2007-11-23
Self-Interest
I took a look at the comments in my blog, and as usual, people like Batman were making perfectly sensible comments that no reasonable person could disagree with, so the left-wing scumbags obviously disagree with. Seems the Prof has joined the left-wing scumbags too, supporting Russia against America and showing not the slightest gratitude for his country being bailed out by America three times, and the fourth time is in progress at the moment. Guess what, Prof? Those terrorists who did 7/7? If you want to protect yourself against British terrorists killing Britons, you need to go via the Middle East, and only America can pull that one off, unfortunately. And it really is unfortunate, as I'd like to have more options for getting the job done, and at the moment I'm down to one party in one country.
Anyway, one thing that I saw was Batman being told that he'd been brainwashed by Bush. Batman is no more brainwashed by Bush than Bush was brainwashed by Batman. You may as well say that Foddy has been brainwashed by Osama Bin Laden, and that's the only reason both of them objected to the liberation of Iraq. Even when he lays out his logic, instead of challenging that logic, all these left-wing scumbags can do is come up with ridiculous ad hominem attacks.
Personally I wanted to liberate the world ever since I was a child, long before I even knew that Bush existed. I incorrectly assumed that everyone else would come to the same conclusion, based on a simple derivation of the Golden Rule. If you would want to be liberated if you were living under a dictator and denied freedom of speech, then you should do the same for others. I thought that was a deep part of Australian ethos. But I had simply projected my own ethos onto others, not knowing any better. In the same way that scumbags project the fact that they never do anything except out of self-interest onto others.
Let's look at the self-interest side of things. Does America always act out of self-interest? Well let's start off with an easy one. The money America donated to Indonesia after the tsunami. How was that in America's self-interest? America could have used that money to instead fund the Nuclear Missile Defense Shield. Why did it instead give it to Indonesia? Especially when, money being fungible, that freed up funds for the Indonesian government to fund Sharia police and buy new fighter jets from Russia.
The left-wing scum will claim that even this is in their self-interest, because they hope to "influence" Indonesia. Influence Indonesia how, I wonder, and to do what? Buy Russian warplanes? Also, where is any evidence of Indonesia being influenced to do anything at all? Even if there was some evidence of a shopping list of how they should be influenced, who makes the determination of how to be influenced? And given that multiple countries provided donations, does that mean there is a mathematical formula that Indonesia follows in order to be influenced?
Do all countries have this formula? Given that no-one gives America a dime, does that mean if I send a cheque to the Whitehouse for "random relief", along with a shopping list of what I want them to do, that, being the only "bidder", I will win and America will totally abandon all its own interests and do whatever I want?
Or - here's a wild concept - could it be that in the 21st century people really are willing to donate to complete strangers, and that some of the teachings of the bible have actually gotten through to the people and made them nice? What evidence would be required to support such a whacky theory? Aid to Indonesia after the tsunami? Billions of dollars of aid to Afghanistan? Billions to Iraq? An entire liberation of Iraq without ever having asked for the Iraqis to pay for any of it? And in fact, doing the reverse, by giving them aid money on top of the liberation costs?
What would be the evidence of America acting in its self-interest? Nuking the entire Middle East, which contributes essentially nothing at all to humanity, and getting a whole stack of free oil, for the cost of a few nukes and zero US lives lost? Yeah, that would sure count. Is there any sign of that actually being done? Mushroom clouds over Tehran? Not that I can see. Maybe that's because I'm in the Southern Hemisphere and the curvature of the earth is getting in the way or something?
What about protecting the Kosovars? Arseholes on the right in America actually objected to that, stating correctly that it was not in America's interest to go there. They were right of course, but fortunately Clinton had the decency to do so anyway, despite severely antagonizing Russia. Incidentally, the situation on the ground has changed radically, and in my opinion NATO should give the territory back to the democratically-elected Serbian government fairly soon. No point creating a new nation of racist religious bigots. Plenty of them already.
