Notices by KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)
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KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Monday, 02-Apr-2018 00:08:39 UTC 
KFist
Every time I hear another goddamn news story going on about how kids feel unsafe because of school shooters, I'm also reminded that there's also constant news stories about kids being functionally retarded at anything past basic math, let alone statistics, thanks to the failing school systems.
It reminds me of that joke centered around a guy on Twitter constantly telling his kid that Trump was going to make his life miserable. Something like
>I told my wife's woke 8-year-old that Trump was personally going to come over to our house, behead me, rape his mother, and skullfuck my child to death. He was terrified and started crying after that. THANKS DRAUMFL!
Yeah like no shit all these kids are terrified. They're emotionally stunted little retards not old enough to have any meaningful individual agency and the MSM is constantly telling them that some guy is going to come over to their school next week with a tactical nuclear device to kill them all. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1344669 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Mar-2018 18:58:20 UTC
KFist
@aven @zemichi @roka
>Liberalistism is far from perfect, but it's better than nihilistic derisive laughter.
It has no real principles that their group can agree on, aside from a wishy-washy sort of "just do whatever man" hope that maybe repeating the same mistakes made in the 90s can prevent the outcome of the two decades after that. There's nothing meaningful that they've done other than peddle for patreonbucks, read off media articles, get into internet webcam fights, and be laughed at by everyone around them.
At best, it's basic liberalism, and before they came up with the retarded term of "liberalist" the Sargonites called themselves "classical liberals." At worst, what they espouse can be called sippy-cup libertarianism (in the words of one faggot). It does nothing, there's no meaningful change and in the end it's nothing more than a more thorough application of the policies that led us to all these issues in the first place. His methods are attempting to replicate the same sort of propagandistic methods that the MSM used to shift the population to the left, except he doesn't have the same apparatus at all. He's just some fuck leading a bunch of no-name youtubers who put out lazy videos.
He somehow believes, through liberalistism, that if he doesn't change things himself, then at least he'd start a movement to somehow get people of every nation and races to adopt classical liberalism and to turn feminists into principled individualists. He also thinks that he can manage to do this without using the institutional control that was required to even create the problems that he's rallying against.
And now, with what happened today, all he can do against the issues that he's spent the last 2-3 years talking about is... hashtags? A maybe-protest of twitterites and redditors to be held somewhere at sometime maybe? An online petition on the UK government's own website to overturn the entire judiciary? Shake his cup for more patreon shekels in the hopes that maybe he could do something?
It's nonsense, and it's laughable. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Saturday, 03-Mar-2018 06:32:12 UTC
KFist
@clacke That's why serial killers target people who are too poor to have any financial footprint. There's a highway in Canada that's known as the Highway of Tears because of a serial killer who targeted native women along a stretch of highway for a decade. Nobody cared or noticed for years because he was targeting people with no footprints or connections to anyone else meaningful.
Tim McVeigh was caught because his rental van left a paper trail and his getaway car didn't have registry stickers on it. Ted Kaczynski was caught because of his brother. Jeffrey Dahmer managed to go 23 years continuously killing people simply because he targeted irrelevant nobodies, and only got caught because he let someone get away.
History has taught us that it's surprisingly easy to get away with huge crimes as long as there's no financial motive behind them and the victims have no meaningful clout. On the other end of the spectrum it's stupendously easy to get away with massive financial crimes if you're part of a cabal that controls the judicial and governmental systems to begin with. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 01-Mar-2018 02:34:54 UTC
KFist
@awg https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1249501 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 22-Feb-2018 21:45:31 UTC
KFist
@dolus @moonman @jeff Read through the chapter in the book instead, I can't listen to audiobooks without it being something in the background that requires re-listening ten times over before I get the meaning of a single read-through.
The good excerpts are these:
"No ability was needed for his vote. In fact, he was assured that voting alone was enough to make him a fine and noble citizen. He loved that, if he bothered to vote at all that year. He became a great man by listing his unthought, hungry desire for someone to take care of him without responsibility. So he went out and voted for the man who promised him most, or who looked most like what his limited dreams felt to be a father image or son image or hero image."
And:
"The privileges their ancestors had earned in blood and care became automatic rights. Practical men tried to explain that there were no such rights—that each generation had to pay for its rights with responsibility. That kind of talk didn't get far. People wanted to hear about rights, not about duties."
