Author Archives: danijel

Why I don’t write

Posted on by
6

Why I don’t comment on the current political situation?

The Muslims are killing people around Europe. They are attempting rapes here, in Zagreb, Croatia, almost on a daily basis, because someone apparently imported the motherfuckers from Afghanistan.

If I wrote what I actually think should happen, I’d end up in jail, because everything constructive that ought to be done is against some law or another. So, I’ll write nothing, but you can read between the lines.

In America, the communists are taking over the streets, and the right-wing countermeasures are timid and weak. That’s logical and is to be expected, because the right-wing people have jobs and families, and better things to do. The communists, however, are either students or on welfare, so that’s why they don’t see the relationship between constructive effort and money, which is also why communism makes sense to them, because they think money grows on some tree and someone just happened to get more instead of them, which isn’t fair. So, basically, the politicians get to think that the communists are more worth appeasing because there’s more of them on the streets, however the right-wing people with jobs pay most of the taxes, so this appearance is deceptive.

Also, there’s been much talk about alt-right, extreme right, Nazis and what not. First of all, the Nazis are not even on the right spectrum. The right spectrum are the laissez-faire people who have their own business to run, and they expect the state to handle defense, laws, courts and police, and fuck off regarding everything else. They don’t need policing because they believe in God, so they are self-disciplined. They believe God is the source of all law and morality, and will punish transgressors in afterlife. They believe their duty is to take care of their community and to rely on personal relationships in times of hardship. Basically, they don’t give a single fuck about the state. The left spectrum are the people who see the state as a God-substitute, which should do everything that “ought to” be done. They imagine some ideal world where everybody is equal, nobody is sick or hungry or poor, and they see it as the duty of the state to make sure that laws are passed and enforced that make this a reality. This in turn increases the power of the state, which is funded by either taxation, foreign debt or selling natural resources. As the state needs to enforce things, there is more policing, which turns it into a police state. The left-wingers can be either internationalists, or nationalists. The nationalist socialists are the ones who took power in the pre-WW2 Germany, and were later called “Nazis” in shorthand, but their true name is NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which translates to “national-socialist German workers’ party”. Yes, they were the extreme left-wing. The theory about Nazis being right-wing is invented by the international socialists, who didn’t like the idea of Nazis being recognized as merely one of the murderous off-shoots of Marxism. Also, that’s why the name is abbreviated to “Nazi”, which doesn’t mean anything significant and is merely a label. However, considering their common love of violence and totalitarianism, one would be hard pressed to see any difference between them. So, basically, both the communists and the Nazis are in fact the extreme left of the political spectrum. The extreme right of the political spectrum are the Amish, the religious people who see the state as a false God, who don’t want anything to do with it, don’t respect the authority of state’s laws, and are completely self-reliant. In this spectrum, I’m closer to the extreme right than to the center. I see the state as a good defense against other states, but other than that, I don’t give much fuck about it whatsoever. Essentially, I give Caesar what is Caesar’s, and then I tell him to fuck off because I have better things to do with my life. It is my opinion that if you have to rely on the state in any way, you’re fucked. Also, I don’t believe in human rights. I believe in human duties, and in privileges that come from performing one’s duties.

America is in the beginning stages of a civil war, and the evil side has everything on its side but time, because it is running out of money. This means I expect them to cook up some very bad shit in order to use their power while it’s still here, in order to prevent any course that would render them powerless. Both the internal strife and the foreign conflicts with Russia and China seem to be cooked up by the same people. It’s not going to hell as fast as I expected it to, but none of the events that took place surprised me.

Europe is fucked. The “liberation” of women and huge taxation reduced natality to sub-replacement levels, because basically people either can’t afford to have children or don’t have time for it because women “have to” work. The Muslim immigrants don’t have such problems – they are all on welfare and their women have nothing to do but give birth and raise children. In order to finance those children, the domicile population is taxed more heavily, so they can afford to have children even less. After a few decades of this, the domicile population started to die out and the politicians agreed to simply import a replacement population for Europe from various shitholes. This makes sense to them because they convinced themselves and the entire population that all people are the same and are mutually interchangeable. If one thinks they are not, he’s called a Nazi and ostracized. The obvious end-result will be a huge slaughterhouse in Europe, which I don’t intend to either witness or survive, because fuck that shit.