If you want to be silly, and the left-wing certainly does, you can indeed trump just about anything up as self-interest. America's self-interest in Kosovo? Easy. To get a democratically-elected government that would be friendly to America, because democracies normally are friendly to America. What's the self-interest for giving money to a beggar on the street? Easy. He'll be able to buy some new clothes with the money, get a job, then buy goods and the economy will improve and you'll get a pay rise! What's the benefit to cutting off your own arm? Easy. You'll be lighter and not have to buy so much food to stay alive!
Yes, it is in America's self-interest to protect itself. And yes, liberating Iraq does indeed protect itself. Maybe if the Iraqis had elected Sadr or worse, America might have endangered itself. But that didn't happen. America is now safer. As is the rest of the world. Why did the rest of the world not see it in their self-interest? Well. Maybe they saw it was in their self-interest to let America do all the hard work, while they stayed at home and had a jolly good time with the money they saved? That's where I see the selfishness. The arsehole countries that failed to protect not just America, but also the Iraqi people. And tomorrow, Australia becomes one of those arsehole countries.
On the programming front, I have done something totally radical. I have enabled applications to run in 31-bit mode on a platform that was never designed to do that, and some said couldn't be done for a host of reasons (which I countered before doing it, but they refused to accept my counterarguments, a bit like the left-wing scum here actually). It took me 2 days, on unfamiliar code with an unfamiliar compiler, to find the right place to put about 10 lines of code to make it happen. Someone said that I had put a round peg into a square hole by using a sledgehammer. :-) The new system is called S/380, and while the virtual machine exists (that's what I did), the operating system is being extended now by someone else so that the apps (me again) can access that new memory (gone from 16 MB to 2 GB) in a more controlled manner. And then GCCMVS, which requires about 20 meg of memory (24 bits can only address 16 meg, even if there was no operating system), should hopefully self-compile. It should only be a couple of days for that to happen. I think this is more productive use of my time, to make the world a better place, than trying to get immoral brick walls like Foddy to support human freedom. This sort of programming work is what I used to do before the Iraq war too. It was only when I saw 50% of Australia objecting to human freedom that I realised my skills were better served sorting out human insanity. But that was sorted out a long time ago, 2004-09-11 to be precise, and the insane humans simply aren't interested in sorting the world out. So, the problem I am solving at the moment is the ability for people to write portable C programs, and to be able to write them on the MVS environment, and indeed, for others to be able to test that their programs really are portable, by running them on MVS, even if they are too large to fit within 16 MB.
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Anyway, one thing that I saw was Batman being told that he'd been brainwashed by Bush. Batman is no more brainwashed by Bush than Bush was brainwashed by Batman. You may as well say that Foddy has been brainwashed by Osama Bin Laden, and that's the only reason both of them objected to the liberation of Iraq. Even when he lays out his logic, instead of challenging that logic, all these left-wing scumbags can do is come up with ridiculous ad hominem attacks.
Personally I wanted to liberate the world ever since I was a child, long before I even knew that Bush existed. I incorrectly assumed that everyone else would come to the same conclusion, based on a simple derivation of the Golden Rule. If you would want to be liberated if you were living under a dictator and denied freedom of speech, then you should do the same for others. I thought that was a deep part of Australian ethos. But I had simply projected my own ethos onto others, not knowing any better. In the same way that scumbags project the fact that they never do anything except out of self-interest onto others.
Let's look at the self-interest side of things. Does America always act out of self-interest? Well let's start off with an easy one. The money America donated to Indonesia after the tsunami. How was that in America's self-interest? America could have used that money to instead fund the Nuclear Missile Defense Shield. Why did it instead give it to Indonesia? Especially when, money being fungible, that freed up funds for the Indonesian government to fund Sharia police and buy new fighter jets from Russia.
The left-wing scum will claim that even this is in their self-interest, because they hope to "influence" Indonesia. Influence Indonesia how, I wonder, and to do what? Buy Russian warplanes? Also, where is any evidence of Indonesia being influenced to do anything at all? Even if there was some evidence of a shopping list of how they should be influenced, who makes the determination of how to be influenced? And given that multiple countries provided donations, does that mean there is a mathematical formula that Indonesia follows in order to be influenced?