I can think of nothing more in response save for excerpts from Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Or rather, one long excerpt that was tactically removed from the shitty movie adaptation. Namely:
=====
Sally stumbled through the first part. However, nobody can describe accurately how the Federation came about; it just grew. With national governments in collapse at the end of the XXth century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans. They had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the Treaty of New Delhi, especially the P. O. W. foul-up - and they knew how to fight. But it wasn't revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917 - the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.
The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first - they trusted each other a bit, they didn't trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice . . . in a generation or two.
Probably those Scottish veterans, since they were finding it necessary to hang some veterans, decided that, if they had to do this, they weren't going to let any "bleedin', profiteering, black-market, double-time-for-overtime, army-dodging, unprintable" civilians have any say about it. They'd do what they were told, see? - while us apes straightened things out! That's my guess, because I might feel the same way . . . and historians agree that antagonism between civilians and returned soldiers was more intense than we can imagine today.
Sally didn't tell it by the book. Finally Major Reid cut him off. "Bring a summary to class tomorrow, three thousand words. Mr. Salomon, can you give me a reason - not historical nor theoretical but practical - why the franchise is today limited to discharged veterans?"
"Uh, because they are picked men, sir. Smarter."
"Preposterous!"
"Sir?"
"Is the word too long for you? I said it was a silly notion. Service men are not brighter than civilians. In many cases civilians are much more intelligent. That was the sliver of justification underlying the attempted coup d'etat just before the Treaty of New Delhi, the so-called 'Revolt of the Scientists': let the intelligent elite run things and you'll have utopia. It fell flat on its foolish face of course. Because the pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility. I've given you a hint, Mister; can you pick it up?"
Sally answered, "Uh, service men are disciplined, sir."
Major Reid was gentle with him. "Sorry. An appealing theory not backed up by facts. You and I are not permitted to vote as long as we remain in the Service, nor is it verifiable that military discipline makes a man self-disciplined once he is out; the crime rate of veterans is much like that of civilians. And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried, overworked, and endangered - yet their votes count."
Major Reid smiled. "Mr. Salomon, I handed you a trick question. The practical reason for continuing our system is the same as the practical reason for continuing anything: It works satisfactorily.
"Nevertheless, it is instructive to observe the details. Throughout history men have labored to place the sovereign franchise in hands that would guard it well and use it wisely, for the benefit of all. An early attempt was absolute monarchy, passionately defended as the 'divine right of kings.'
"Sometimes attempts were made to select a wise monarch, rather man leave it up to God, as when the Swedes picked a Frenchman, General Bernadotte, to rule them. The objection to this is that the supply of Bernadottes is limited.
"Historic examples range from absolute monarch to utter anarch; mankind has tried thousands of ways and many more have been proposed, some weird in the extreme such as the antlike communism urged by Plato under the misleading title The Republic. But the intent has always been moralistic: to provide stable and benevolent government.
"All systems seek to achieve this by limiting franchise to those who are believed to have the wisdom to use it justly. I repeat 'all systems'; even the so-called 'unlimited democracies' excluded from franchise not less than one quarter of their populations by age, birth, poll tax, criminal record, or other."
Major Reid smiled cynically. "I have never been able to see how a thirty-year old moron can vote more wisely than a fifteen-year-old genius . . . but that was the age of the 'divine right of the common man.' Never mind, they paid for their folly.
"The sovereign franchise has been bestowed by all sorts of rules - place of birth, family of birth, race, sex, property, education, age, religion, et cetera. All these systems worked and none of them well. All were regarded as tyrannical by many, all eventually collapsed or were overthrown.
"Now here are we with still another system . . . and our system works quite well. Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb. Why? Not because our voters are smarter than other people; we've disposed of that argument. Mr. Tammany can you tell us why our system works better than any used by our ancestors?"
I don't know where Clyde Tammany got his name; I'd take him for a Hindu. He answered, "Uh, I'd venture to guess that it's because the electors are a small group who know that the decisions are up to them . . . so they study the issues."
"No guessing, please; this is exact science. And your guess is wrong. The ruling nobles of many another system were a small group fully aware of their grave power. Furthermore, our franchised citizens are not everywhere a small fraction; you know or should know that the percentage of citizens among adults ranges from over eighty per cent on Iskander to less than three per cent in some Terran nations yet government is much the same everywhere. Nor are the voters picked men; they bring no special wisdom, talent, or training to their sovereign tasks. So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? We have had enough guesses; I'll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.
"And that is the one practical difference."
"He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history."
