Activity

Lots of troubling things here … “popular movements”, “social research”, ” collective expression” … EUPHEMISMS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

________________________________________________________

entire article at: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-military-trawl-350-billion-074320749.html?

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. military plans to analyze 350 billion social-media posts from around the world to help it track how popular movements evolve.

A tender for the project, based at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, calls for screening messages from at least 200 million users from more than 100 countries in more than 60 languages to better understand “collective expression.” Messages, including user names, will be examined for comments, metadata, location and hometown identifiers.

While it’s part of an existing Department of Defense Analysis effort to harness big data for social research, “the scale and global reach of this program is striking,” Antoine Bousquet, a senior lecturer in international relations at Birkbeck, University of London, said by email.A tender for the project, based at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, calls for screening messages from at least 200 million users from more than 100 countries in more than 60 languages to better understand “collective expression.” Messages, including user names, will be examined for comments, metadata, location and hometown identifiers.

While it’s part of an existing Department of Defense Analysis effort to harness big data for “collective expression.” , “the scale and global reach of this program is striking,” Antoine Bousquet, a senior lecturer in international relations at Birkbeck, University of London, said by email.

________________________________________________________

Simone Weil – The Illiad or The Poem of Force

The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force. The force that men wield, the force that subdues men, in the face of which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul seems ever conditioned by its ties with force, swept away, blinded by the force it believes it can control, bowed under the constraint of the force it submits to. Those who have supposed that force, thanks to progress, now belongs to the past, have seen a record of that in Homer’s poem; those wise enough to discern the force at the center of all human history, today as in the past, find in the Iliad the most beautiful and flawless of mirrors.

Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it.