Monthly Archives: October 2018

Did slavery make America?

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There was an article about what made America great – a think tank concluded it was the free market, but the reaction on the social media was that slavery and robbery were the more likely cause. The reaction on the social media shows how indoctrinated with Marxism everybody really is.

No, slavery didn’t do shit. The parts of America that kept slaves were backward and poor; the North industrialised exactly because there was no cheap slave labor to compete with the machines, so those were developed, to great effect. A combination of a very simple state structure, patent laws that encouraged invention (one hoped to become rich with patents), and, first and foremost, influx of some of the most competent people from abroad, like Tesla, is what made America. However, it still wasn’t much – the difference between America and Argentina for instance, before the world wars, was insignificant. It’s after the second world war, after Europe was completely ruined, and America essentially robbed it of the intellectual cream of the crop, controlled the world’s monetary system, and had the military upper hand, not to mention the occupying forces on the ground, that America surged up compared to Europe. The reasons are complex, but slavery played zero part in them. Also, the free land didn’t mean that much, or Australia for instance would be in the same ballpark, which it is not. Slavery exists even today in some countries, and how does it affect them? They are without exception among the poorest and least developed countries in the world. So much about the Marxist analysis, stating that if someone is rich, he must have robbed someone. Exactly the opposite seems to be true – where people are allowed to rob others, this interferes with the complexity of processes required for technological and economic development.

Intermediary-ranged nuclear missiles, and what they mean

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Donald Trump just announced that he will pull out of the INF treaty.

Let me explain in very simple and clear terms what this means. Intermediary-range rockets with nuclear payloads are those that America installs in Eastern Europe close to the Russian borders so that they could arrive to Moscow so quickly, the Russians don’t get enough time to analyse the situation and provide an adequate response. All the supposedly “anti-Iran” rocket “defenses” installed in Romania and Poland are going to be armed with those intermediary-range nuclear rockets.
The last time that was done, when Pershing II was installed in Western Germany, the Soviet Union threatened immediate nuclear retaliation if they are put into service, and the crisis got so bad, that after several close calls with Russian defences on a hairline trigger, Reagan decided to end the cold war and be friends with Russia.
The political situation right now is much, much worse than it was in 1983-1987. In order to counter this, the Russians would have to have all their nuclear forces either on a hairline trigger, or on a dead man’s hand trigger.
Those weapons are inherently asymmetrical, biased heavily against Russia, and are a first-strike only weapon. They have no defensive purpose whatsoever. What biases them against Russia is the fact that America can put them in Europe, and Russia can’t put them in Latin America, and geography determines the flight times. This means that America doesn’t have to put the missiles on a ballistic trajectory; they can use a stealthy small cruise missile that only has to fly from Poland or Lithuania or Romania to Moscow, not across the ocean. This means they can perform a surprise nuclear attack to kill the Russian leadership and their urban population, which of course will make the Russians extremely paranoid and trigger-happy, like it did in the 1980s, when it was last implemented. Only this time the Russians will no longer trust the West because the last time they did that, they suffered grave consequences.
My opinion is that this completely validates Putin’s objection to the supposedly anti-rocket installations on the Russian borders; if you recall, he warned that those installations can be modified with trivial ease to carry the intermediary-ranged nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Trump pulling out of INF means that Pentagon decided to do exactly this, and those installations will probably be armed the second Trump signs the document. Putin is in a precarious situation now. He now has a huge nuclear advantage. His military knows this. He’s in a “use or lose” situation, because if he allows those installations to go online, he puts Russia in an incredibly vulnerable position, to the point where his own military might not allow this. And this is not news to Putin. Years ago he warned the West that this will inevitably happen. His countermeasures must have been so timed as to coincide with American actions.

So, you tell me what this means.

Linux: what it intended, and what it did

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There’s been lots of talk about the recent development where the SJW cult apparently took over the Linux kernel development team, forcing Linus Torvalds to sign some LBGTASDFGHJKL manifesto, where meritocracy is decried as a great evil, equality of outcome is praised and white heterosexual men need to be removed in order for the world to be awesome.

To this, my answer is that communism, as usual, is eating its children, and this is nothing new. Linux was originally a communist project and a leftist cesspool, and since the SJW fraction already took over the modern communist movement elsewhere, it would not have been realistic to expect Linux to remain separate from this trend.

To this, I got a reply that Linux did some good things, and it’s not a failure: it powers the server-side, most of the mobile platform, and there are great companies making money with Linux and supporting its development. To this, I wrote an answer I’m quoting below:

Yes, there are companies that made a huge fortune using Linux – mostly those that just sell their services implemented on top of Linux, like Google with Android, but also some involved with Linux itself. If you look at it this way, Linux created both jobs and money. However, there’s an alternative perspective: Linux, by being good enough and free, destroyed the competition. SCO, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX went the way of the Dodo. All the people working on those were presumably fired, and because the competition is Linux, there were no alternative paying jobs waiting for them. Android destroyed the possibility of anyone developing a commercially sold OS for a mobile platform, other than Apple, whose position seems to be safe for now. If Android competed fairly and the cost of development was actually charged to the customer instead of being absorbed by Google and the open source community, with the goal of turning the devices into data-gathering and ad-delivery platform, competition could actually enter the marketplace and interesting things could happen, but this way, the only market pressure is on Apple, the only player who actually plays fairly, by charging money for things that cost money.
When Linux geekboys spout their hate fountains towards Microsoft and Bill Gates, and I’ve been watching that for actual decades, their complaint is that it costs money, and the users of Windows are stupid because Windows are easy to use. The argument against Apple today is the same recycled thing: the devices are expensive so the buyers are idiots and the company is greedy, and the devices are simple to use so the users must be idiots. This looks like all the bad shades of jealousy, hatred, spite and malice blended into a very nasty combination of mortal sins; essentially, they want to destroy companies that are financially successful by sacrificing their time and effort in order to provide a decent but completely free product in order to put the commercial products out of the market, because they hate that someone is rich, and something needs to be done about it.
Basically, Linux is a cancer that destroys the potentially profitable things by competing unfairly on the market, because it pays its developers in ego trip, hatred and envy instead of money, and its goal is essentially to make everything it touches inherently unprofitable. True, some managed to profit off of that, like Google who used the modified Linux to power its ad-delivery platform, as well as its server farms, but that was done by means of taking power away from the customer, because you’re not really the customer if you’re getting a heavily subsidised product, by turning the former customers into a product that is sold to the real customers: those that buy ads.
So, essentially, what Linux did was provide leverage that manages to pump wealth away from the software developers and into the pockets of ad sellers, making the customers less influential and less empowered in the process.
Also, what needs to be looked into is how much of the cloud computing boom is due to Linux, because it’s easy to have a supercluster if your OS is free; try paying Oracle per CPU for a Google or Facebook farm and you’ll get a head-spinning number that would probably make the entire thing financially unfeasible. This way, it’s another lever for centralising power over the Internet and over the end-users, essentially replacing the distributed nature of Internet itself with large corporations that, essentially, are the Internet for most people, and which, of course, are now starting to assert political and societal influence and controlling what people are allowed to think and say.
And in the meantime, the Linux crowd still hates Microsoft and dreams of a world where they’ll finally show it to Bill Gates who dared to charge money for Windows.