Major Reid paused to touch the face of an old-fashioned watch, "reading" its hands. "The period is almost over and we have yet to determine the moral reason for our success in governing ourselves. Now continued success is never a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what it is, not what we want it to be. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives - such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will! - the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force."
"But this universe consists of paired dualities. What is the converse of authority? Mr. Rico."
He had picked one I could answer. "Responsibility, sir."
"Applause. Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current 'flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority . . . other than through the tragic logic of history. The unique 'poll tax' that we must pay was unheard of. No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."
"Superficially, our system is only slightly different; we have democracy unlimited by race, color, creed, birth, wealth, sex, or conviction, and anyone may win sovereign power by a usually short and not too arduous term of service - nothing more than a light workout to our cave-man ancestors. But that slight difference is one between a system that works, since it is constructed to match the facts, and one that is inherently unstable. Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility - we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life - and lose it, if need be - to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. Yin and yang, perfect and equal."
The Major added, "Can anyone define why there has never been revolution against our system? Despite the fact that every government in history has had such? Despite the notorious fact that complaints are loud and unceasing?"
One of the older cadets took a crack at it. "Sir, revolution is impossible."
"Yes. But why?"
"Because revolution - armed uprising - requires not only dissatisfaction but aggressiveness. A revolutionist has to be willing to fight and die - or he's just a parlor pink. If you separate out the aggressive ones and make them the sheep dogs, the sheep will never give you trouble."
"Nicely put! Analogy is always suspect, but that one is close to the facts. Bring me a mathematical proof tomorrow. Time for one more question - you ask it and I'll answer. Anyone?"
"Uh, sir, why not go - well, go the limit? Require everyone to serve and let everybody vote?"
"Young man, can you restore my eyesight?"
"Sir? Why, no, sir!"
"You would find it much easier than to instill moral virtue - social responsibility - into a person who doesn't have it, doesn't want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him. This is why we make it so hard to enroll, so easy to resign. Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination - devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues - which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. Conscript armies have been tried in the past. Look up in the library the psychiatric report on brainwashed prisoners in the so called 'Korean War,' circa 1950 - the Mayer Report. Bring an analysis to class." He touched his watch. "Dismissed."
=====
Universal suffrage is idiotic because it allows for the illusion of responsibility, but in reality has no accountability. People who vote directly or indirectly for more gibs and meaningless rights and horrific wars and self-destructive policies rarely have to suffer for their decisions. The boomers and gen-x apathetic cunts who voted for politicians with self-destructive policies will get theirs and die before they have to suffer the consequences of their self-centered actions.
The idiot millennials who are nothing more than the end-result of the materially-flawed and spiritually-bereft educations where they were taught that all are equal, that every culture is correct, that no opinions can be wrong, that every religion is the same, that spirituality means nothing more than believing in hokey-pokey cults, that importing millions of people who fundamentally hate them, and that western propaganda ended on September 2, 1945. There's nobody to blame, because you're told that you can't blame billions of people at a time. You can't blame an entire demographic at a time. You can't blame any individual voter either.
The entire system is flawed. You can't truly fix the system without being exclusionary, and being exclusionary will always mean being racist, sexist, ableist, and all the other -ists you can throw at the issue. But the only other option is to somehow deal with the fact that most countries let complete social and political invalids vote, let alone actual retarded people and those with absolutely no stake have a say in the matter. You let people with absolutely no stake in the country past eagerly wanting gibsmedats vote, yet you don't let kids young enough that immediate policy changes will directly affect them when they turn 18 vote. These are the situations which lead corrupt politicians and the usual suspects import violent, ignorant, uneducated migrants by the millions because they will always vote for gibs. These are the situations that lead to national suicide.
And so, the only logical conclusions are, in essence: Abolish universal suffrage in favor of merit-based suffrage based upon deep and unremitting toil in service of the nation; or to abolish suffrage altogether.
But these thoughts get you called a fascist. Which is why I found myself being a fascist. Odd how these things work. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 16-Feb-2018 00:35:11 UTC
KFist
@dokidoki Quoth the raven, "KRAAAAAAAAAAAW" -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 15-Feb-2018 15:46:42 UTC
KFist
@nerthos @moonman But J002E3 was just the spent and empty upper stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket. If it hit the Earth nothing would have happened unless it came down directly on a city at a steep angle. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2018 00:05:48 UTC
KFist
>up to half a meter of snow falling within a day
>temperatures of -20 for the next week
ABSOLUTELY COMFE https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1019093 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Feb-2018 05:42:37 UTC
KFist
@turbomoist @awg Resentment is one of the greatest emotional indicators of where you are in life. Resentment towards a person usually stems from having a dialogue with that person then suddenly realizing that said person isn't entertaining any of your ideas and really doesn't give a shit about what you have to say. Or more specifically, it's when your expectations for that person are completely incongruous with the person's actions. Then you feel contempt for that person if you have any backbone. Both emotions tell you that there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong with the social interaction at hand. So you have to adjust for that.