Is all of this avoidable? I guess that depends on what you mean. If you mean, is it possible to have a business-as-usual continuation of existence in the West, with our normal way of life, the answer is, no, the probability of that is exceedingly low. We had a good run, but our civilization is about to end and be replaced by abject savagery. The causes of our civilization’s downfall are intrinsic; it will fall because it its own inherent flaws. It will fall because of egalitarianism, idealism, human rights and democracy, and it will fall because it neglected rationality, objectivity, meritocracy, tradition, and, above else, because it abandoned God. I see the optimism of the YouTube right-wing commentators, but I don’t share it. If this civilization is to survive, it first needs to change so radically, it will not be the same regardless. Furthermore, I see the need for it to fail, because it was built on false foundations, and the very idea that it could last is an illusion.

 

Arguments in favour of the state

Posted on by
12

The socialists with their push for more taxation and state power went so far, it recently became popular to advocate for complete anarchy and removal of the state. Let me explain why I think it’s a bad idea.

First, you can’t have a professional standing army with expensive weaponry without the state. This means that you would be defenseless against any state actor that adheres to the Roman type of state that collects taxes in order to finance a professional army. I call it “Roman” because it was Rome who did it first, and it’s the reason why it was so successful militarily. You see, everybody else could obey the call to arms and fight an enemy, but after a while they had to return to their harvests and other work or they would have starved. Rome, however, could simply wait for that to happen and then run them over, because its legions had no such constraints on them. They were paid from tax money. They didn’t have fields to plough. They could do war all year, every day. So, basically, the idea that you can have a weak state where independent humans will answer the call to arms in times of war was put to rest about the time of Caesar’s Gallic wars, if not earlier. The idea that you can have a free citizen with a gun as a basis for a militia that will defend the country was put to rest in WW1, with the advent of industrialized warfare and expensive, specialized, sophisticated weaponry. You can have an AR-15 at home as a multi-purpose weapon that would serve you well in times of war, but what about tanks, ships, planes and rockets? You can’t really own those as a citizen “just in case”, and they don’t have a legitimate civilian purpose. However, you must take it as a fact that in any modern war, your enemy will be armed with those, because he will have a modern state that collects taxes and funds military industry and a professional standing army.

So, war is the main reason why you need a state. The problem arises once the state is formed, and various assholes start thinking of places where tax money could be “better spent”, and then you end up with socialism. The irony is, the socialist disasters such as Britain eventually end up with so many social programs and such an expensive state, they run out of money for the military. Croatia is an even worse example – the state apparatus is so expensive, there’s no money left for either the social programs or the military, and this state is so inherently hostile to private entrepreneurship, the entire private sector is in ruins. The example of Greece demonstrates that not even the tourism can save such a state from collapse indefinitely, but it can limp along for quite a long time, as a parasite that grew so large, the host can no longer imagine existing without it.

In the end, I’m ambivalent regarding the state, because I fully understand and accept all the arguments that show its inherent corruption and evil, however I also cannot see some problems being solved without it, and I don’t think the alternative to the centralized state is some idealized libertarian paradise. The most obvious alternative to the centralized state is some form of oligarchy with multiple centers of power, and I don’t really see how multinational corporations would be better than the states. For an average person, the difference would hardly be perceivable. Instead of a professional army you would have private contractors, and the degree of influence of the individual upon the system would be as minimal as it is in “democracy”, where the corporate media tells you what to think and then you cast a vote for one of the pre-selected candidates. The way the system went crazy when Trump was elected contrary to its will, as probably the first actually democratically elected president in modern American history, shows what a sham this system normally is.

How to improve things? Well, you can’t do it with weak individuals. Weak individuals will always need to aggregate in greater social groups, and if you follow this far enough you eventually get a modern state. In order for that to stop making sense, an individual would need to have such a degree of power that would make social aggregation a matter of preference and not existential need.

Posturing oneself into bankruptcy

Posted on by
2

I apologize for not writing any articles in quite a while; work, among other things, had to be prioritized.

I’ve been listening to Dave Ramsey’s YouTube channel; from what I gathered, he’s a personal finance adviser who helps people get out of debt. His recurring advice is to reduce spending, pay off all debt, pay all necessary things with cash and not credit, don’t finance depreciating assets like cars, basically all the standard common-sense stuff. However, what piqued my interest is that people seem to get into debt for similar reasons regardless of their income level – it’s not that they go into debt because they can’t make ends meet, they can’t make ends meet because they spend above their income level. To an outside observer this looks irrational, but I think I get it.

