The UN is simply a forum for countries to meet and discuss international affairs. It is not a global governing body, and wields no power not authorized by its constituent member nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_grants_in_the_United_S...

From "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology":

> Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment. Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway,they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.

http://abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf

And "Dead Zones of the Imagination":

> Consider the hegemonic role, in US social theory, of Max Weber in the 1950s and 1960s, and of Michel Foucault since the 1970s. Their popularity, no doubt, had much to do with the ease with which each could be adopted as a kind of anti-Marx, their theories put forth (usually in crudely simplified form) to argue that power is not simply or primarily a matter of the control of production but rather a pervasive, multifaceted, and unavoidable feature of any social life ... Foucault was more subversive, but in a way that made bureaucratic power more effective, not less. In his work on asylums, clinics, prisons, and the rest, bodies, subjects—even truth itself—all become the products of administrative discourses. Through concepts like governmentality and biopower, state bureaucracies end up shaping the parameters of human existence in ways far more intimate than anything Weber might have imagined.

> Foucault’s ascendancy, in turn, was precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that both became the haven for former radicals, and were almost completely divorced from any access to political power—or, increasingly, from any influence on social movements as well. This gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus—the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of social power—a particular appeal.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2....

I just have one part I found incredibly funny

> The idea that the British were somehow exploitative by resisting renegotiation is ignorant of this fact

If overthrowing a democratically elected government is not exploitative, I don't know what is. "Resisting renegotiation" is a very Orwellian way of phrasing such. I'm guessing something along the lines of "we will topple your government and hand over absolute power to a brutal dictator if the terms are violated" was also part of the the agreement?

What about all the other Iranians, the ones that had nothing to do with APOC or oil or the government. Did they also "deserve" their fate?

The agreement was re-negotiated in 1933, according to terms that the grandparent pointed out. At this point I have to wonder if you are being disingenuous on purpose. The rest of your comment is a moral appeal making a case for why D'Arcy "deserved" the profits. You have to pick a lane, are you arguing on the basis of who "deserves" a countries natural resources, or from the point of view of adherence to contracts and agreements?

I'm not accusing you of being inhumane. I'm wondering if you would apply similar moral standards when the shoe is on the other foot, or if you are a hypocrite.

I have noticed all such principled defenses of "property rights" and "capitalism" are built upon a very specific and convenient view of what exactly counts as "legitimate property". Was the oil even the Shah's to give away in the first place?

Very strange how oil underneath the Iranian soil can be considered a "British resource".

First I never said I'm not. Either way it is pretty irrelevant to the discussion.

If, in fact, I am not using a government run one right now, maybe it is precisely because the government hasn't yet stolen Google's? If the government already had something as good as Google, clearly there would be no point in them stealing Google's, would there?

> designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger

While google says:

> The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexi...

Seems like the government already has the expertise and equipment required to handle data at Google scale :)