I had this epiphany more than a year ago now, and it completely flipped my social interactions upside down. I realized that I resented most of the "friends" I had in my life, and I figured that I had to adjust my expectations and actions accordingly. From then on, I only ever opened myself up when a conversation involved mutual respect. Boom, I lost a lot of "friends" but the ones I kept remain rock-solid to this day simply because every single one of our conversations were dialogues (not debates or monologues) and were grounded in mutually-acknowledged and mutually-given respect.
Now, there's an issue with that sort of approach. Respect is a two-way road, and it's also earned (not given). So how can you really respect someone you don't know? You just give them that baseline of being polite and socially-adjusted, and you simply don't disrespect someone until they disrespect you. You don't have to respect someone new, you just have to not outright disrespect them until reason is given. It's a stupidly convoluted way of saying "do unto others etc etc" but it's usually better to lay it out in actual terms instead of aphorisms and platitudes. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Saturday, 27-Jan-2018 16:16:49 UTC
KFist
@hakui @histoire @nine @awg @ocean22 Apologies, it should be 360 in 24hours, 15 degrees every hour, and 3.75 degrees every 15 minutes, and 2.5 degrees every 10, and 1.5 degrees every 6 minutes. If your outstretched palm subtends 6 degrees, then it's 0.4 hours, or 24 minutes. Each finger would be 6 minutes of time. Calculate accordingly. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Saturday, 27-Jan-2018 16:13:30 UTC
KFist
@hakui @histoire @awg @nine @ocean22
Figure out the angular size of your fingers when your arm is outstretched. You can do this by outstretching your arms, making palms, bend your fingers so they're perpendicular to your arms (your palm should now be facing you). Now hold one palm out so your pinky finger is flush with the horizon. Then put your other palm atop the first, then your first palm atop that, and alternate, counting how many times you do this until your arms are now right above you. For me, it was about 15 times.
Now you've figured out how many outstretched palms subtend 90 degrees. For me, it was 15, so 90/15=6. That means each one of my fingers is roughly 1.5 degrees in visual angle when my arm is outstretched.
Now, the Sun moves across the sky 360 degrees in 24 hours, or 15 degrees every hour, or 3 degrees every 15 minutes. Since an outstretched palm subtends 6 degrees, it represents half an hour of time. Now look at the Sun, and do the palm-over-palm thing along the apparent path of the Sun until you reach the horizon at due east or due west (not directly from the Sun to the nearest horizon!). The point at which the Sun rises and sets is essentially due east and west, but it's a bit more southerly during the Winter and a bit more northerly during the Summer.
So that means if I go outside in the afternoon and count 7 hands from the Sun to the rough point at which it will set, that means it's (7*30m = 210m) 3.5 hours until it sets. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jan-2018 04:13:17 UTC
KFist
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1157154 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jan-2018 02:09:22 UTC
KFist
@roko The underlying issue at hand is that being gentle and kind is meaningless if you don't show that you can be mean and aggressive. You don't laud soap scum for being relatively harmless, but you're impressed at the perfectly-trained Alsatian wolfdog that's being super friendly. The soap scum can harm you if you're both negligent and incompetent, while you constantly respect the Alsatian who's tolerating your dumb bullshit. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Monday, 22-Jan-2018 01:00:35 UTC
KFist
@fate @sim Democracy has failed insofarasmuch as the method of franchisement has failed. The first failure was giving the franchise to those who have no stakes outside of their own immediate survival, and the second failure was giving the franchise to the individual rather than the family. Namely, democratic rule went from being a landed vote, to a sex-aligned vote, to being a universal vote. Give or take some steps along that intermediary step, such as going from landed vote to universal vote directly.
The underlying issue is the disconnect between the voter and the nation, especially within a welfare-state political structure. The focus of any particular vote goes from "what is best for each individual region within a united nation" to "what is best to the single largest demographic or numerical plurality of demographics within a given politically-structured catchment area." The plight of the poor, especially within a welfare state, becomes the political issue of the day, the month, the year, regardless of any other considerations. Simply promising more gibsmedats to the largest demographics within a political catchment area is enough to win.
