Anti-Subjugator

It was wonderful and tragic at the same time to see the Burmese protests. Unless military personnel start changing sides, the protesters cannot actually defeat the military. It is tragic that all that is required is one B52 bomber to dramatically change the military equation in favour of the Burmese people. But can we deploy that bomber? One day a Burmese person is going to ask me "why didn't you deploy a bomber?".

And quite frankly, it is tough. China and Russia are adamant that this is the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, and no-one has the right to interfere. Should we listen to these arsehole countries? Of course not. But they do have scary weapons and we need to manoeuvre around them. Could we just tell them to go get stuffed and liberate Burma? Maybe. Or maybe that will have some ramification we haven't thought of. E.g. the dictators of the world may run to China/Russia's embrace because they (correctly) don't have faith in the US supporting their dictatorship for eternity.

I'm neither totally for liberating Burma at this point in time, nor totally against it. What I do know is that I don't want anything to jeapordize the liberation of Iran. Iran allows us to topple an enemy as well. And also allows us to understand the true religious inclinations of the Iranian people. These are the important things in the War on Terror. Burma may as well be an extension of the Pacific Ocean. While I'd love to see the Burmese people free, I don't think it is their turn to be invaded yet. This is war. Until we know the ramifications of going to war, we won't know whether the move was good or not. If we can get away with it, then we should definitely do it. But I have no way of knowing that in advance. We should at the very least make it clear that failure to invade rests primarily with Russia and China for preventing UN action. I wish the lefties would agree to assign this blame where it belongs, but of course they won't. Bush will get the blame instead, no matter what he chooses to do.

And the protesters are too few in number as well. Which means they will be rounded up and tortured. Terrible. These are the greatest people in Burma, they are the ones I want to protect most of all, but I'm not sure that that is wise for the long-term benefit of human freedom. We're not yet in a military position to be able to stomp on dictators whenever they raise their ugly head. We need to very carefully get into such a position so that we will never have to ignore human slavery again. But we're not there yet. That's the challenge facing all decent humans. How do we get there?

If we could make a deal with the left-wing that we liberate Burma as an example of a country that is being liberated purely for human rights reasons, and that on doing so they would in turn allow us to liberate countries for both human rights AND SECURITY reasons, then it is worth the risk of antagonizing China etc (including the potential for escalation into a nuclear war) in order to get those security guarantees. But with the left-wing continuing their insanity regardless, we really do need to pick our wars very very carefully. And that is still Iran, Iran, Iran. Would I do the same if it were Australians under siege in Burma? Absolutely. The military equation remains the same. We are being frustrated by China and Russia, and need to find a way around these two arseholes. Why Russia isn't liberating Burma themselves is something I didn't expect to happen after 1991. I had always assumed that having experienced tyranny first-hand, they would be first in line to liberate others. I never expected a country of arseholes, democratically electing an arsehole who represented arsehole opinion. Never in a million years. But then I never expected half of Australia to be such arseholes that they wouldn't protect women from rape because they were the wrong race/religion/nationality either.

Ok, what would I do if the Burmese government was raping women? Still nothing. I would applaud if someone, anyone, were to put an end to this Burmese behaviour though. Although it would be a temporary elation if we suddenly wound up in a nuclear war with China afterwards. With Iran we don't have this problem. We can point to them and say "if they hadn't caused us a security problem, we wouldn't have been forced to act", which will hopefully be enough to keep China's guns quiet. Even as China's list of possible allies gets shorter and shorter while ours grows longer and longer with every invasion. :-)

I wonder if Australia could liberate Burma unilaterally without China going apeshit? If that was possible, it should definitely be done. People are less nervous about a lesser power like Australia doing something like that than having the world's sole superpower approaching their border. I really don't know. If it were possible to calculate all the possible paths forward, it would be easy to choose the least-worst option. In Iraq it was pretty difficult to imagine how toppling a sadistic enemy would lead to a worse result. And with the benefit of hindsight, we know that it led to an excellent result - a democratically-elected ally. In Burma that is not so clear. Of course the replacement government would not be worse than it is currently. It's how the rest of the world would react to the US invading someone when they can't point to anything remotely security-related. If our dictator allies were to move over to China's side, that would be far more tragic, as it may put an end to liberations of even enemy countries. Whereas inaction in Burma would have no security ramifications for the free world as far as I can see. It's not like the Burmese dictatorship is about to give nukes to terrorists etc. Maybe if they gave China basing rights it would be seen as a lost opportunity, but otherwise, it's a problem to be dealt with later.