There seems to be strong peer pressure involved, real or imaginary, to send outward signals of being in a higher income bracket than you in fact are, because of both positive and negative expected social attention. The positive attention is “neighbors” assuming you’re doing well and feeling envy, which boosts your ego. The negative attention is inviting scrutiny and competition if you send signals at or below your actual income level. Essentially, it’s like a cat puffing up to appear bigger than it actually is, when facing a potentially threatening situation. If you appear bigger, others will think twice before confronting you. If you appear normal or smaller than you actually are, potentially dangerous challengers might feel encouraged to encroach upon your territory. In such a challenge, you might actually lose, but any challenge is fraught with inherent dangers and if you can avoid it altogether by posturing, the better.

The problem is, posturing might be causing you other problems and might prove to be even more expensive in the long run, so on one hand it’s more dangerous than it appears and is definitely not free, and on the other hand its benefits might be overstated. Sure, you may argue that having an expensive suit, watch and car can give you an advantage in the business world and might land you a deal you would have otherwise missed on, but it is my experience that those kinds of posturing almost never work, and if they appear to, it’s usually an illusion because you landed the deal because of your other merits, and due to low self-confidence you ascribed the result to your paraphernalia. Sure, people will check out your clothes, your watch, your car, your house and other things, both consciously and unconsciously, because that’s what people do, but your competence, knowledge and actual confidence will play a much bigger role than your trinkets. Sure, there are social circles where nothing but posturing matters, but it’s my experience that those are not where the actual money is being made. For each YouTube channel where the author makes videos about his Lamborghini, there’s another channel with more subs where the author simply talks in an interesting way.

So, I conclude that expensive trinkets primarily serve the purpose of alleviating one’s anxiety, insecurity and discomfort in an uncontrolled environment. The more threatened and weak you feel, the greater the need for investing in a protective outward pose. Sure, when you’re trying to make the best possible first impression, it’s useful to check all the expected boxes, basically if people expect you to be wealthy you are expected to drive an expensive car, and if you don’t, they’ll start questioning what’s wrong, and that’s never good. However, your idea of an expensive car might actually be much more expensive than what would suffice for checking the right boxes.  A several years old nice car will do just fine. A brand new car of the same class will not improve the impression. A brand new car from a lower class, that costs more than the older high-end car, will actually be likely to start the gossip. An expensive, but not super-expensive watch might start more questions than a Casio. If you wear a Casio, the assumption is that you don’t care about watches and nobody will give a second thought about it. However, a Frederique Constant will raise the question why you didn’t buy a Jaeger-LeCoultre or a Patek. Too much posturing raises red flags – what is this guy trying to hide? What kind of incompetence, weakness or bullshit is he hiding or trying to sell? I am always suspicious of perfect façade, and trust me, I’m not alone in that. If someone looks wealthier than Bill Gates, I am almost certain he’s some kind of a con artist. If I’m trying to hire a subcontractor for some job, it’s not the guy with the most expensive gadgets who’ll get the contract, but the guy who demonstrates the most straightforward competence in the subject matter. You do, however, need to check the right boxes, or people will instinctively assume there’s something not quite right. You need to dress appropriately for your job, you need to behave appropriately for your expected social role, you need to demonstrate that you generate expected levels of income and own property. The problem starts when people are insecure and assume they need more posturing than would actually do, and in doing so, they kill themselves financially.

Sure, it’s easy for the financial advisers to tell you not to buy a car you can’t really afford, but if you’re socially threatened, if you feel insecure, those fears are strong enough to make you sick or even kill you if you don’t deal with them in some manner, and for most people the most straightforward way requires the least amount of thinking – you just buy expensive shit and live a lifestyle above your income until you’re ruined, and then your self-confidence really collapses and it’s difficult to find your way out of that tunnel. The proper way out of the trap is to gradually build your confidence by realizing people hire and appreciate you for your skills, abilities and character, and not for the things you own. Then you can buy things because you like them, not because they are a shield you desperately cling to, fearing immediate attack on the first sign of weakness.

