Ahistory

Chill Uncategorized

I don’t understand how and why so many leftists think so poorly and non-systemically and ahistorically. I mean, they try, but they are utter shit at it. Just worse than toddlers. I need to ponder this more because I have difficulty with understanding how this can be the case.

I like this person, but false dichotomy here, among other issues. Not only is base assumption utterly incorrect, but DARPA was a result of space funding, and from DARPA and other related space-race-caused funding we got:

*ARPANET (direct predecessor of the internet)

*Video conferencing, the mouse, the GUI, hypertext (look up Douglas Engelbart if you don’t believe, and yes, we was receiving directly and indirectly government funding at the time)

*Siri and other personal digital assistants

*Unix (and therefore Linux), and many, many other computing innovations

*GPS

I could go on, but is that not enough?

Not that all of these were funded directly for/by space research, but funding for anything societally useful tends to move in a cluster. See here for more info.

As Fishman points out, while the U.S. government was funding moon rockets, it was also thinking big in social policy: the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, Medicare and Medicaid. When it withdrew from space, it pulled back from such initiatives, too. Public investments of all sorts tend to sink or swim together.

I agree with her that it’d be better that it were not done under the oversight of the military-industrial complex. But in the US, that’s about all there is. Who else will do these things?

As I said, I like her, but when an argument is incoherent and obviously fatally flawed in some base assumptions or concerning very-recent history, no reason to agree with it. I just don’t value comity or being liked that much.