That's how I see the world's weapons on 2007-09-28. That's how I always look at the world. I look at what the weapons systems are doing, because that is where true security comes from. And a lot of those weapons are still pointed at the free world. And so the centuries-old Anglophone geostrategy continues.

I have no idea how the people I meet manage to even cross the road. "That's not a semi-trailer metres away - so it's safe to cross!". Today's argument with one of my left-wing colleagues went like this:

LLL: I saw a documentary on Afghanistan last night, and women are afraid to show their face or they'll be killed!

PE: And? That was happening before the invasion.

LLL: No, now!

PE: Sorry. I meant it was ALSO happening before the invasion. No-one expected all problems to miraculously disappear the day of the invasion. The point was to get the Afghans on a PATH where they can address these problems. The women have now been empowered and if they don't like what Karzai is doing, they can vote for someone different. They even had a female candidate to choose from, and about half the electorate is women.

LLL: So are you saying democracy always works for everyone?

PE: No, I'm not even claiming that. Just that in Afghanistan and Iraq they have democratically chosen someone better than the dictators they had before.

LLL: In Iraq under Saddam there were hospitals, now everything has been destroyed.

PE: Under Saddam he was chopping out people's tongues! What were they doing in the hospitals? Sewing people's tongues back on?

LLL: That happens under every dictator, and is happening in America too. You know if anyone says anything against the US government, they get killed!

PE: What? There's 150 million Americans against the US government. How many are being killed?

LLL: It's being covered up! You know there was this one guy who got sacked from ASIO because of something-or-other. What sort of freedom is that?!

PE: Hang on, let's start with the mass murder. Where is your evidence for the murder of Americans by the American government?

LLL2 (backing up LLL): Of course there's no evidence - there wouldn't be - it's being covered up!

LLL: Yeah, and Bush is rigging the elections!

PE: If Bush is rigging the elections, how did the Democrats manage to win the Congress and Senate at the last elections?

LLL: They didn't!!!

PE: You're disputing that the Democrats control the Congress and Senate?!

LLL: You know, the Americans woke up!


The conversation came to a close at that point after she decided to go on yet another tangent about some friend that she had who said something-or-other. Otherwise I might have at least pressed her to clarify that Bush was rigging the elections in favour of the Democrats, or that the elections weren't rigged after all. I might then have gone further and asked her approximately how many Americans are being murdered by the American government every year, and what opinion was being suppressed by that action, and how does that opinion compare with what you see on the LLL blogs.

An Iraqi once complained to me that I was trying to apply logic to a country with no logic (ie Iraq). I guess you don't need to go to Iraq to see that in action.

I really am at a loss of what to do. Why can't these people apply their same screwball logic when it comes to something that I can get some benefit from? E.g. Why can't I offer to give them $5 for 5 * $50 notes, based on the fact that because of inflation, higher numbers don't mean anything anymore.

Although they're pretty close to that already. I was complaining that the exams were ridiculously weighted in favour of grammar and vocab. Someone who actually understands maths told me "no, you're meant to scale it so that grammar and vocab is only 20% of the total". Ok, great, and I went ahead and did that. Then I explained to the other teachers that they were doing it wrong. And then explained it again. And again. And the person who told me about the weighting explained it. And then explained it again. And again. Then I wrote a document on how to calculate it. But they didn't understand that either. Then I created a spreadsheet. Some tentatively follow that, but others insist that the old way was so much easier. The fact that grammar and vocab was scoring 60% while listening was scoring 4% was lost on them.

