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.

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.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan)

I’ve seen this quote thrown around frequently, in the recent “fake news” argument, and honestly, I always found it disturbing.

You see, the whole point of a discussion is that both sides have different perception of what the facts are. If you’re having a discussion between an egalitarian and a meritocrat, of course the egalitarian will think that it’s a fact that all men are equal, and the meritocrat will think it’s a fact that there are scientifically proven differences between races and genders, and in a liberal society those differences will significantly influence the outcomes of those statistical groups.

The same thing will happen when you have a discussion about the existence of God between an atheist and a religious person. A religious person will cite his personal relationship with God as evidence of God’s existence, while an atheist will consider this a non-fact and will cite absence of material evidence of God. They do indeed have a difference of opinion, but this is just a surface. Underneath, they also have a profound disagreement about the nature of reality itself, and they will selectively accept and deny certain pieces of evidence that attempts to establish what the facts are.

The difference between the “main stream” and “alternative” media is not about interpretation of facts. It’s a fundamental disagreement about what facts are established, what evidence is credible, and about the moral nature of the forces in the world – who is good, who is evil, and who is irrelevant.

That’s why the “fact checking” services are nonsense. Depending on their political and religious bias, they will cite as fact the things that agree with their worldview, and mark as false the things that put their worldview into question. The only truly unbiased fact-checker is God, because He knows what is actually true and real, and what reality is objective. Everybody else is an interested party, and not an unbiased, nonpartisan fact-checker. So, if there are discussions about what the facts are in science, where the scientists often vehemently argue about this, how can a politician state that facts are something that exists in some realm beyond dispute?

I still have problems with the second world war, because the facts were so obscured by propaganda, it interferes with my ability to pass moral judgment – if I don’t know what the actual facts were, and I don’t know in what situation someone made a certain decision, how can I judge him? That’s a serious problem. You can’t just say, a person X ordered the Y number of people to be killed, so he’s evil. Maybe the choice was such, that he had the option to kill those people, or the complete destruction of all civilization, at least in his mind. What would you do, if your options were to, for instance, either use a time machine to kill an innocent man, or wait for that man to grow into a serial killer who will kill 60 innocent people and do nothing good at all in his life? If your options are to either kill ten million people, or have the entire civilization descend into savagery, what would you do? The concepts like “violence is violence” and “love is love” are the pastime of idiots. You can’t judge someone for killing ten, hundred or ten thousands people until you know the reasons and circumstances. Maybe he’s a serial killer. Maybe he’s a war hero. Maybe he accidentally turned off the coolant circulation pump in a nuclear reactor. Maybe he’s a psychopath who seduced millions of people into evil and made them kill the other half of the country. Maybe he motivated the nation to kill an evil invading horde that would destroy everyone if left unchecked. Until you know the facts, your moral opinions are essentially worthless.

So, my problem here is that the “main stream” media basically tries to eliminate anyone who would dispute the kind of propaganda they are distributing, and which they peddle as “facts”. If I have so many questions about what the facts are, I seriously doubt some politician or a journalist is in a better intellectual position.

Someone remind me, why was the Watergate scandal such a big deal? Oh, a running president wiretapped the opposition during the campaign? And why are those who did the same thing to Trump not in serious trouble, fired or jailed?

President Donald Trump has claimed files about his former campaign adviser Carter Page confirm that the Department of Justice and FBI had misled the courts. Separately, he suggested his campaign was “spied upon illegally.”
Donald Trump on Sunday lashed out at the FBI and the Department of Justice, which released over 400 pages of its initial and renewed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests pertaining to Carter Page, Trump’s ex-foreign policy adviser.
Praising Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation that studied the files, the president tweeted: “As usual they are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of “Justice” and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!”
In a subsequent message, Trump suggested his 2016 presidential campaign has been under unlawful surveillance orchestrated by his Democratic contender. “Looking more and more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon (surveillance) for the political gain of Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC,” the angry tweet said.
(Link: https://www.rt.com/usa/433944-carter-page-fisa-fbi-trump/)

Someone will say, oh, but Trump was suspected of having contacts with the Russians. No he wasn’t – in fact, the entire story started when Hillary’s campaign figured out it would be a good idea to spread this as rumors and even paid for the creation of the “Steele dossier“. So basically the same group of people invented the Russia connection and then had it “investigated”. It’s actually much, much worse than Watergate. It’s outright treason, an attack on the constitution and the way government and judiciary are supposed to work. Essentially, it’s an attempt to prevent the people of America in electing their own president, and then trying to prevent this president from doing his job, by fabricating reason after reason why he isn’t really the president so they are allowed to oppose him.

America’s state of government at the moment is something one can normally see during the early stages of a civil war, where one part of the country claims the government is illegitimate and breaks off. I’ve seen this in Croatia between 1990 and mid-1991. Yugoslavia formally existed and Belgrade was formally in charge, but that existed only on paper. In reality, Belgrade couldn’t implement anything.

Another thing that’s popular in America today is to suggest that everybody who doesn’t want WW3 with Russia is working for Putin. Beside this being obviously nonsensical (if Putin tries to have people not want a nuclear war, what’s actually wrong with Putin?), what’s the actual claim? That everybody who has an opinion that differs from that of the CIA and its hired scum works for Putin? The actual problem is that the CIA controls most of the politicians and the media in the “western world”, and, unfortunately, everywhere else, except for China and, in part, Russia. The Russians have some media presence in form of RT and Sputnik, and those became popular exactly because they are the only semblance of free press that we actually have – everything else is CIA controlled and spouts utter nonsense that fails to bear even the slightest bit of intellectual scrutiny.
The problem is, I’ve seen this kind of paranoia before, in SFR Yugoslavia, where they had labels for people who asked uncomfortable questions, and being labelled “counter-revolutionary”, “reactionary”, “opposing brotherhood and unity of our nations and nationalities” or something similar could make you disappear. This process of labelling took place for instance when the Croats and Slovenians asked where all the money went – they asked unpleasant questions and those who stole the money responded by calling the accusers “enemies of brotherhood and unity”, which is an idiotic accusation, both non sequitur, ad hominem and ad baculum at once – has nothing to do with the issue at hand, but slanders the opponent and implicitly threatens him. So that’s what I see in America today – a crazy society similar to Yugoslavia in its death throes.