Do all countries have this formula? Given that no-one gives America a dime, does that mean if I send a cheque to the Whitehouse for "random relief", along with a shopping list of what I want them to do, that, being the only "bidder", I will win and America will totally abandon all its own interests and do whatever I want?
Or - here's a wild concept - could it be that in the 21st century people really are willing to donate to complete strangers, and that some of the teachings of the bible have actually gotten through to the people and made them nice? What evidence would be required to support such a whacky theory? Aid to Indonesia after the tsunami? Billions of dollars of aid to Afghanistan? Billions to Iraq? An entire liberation of Iraq without ever having asked for the Iraqis to pay for any of it? And in fact, doing the reverse, by giving them aid money on top of the liberation costs?
What would be the evidence of America acting in its self-interest? Nuking the entire Middle East, which contributes essentially nothing at all to humanity, and getting a whole stack of free oil, for the cost of a few nukes and zero US lives lost? Yeah, that would sure count. Is there any sign of that actually being done? Mushroom clouds over Tehran? Not that I can see. Maybe that's because I'm in the Southern Hemisphere and the curvature of the earth is getting in the way or something?
What about protecting the Kosovars? Arseholes on the right in America actually objected to that, stating correctly that it was not in America's interest to go there. They were right of course, but fortunately Clinton had the decency to do so anyway, despite severely antagonizing Russia. Incidentally, the situation on the ground has changed radically, and in my opinion NATO should give the territory back to the democratically-elected Serbian government fairly soon. No point creating a new nation of racist religious bigots. Plenty of them already.
If you want to be silly, and the left-wing certainly does, you can indeed trump just about anything up as self-interest. America's self-interest in Kosovo? Easy. To get a democratically-elected government that would be friendly to America, because democracies normally are friendly to America. What's the self-interest for giving money to a beggar on the street? Easy. He'll be able to buy some new clothes with the money, get a job, then buy goods and the economy will improve and you'll get a pay rise! What's the benefit to cutting off your own arm? Easy. You'll be lighter and not have to buy so much food to stay alive!
Yes, it is in America's self-interest to protect itself. And yes, liberating Iraq does indeed protect itself. Maybe if the Iraqis had elected Sadr or worse, America might have endangered itself. But that didn't happen. America is now safer. As is the rest of the world. Why did the rest of the world not see it in their self-interest? Well. Maybe they saw it was in their self-interest to let America do all the hard work, while they stayed at home and had a jolly good time with the money they saved? That's where I see the selfishness. The arsehole countries that failed to protect not just America, but also the Iraqi people. And tomorrow, Australia becomes one of those arsehole countries.
On the programming front, I have done something totally radical. I have enabled applications to run in 31-bit mode on a platform that was never designed to do that, and some said couldn't be done for a host of reasons (which I countered before doing it, but they refused to accept my counterarguments, a bit like the left-wing scum here actually). It took me 2 days, on unfamiliar code with an unfamiliar compiler, to find the right place to put about 10 lines of code to make it happen. Someone said that I had put a round peg into a square hole by using a sledgehammer. :-) The new system is called S/380, and while the virtual machine exists (that's what I did), the operating system is being extended now by someone else so that the apps (me again) can access that new memory (gone from 16 MB to 2 GB) in a more controlled manner. And then GCCMVS, which requires about 20 meg of memory (24 bits can only address 16 meg, even if there was no operating system), should hopefully self-compile. It should only be a couple of days for that to happen. I think this is more productive use of my time, to make the world a better place, than trying to get immoral brick walls like Foddy to support human freedom. This sort of programming work is what I used to do before the Iraq war too. It was only when I saw 50% of Australia objecting to human freedom that I realised my skills were better served sorting out human insanity. But that was sorted out a long time ago, 2004-09-11 to be precise, and the insane humans simply aren't interested in sorting the world out. So, the problem I am solving at the moment is the ability for people to write portable C programs, and to be able to write them on the MVS environment, and indeed, for others to be able to test that their programs really are portable, by running them on MVS, even if they are too large to fit within 16 MB.
# posted by Paul Edwards @ 21:54 