I wonder if I can offer to do the score calculations in exchange for them marking the exams? But if I keep on this path I'll end up back as a computer programmer again!

What a world. Really, what a world. Although I think it'd be pretty boring if everyone was as logical as me. On the other hand, are the gross human rights abuses that are a product of this illogic a price worth paying for an entertaining world?

The unthinkable has finally happened. A black has actually stood up and looked another black in the eye and told him that he's a racist for discriminating against whites. God knows how many decades I've waited for someone to have the decency to do that. But here we have. Let's have a look what the man has to say.

He doesn't just call out Mugabe for being a racist, he calls out Mbeki (South Africa) for possible complicity in the crimes. Like wow, man. And to top it all off, this isn't just any black. This is some religious guy. I'm not familiar with the religious system in the UK, but he sounds like some bigwig. While the American religious figures will speak up against dictators, you don't see that in Australia. Here the religious figures don't dare buck the nasty and noisy left-wing. They're morally bankrupt.

And not only does this guy, John Sentamu, do the right thing, he even tells Britain to end its "colonial guilt" and to actually start interfering in Africa like it ought to. Maybe one day we'll see this guy even explain how Africa was far better off under British colonial rule, and that something similar should return until such time as Africans have demonstrated their ability to run something other than a kleptocracy. If I were living under a kleptocracy, that's what I would want, and based on the Golden Rule, I expect people like Sentamu to speak up and take action to get me a decent government.

It's interesting that Zimbabwe comes up. A guy in the train initiated a conversation with me a few days ago, and I mentioned that one of the reasons why I was wanting to be a teacher was to find out why foreigners were anti-American. This guy was wearing a suit and tie, and I thought that I would finally get a chance to speak to a Liberal supporter instead of the left-wing arseholes I currently work with. No such luck. This guy said that America was raping the world economically, and deserved everything it got. He didn't tell me exactly how America was doing anything other than making deals on the free market, but nevermind. His excuse for opposing the Iraq war was that Mugabe was ten times worse. I don't know why the existence of an allegedly worse dictator should mean that a lesser dictator shouldn't be toppled, but we didn't have time to get into that. He told me that I was living in a fantasy world, and I told him that he was. Then I needed to get out at my stop. I know the exact feeling the ANA must feel when taking on the Taliban. Complete scum sitting right next to me. Time for strategy and tactics to take him out. :-)

With just 3 hours to spare, I noticed that today was Sept 11. I really hate these anniversaries, as I don't like to listen to Americans moan on and on about it. I can't stand these tributes. Just like NASA - Need Another Seven Astronauts. What would be worth watching is if on Sept 11 every year the Americans announced which dictators were going to get rolled in the following year. Or perhaps they could organize for all NATO aircraft to take to the skies on Sept 11, and then launch an invasion of some dictator, and you don't actually know who it's going to be until the bombs start dropping.

Anyway, we've reached the point of equidistance. After Sept 11, 2001 I was determined to make sure that the scum that did that were permanently removed from the face of the earth. It was just a matter of identifying who they were. Who were these people that wanted to harm America instead of protect it? It took 2 wars and 3 years before I finally identified the enemies in message 666 on Sept 11, 2004. Not Muslims so much as religious bigots, of which a majority of Muslims were just a subset. And now it has been 3 years since message 666. It has certainly been a radical change for me. Going from computer programmer to English teacher in that time.

I have basically concluded my programming contribution to humanity. A couple of weeks ago I released new versions of PDPCLIB, PDOS and GCCMVS. The only thing that remains there is some tidy-up, releasing associated versions of Bison etc for MVS. Then I'm going to get a laptop and start using Windows Vista instead of Windows 98.

At work they are still using cassettes. And they don't even have enough CD players. So I went and bought an MP3 boombox for $100 (US$80) and have converted the CDs to MP3s. It's really neat. Now I'm trying to get hold of a cassette deck with "line out" so that I can convert the stuff that is on cassette. It seems that machines with "line out" are very rare these days. Even my portable stereo from 25 years ago had one! My boombox has 512 MB of memory and can take an SD card as well (of which I have a 128 MB spare card). The internal battery lasts 5 hours supposedly. I'm definitely happy with it.