To another extent, the superficially-relevant issue of gerrymandering is a mask for the fundamentally incorrect axiom that the city-dweller is just as important as the rural denizen. If 10,000 farmers/loggers/truckers/riggers/miners in a disparately-represented rural area provide enough material and economic wealth to support a city of 1,000,000 (who in turn support an elite of 1,000 businessmen/wealth-creators as per the Pareto principle), then are their votes really equal? Should the efforts of 9,998,000 parasites outweigh the efforts of 11,000 producers?
And here comes the fundamental issue of modern democracies: Universal suffrage. Universal suffrage should not exist. It simply cannot work. The past 100 years have taught us this lesson. The past 20 are simply hammering this lesson into the brains of those who are terminally and fatally asleep. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/478446 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 19-Jan-2018 22:21:11 UTC
KFist
@augustus Did someone say it's time for copypasta?
Let Africa Sink
Kim du Toit, May 26, 2002
When it comes to any analysis of the problems facing Africa, Western society, and particularly people from the United States, encounter a logical disconnect that makes clear analysis impossible. That disconnect is the way life is regarded in the West (it's precious, must be protected at all costs etc.), compared to the way life, and death, are regarded in Africa. Let me try to quantify this statement.
In Africa, life is cheap. There are so many ways to die in Africa that death is far more commonplace than in the West. You can die from so many things–snakebite, insect bite, wild animal attack, disease, starvation, food poisoning… the list goes on and on. At one time, crocodiles accounted for more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa than gunfire, for example. Now add the usual human tragedy (murder, assault, warfare and the rest), and you can begin to understand why the life expectancy for an African is low–in fact, horrifyingly low, if you remove White Africans from the statistics (they tend to be more urbanized, and more Western in behavior and outlook). Finally, if you add the horrifying spread of AIDS into the equation, anyone born in sub-Saharan Africa this century will be lucky to reach age forty.
I lived in Africa for over thirty years. Growing up there, I was infused with several African traits–traits which are not common in Western civilization. The almost-casual attitude towards death was one. (Another is a morbid fear of snakes.)
So because of my African background, I am seldom moved at the sight of death, unless it's accidental, or it affects someone close to me. (Death which strikes at strangers, of course, is mostly ignored.) Of my circle of about eighteen or so friends with whom I grew up, and whom I would consider "close", only about ten survive today–and not one of the survivors is over the age of fifty.
Two friends died from stepping on landmines while on Army duty in Namibia. Three died in horrific car accidents (and lest one thinks that this is not confined to Africa, one was caused by a kudu flying through a windshield and impaling the guy through the chest with its hoof–not your everyday traffic accident in, say, Florida). One was bitten by a snake, and died from heart failure. Another also died of heart failure, but he was a hopeless drunkard. Two were shot by muggers. The last went out on his surfboard one day and was never seen again (did I mention that sharks are plentiful off the African coasts and in the major rivers?). My situation is not uncommon in South Africa–and north of the Limpopo River (the border with Zimbabwe), I suspect that others would show worse statistics.
The death toll wasn't just confined to my friends. When I was still living in Johannesburg, the newspaper carried daily stories of people mauled by lions, or attacked by rival tribesmen, or dying from some unspeakable disease (and this was pre-AIDS Africa too) and in general, succumbing to some of Africa's many answers to the population explosion. Add to that the normal death toll from rampant crime, illness, poverty, flood, famine, traffic, and the police, and you'll begin to get the idea.
My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read: "Three Headless Bodies Found".
The next day: "Three Heads Found".
The third day: "Heads Don't Match Bodies".
You can't make this stuff up.
As a result, death is treated more casually by Africans than by Westerners. I, and I suspect most Africans, am completely inured to reports of African suffering, for whatever cause. Drought causes crops to fail, thousands face starvation? Yup, that happened many times while I was growing up. Inter-tribal rivalry and warfare causes wholesale slaughter? Yep, been happening there for millennia, long before Whitey got there. Governments becoming rich and corrupt while their populations starved? Not more than nine or ten of those. In my lifetime, the following tragedies have occurred, causing untold millions of deaths: famine in Biafra, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Angola, floods in South Africa, famine in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, famine in Ethiopia, floods in Mozambique, wholesale slaughter in Uganda, and tribal warfare in every single country. There are others, but you get the point.
