cultural revolution".

Any of those I imagine, perhaps all. When things reach boiling point pressure has to be released somehow. And as it stands things are under quite some pressure as of recently.

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#128
post #85

The surprise to me is that anyone would ever expect companies like X or Facebook to pay more than lip service to the idea of being an open public platform. These are private companies who want to 1) Attract a lot of eyeballs 2) Sell ad space in front of those eyeballs That's all. To bastardize a Lincoln quote[1]: My paramount object in this struggle is to make a profit and is not either to save or to destroy free spe…

The problem is that all hosting is done by companies trying to make a profit. When you say host it yourself, likely you mean - Build your own website. A few issues with this line of thinking

- Web hosting companies are attacked for hosting controversial speech all the time (AWS stopped hosting Parler when they were put on blast) - The infrastructure required for hosting large controversial websites can also be made unavailable to controversial sites (e.g CloudFlare dropping KiwiFarms citing its 'hateful user base') - Not to mention some platforms/people are literally de-banked, which apparently is a thing, and forced to use crypto for all expenses and revenue

Americans value freedom of speech, these are American companies. At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance with American values. I don't know the numbers but I would imagine it's a very small amount of America that isn't pro free speech.

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since they embraced price gouging on tuition in the 90's. (Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-student spending hasn't even increased at a pace equivalent to inflation; rather, funding didn't increase with enrolment, leading to students paying for an ever-higher share of their education. (As for…

I used to work in Institutional Research at a state university and at least for state school's tuition tracks pretty closely to the cost of education. In my time working there, our funding from the state was reduced by 30%. Generally Non-resident tuition is the cost it takes to educate a student. Resident tuition is cheaper because it's subsidized by the state. Every year we would get less and less funding from the s…

There is no reason why my adjunct professor spending 45 minutes a week, twice a week for a few months, in some old building, should cost me and 70 other people $3000 each. The tuition problem is one of bloat and greed.

That's nearly a quarter million dollars, of which the professor is probably getting a few thousand. where is the other $200k+ going?

Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

#130
post #80

Colleges and universities are like little countries, rarely answer to anyone and focused on their own insular practices.

A lot of people are looking for an all controlling force in the country or world instead, I see a lot of demigods that rule their domain, curating complete autonomy as long as they stay within the confines they finessed

You don't need a formal conspiracy when you have an elite with converging interests.
Post reply on HN