The students come up with some of the most amazing stuff. E.g. after I explained the different security forces protecting my human rights as an Australian, one asked me who was protecting the Iraqi people's human rights from the Americans. And a South Korean told me that the reason South Korea sent forces to Vietnam was because if they didn't, America would put trade sanctions on them and destroy them. The first guy I pointed out that Saddam was chopping out people's tongues, whereas now they have laws to protect human rights, and the Americans are helping to enforce those Iraqi laws. For the second guy, I asked him if he'd met even 1 single American who supported putting trade sanctions on South Korea if they failed to turn up to Vietnam etc. Nevermind 1%. I'll start with one single American. Because I'd like to meet this dastardly American that everyone talks about. Just once.

I'm trying to get people into chat rooms so that they can actually talk to some random Americans. Really, English and ordinary Americans are the tip of the spear in this ideological war. The good will prevail. We have the truth on our side. Nothing needs to be rigged from our side. We win in an environment of free inquiry. All we need to do is get a global conversation going. I am starting to get access to various nationalities that I previously had no way of contacting, and that's really great. The mix of students changes radically though. Originally I had no Koreans, and now I've got over 50% Koreans. In the space of a couple of months. A pity I don't have any Taiwanese. I had a Vietnamese in a different class for one day, but only a teenager, and didn't speak personally with her. I need a lot more time in order to pop the million dollar question - "what percentage of your countrymen want to be bombed?". A teacher from Iran reckons over 50% of Iranians want to be bombed, which corresponds to a recent poll. But I have no confidence until any figure at the moment. I'll wait until post-liberation to find out this extremely important figure.

Well, there are a lot of really crappy sayings, and I always thought that this was one of them. Just like I thought Christians waiting for 666 to appear everywhere were the biggest bunch of idiots you could imagine. However, the truth was more complicated than that. The only age I've ever wanted to be was 18, when I suddenly gained my human rights. Or should I say, a whole stack of security forces started protecting those rights.

Anyway, today I turned 40. There is one more website that needs to be built. An NGO, with no religious affiliation, comprised of non-Americans who seek to eliminate the problem of anti-Americanism among non-Americans. And who also seek to protect America, and liberate the world. I have a religion doing that, but what's needed is an NGO that isn't headed by me. I tried to get Trinity to start one, but she was too busy to do that. But Kevin Wu, the recent Caliph of Taiwan, has expressed interest in starting such an NGO.

Previously in my mind, I was looking at Muslims as the enemy, and basically saying that the good Muslims need to speak up and identify the bad Muslims, so that they can be eliminated. But now I think that there is a better way of viewing the problem. From the American perspective, they are being attacked by non-Americans. It is really up to us non-Americans to identify the enemy within. Many anti-Americans are actually Christians, or professed Christians, anyway, living in places like South America etc. A South American recently told me that the South Americans were united in their hatred for America. I asked her how she had the audacity to call herself a Christian, and she terminated the debate.

So in the general case, America needs to seriously consider why it should put up with this threat from non-Americans. What benefit is there to America to allow non-Americans to continue attacking it? Think of it from the American perspective. Non-Americans are a strategic threat that should be eliminated. Unless we can convince the Americans that only some of us are bad. The onus is actually on us to explain who the bad non-Americans are, and take primary responsibility for dealing with our own vermin. We are free to ask America for help though. But we need to identify them before we can send the list to America. That is what I see the role of the NGO being. It needs to be created, and military solutions handed off to the American government. I think the American government is pretty rational and will respond to our rational suggestions. In fact, they'll be very happy that they don't have to take the rap for military action, they can instead say that they're just implementing the recommendations we gave them, and that if anyone has any complaints, they should come and see us. That is actually another form of protection.

Anyway, let's see what happens in my life now that I've turned 40 and about to see the birth of the NGO I want to see. Which will operate independently of the Mu'tazilah religion, which is another thing that needs to exist, along with NATO. Let's see indeed. :-)