Don’t get me wrong: you do need to send social signals, and you occasionally do need a shield. Just be careful not to overestimate the amount of shielding you need, lest you spend your way into an early grave. For instance, the price difference between a brand new Mercedes E350 CDI and a two years old Mercedes E220 CDI is a factor of 2. There’s no difference in the strength of a social signal sent by either car in a business environment. There’s no difference in the strength of a social signal sent with a 5000 USD Rolex Explorer and a 20000 USD Jaeger-LeCoultre. They all check the same boxes. The main difference is, if you’re not sure of yourself and you overspend in order to increase your perceived shielding, you will end up bankrupt. Also, your insecurities will cost you dearly in other places, so you’d do well to sort yourself out first.

 

The Yin and the Yang

Posted on by
2

I’ve been thinking about communism and capitalism and I found a nice image to explain one of the crucial differences and inherent mechanisms.

The yin-yang image from Taoism explains things by ratios of yin and yang, and the thing is, those never exist in a pure state: in the yin half-circle, there’s a dot of yang, and in the yang half-circle, there is a dot of yin. Essentially, this means that in perfect stillness there’s an aspect of activity, and in pure activity there’s an aspect of stillness.

In capitalism, in its pure and perfect form, where the vast majority of  the population is wealthy, there is a minority that languishes in poverty. In communism, in its pure and perfect form, where the vast majority of the population languishes in poverty, there is a minority, the officials and dignitaries of the Communist Party, who are wealthy and powerful.

There must be a poor minority in capitalism, because they serve as a warning to others, of what could happen to them if they fail. They are a much greater motivation for success than the few super-wealthy, who can be seen as completely beyond reach. However, everybody sees the homeless people on the streets and they are an omnipresent warning: get your shit together or that’s where you will end up. So, in capitalism, there is widespread wealth and localized misery; it’s really unimportant that some are super-wealthy and can afford their own jet planes, if the majority is wealthy enough to be able to afford a good house and a nice car. Eventually, as the entire country becomes super-wealthy, someone compassionate says “let’s eradicate poverty altogether”. Let’s raise the taxes for the wealthy, and elevate that tiny minority above the threshold of poverty. And people agree, because it’s hard for them to see how it could harm, since everybody is so well off. However, as they raise the taxes in order to funnel the money into welfare, the state bureaucracy grows, the difficulty of doing business grows, the taxes grow exponentially because you no longer have only welfare as an expense, but the price of bureaucracy, and in a generation the result of attempting to remove that tiny dot of yin in the sea of yang you actually expanded the dot. You made poverty widespread and wealth localized. Unfortunately, as that happens people vote for more socialist measures because they feel impoverished, and point at the rich thinking that they are who stole their money, either by not paying enough taxes or by outright exploitation. However, the thing is, nobody needs to steal your money in order for you to be poor. Money can simply vanish, by destroying the environment in which it can be created. Wealth is not a given, it’s an emergent property. If you have very few laws, for instance to assure that the contracts are honored, that the patents are obeyed and that the offenders are punished, but nothing more than what is essential, you will have a thriving society and wealth will be created. If you create a situation where people need to fill paperwork whenever they wipe their ass, and they are taxed so much they never get to have any money to spare, you don’t shift wealth elsewhere, you destroy it. What was once a machine of capitalism that produced prosperity and wealth, now becomes a quagmire of socialism that produces only bureaucracy, discontent and more socialist measures to combat the rare situations where anyone managed to have any money. So, by trying to eliminate that localized speck of poverty from a capitalist society, we destroy the capitalist society and turn it into a cesspool of poverty and socialist incompetence and ideological warfare.

In communism, there’s something called “corruption”, which basically means that the communist party leadership always manages to be well off, even in the countries where most of the population is starving. However, if you try to change anything, you will destroy the communist system. If you try to fight “corruption”, you end up decapitating the communist system, as it happened in Romania, and the entire country transforms into something else, it’s no longer communist. If you try to elevate the majority of the population into the middle class, as it happened in Yugoslavia, people start thinking in capitalist terms. They see socialism as restrictive, because if they can’t earn money for building a house at home, but they can do so in Germany, there’s something seriously wrong with the system at home. They are no longer the impoverished masses who are willing to embrace communism because it promises equal misery to all where at least they will have some food, they are the middle class who wants nicer cars and bigger homes. As a result of draining the swamp of poverty, communism turns into capitalism.

The conclusion is that it’s quite easy to destroy any system by destroying its foundations. In capitalism, you need to have minimalistic rules, no glass ceilings for the winners and no safety net for the losers. Then, as a result, you get widespread wealth and localized misery. Never attempt to remove this dot of misery in the pool of wealth because you will destroy the pool of wealth, and the misery will drown us all.

Why everybody wants to go to America… not

Posted on by
5

I am annoyed when Americans routinely state, as argument in favor of the thesis that America is the best, or at least the least bad of all countries, that everybody wants to go there.

According to this argument, shit is the best thing in the world because all the flies want to get there.

It’s not important how many people want to get somewhere, it’s the motive behind their migration. If they figured out there’s free welfare which they can obtain without having to work, it’s hardly evidence of your country’s greatness. If jihadists want to get to your country, in order to make an Islamic caliphate and kill you, it doesn’t mean they think your state is great, it means they think it’s weakly enough defended to make it a tempting target.

The fact that parasites and enemies want to invade you doesn’t mean you’re great. It means you’re seen as roadkill, as something to be devoured by lesser beings in absence of a proper defense that would be presented by a living organism.

The idea that everybody always wanted to go to America is American narcissistic delusion. I live in Croatia, a country with probably the second greatest diaspora in the world, after Israel. I think that more Croats live outside Croatia, in Canada, USA, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Germany and other countries, than inside Croatia. That’s because of all sorts of wars, persecution and poverty, during the rule of several different regimes in the 20th century. To them, it wasn’t clear where they wanted to go. America was merely one of the possible destinations. There was absolutely nothing special about it. Before the second world war, Argentina was as preferable, and after the second world war, Germany was more preferable – simply because it was easy to get work and be paid well. So no, America was historically not the singular beacon of freedom and a destination of choice. It was just another country, one that was far away that you can hope it’s significantly different from what you had at home. For most people, what was important is that there’s work that’s paid well enough, and that there’s no outright persecution, such as they usually faced at home. To Croats, America was a free country, Argentina was a free country, Canada was a free country, Germany was a free country, Australia was a free country, New Zealand was a free country. Wherever you could work and not be killed was a free country, which tells you something about the conditions at home, where the Serbs were mistreating the Croats so badly, they had really low requirements for emigration. As long as you didn’t get killed, beaten up and robbed, and you can find a job that paid well enough to make a living, it was a free country. Nobody cared about the American constitution, it’s completely irrelevant. Nobody cared about Australian constitution, either. As long as the Serbs can’t beat you up, imprison you on false charges and kill you, it’s a great constitution.

Let’s see who’s actually trying to go to America now:

  • Latino immigrants looking for free money or low-paying jobs.
  • Jihadists who want to convert it to Islam.
  • …

The times after the second world war, when the greatest minds from Europe flocked to America because it wasn’t destroyed by war and they could continue to do their work in normal conditions, those times are over. Also, the times from the 19th century, when people like Nikola Tesla went to America to escape the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy which hindered all progress, they too are over, because as things are, American bureaucracy now is a copy of that innovation-stifling mess people used to run away from. Also, if people want freedom, America with its fascism, restrictions on travel, spying and surveillance, completely controlled media spewing propaganda is the last country on Earth they would go to. In fact, people seeking freedom and fighting for truth are right now hiding from America in Ecuadorian embassy (Assange) and in Russia (Snowden). America is the country that persecutes freedom fighters and restricts freedoms. America is a country where Nazi armed guards implement controls at the airports, so that they could have complete control of the population, and spiritual heirs of the Sturmabteilung thugs wearing black masks and neo-fascist symbols intimidate free speech advocates at the universities, using violence with the tacit support of the police.

In the 1980s, I actually used to dream about going to America to work at Microsoft or somewhere else in the IT industry, because that was my thing, and America was where it happened. But now, nothing happens in America except fascism and spying and madness. America is a country that exports ideas such as “the Earth is flat”, “we didn’t go to the Moon”, the spiritually empty ideology of human rights, feminism, gender bullshit and hatred of Russia. America is a fascist shithole. Nobody competent and in his right mind wants to go there anymore. I certainly don’t; one would have to drag me there screaming and in chains. Once it’s liberated from fascism and if it’s a free country, maybe. But as things stand, if you want freedom and opportunity, you run away from America, not to America.