Yes, all this was also true in Europe–maybe a thousand years ago. But not any more. And Europe doesn't teem with crocodiles, ultra-venomous snakes and so on.
The Dutch controlled the floods. All of Europe controls famine–it's non-existent now. Apart from a couple of examples of massive, state-sponsored slaughter (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia), Europe since 1700 doesn't even begin to compare to Africa today. Casual slaughter is another thing altogether–rare in Europe, common in Africa.
More to the point, the West has evolved into a society with a stable system of government, which follows the rule of law, and has respect for the rights and life of the individual–none of which is true in Africa.
Among old Africa hands, we have a saying, usually accompanied by a shrug: "Africa wins again." This is usually said after an incident such as:
a beloved missionary is butchered by his congregation, for no apparent reason
a tribal chief prefers to let his tribe starve to death rather than accepting food from the Red Cross (would mean he wasn't all-powerful, you see)
an entire nation starves to death, while its ruler accumulates wealth in foreign banks
a new government comes into power, promising democracy, free elections etc., provided that the freedom doesn't extend to the other tribe
the other tribe comes to power in a bloody coup, then promptly sets about slaughtering the first tribe
etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The prognosis is bleak, because none of this mayhem shows any sign of ending. The conclusions are equally bleak, because, quite frankly, there is no answer to Africa's problems, no solution that hasn't been tried before, and failed.
Just go to the CIA World Fact Book, pick any of the African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi etc.), and compare the statistics to any Western country (eg. Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland). The disparities are appalling–and it's going to get worse, not better. It has certainly got worse since 1960, when most African countries achieved independence. We, and by this I mean the West, have tried many ways to help Africa. All such attempts have failed.
1. Charity is no answer. Money simply gets appropriated by the first, or second, or third person to touch it (17 countries saw a decline in real per capita GNP between 1970 and 1999, despite receiving well over $100 billion in World Bank assistance).
2. Food isn't distributed. This happens either because there is no transportation infrastructure (bad), or the local leader deliberately withholds the supplies to starve people into submission (worse).
3. Materiel is broken, stolen or sold off for a fraction of its worth. The result of decades of "foreign aid" has resulted in a continental infrastructure which, if one excludes South Africa, couldn't support Pittsburgh.
Add to this, as I mentioned above, the endless cycle of Nature's little bag of tricks–persistent drought followed by violent flooding, a plethora of animals, reptiles and insects so dangerous that life is already cheap before Man starts playing his little reindeer games with his fellow Man–and what you are left with is: catastrophe.
The inescapable conclusion is simply one of resignation. This goes against the grain of our humanity–we are accustomed to ridding the world of this or that problem (smallpox, polio, whatever), and accepting failure is anathema to us. But, to give a classic African scenario, a polio vaccine won't work if the kids are prevented from getting the vaccine by a venal overlord, or a frightened chieftain, or a lack of roads, or by criminals who steal the vaccine and sell it to someone else. If a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow, and offered to every African nation free of charge, the growth of the disease would scarcely be checked, let alone reversed. Basically, you'd have to try to inoculate as many two-year old children as possible, and write off the two older generations.
So that is the only one response, and it's a brutal one: accept that we are powerless to change Africa, and leave them to sink or swim, by themselves.
It sounds dreadful to say it, but if the entire African continent dissolves into a seething maelstrom of disease, famine and brutality, that's just too damn bad. We have better things to do–sometimes, you just have to say, "Can't do anything about it."
The viciousness, the cruelty, the corruption, the duplicity, the savagery, and the incompetence is endemic to the entire continent, and is so much of an anathema to any right-thinking person that the civilized imagination simply stalls when faced with its ubiquity, and with the enormity of trying to fix it. The Western media shouldn't even bother reporting on it. All that does is arouse our feelings of horror, and the instinctive need to do something, anything–but everything has been tried before, and failed. Everything, of course, except self-reliance.
All we should do is make sure that none of Africa gets transplanted over to the U.S., because the danger to our society is dire if it does. I note that several U.S. churches are attempting to bring groups of African refugees over to the United States, European churches the same for Europe. Mistake. Mark my words, this misplaced charity will turn around and bite us, big time.
Even worse would be to think that the simplicity of Africa holds some kind of answers for Western society: remember "It Takes A Village"? Trust me on this: there is not one thing that Africa can give the West which hasn't been tried before and failed, not one thing that isn't a step backwards, and not one thing which is worse than, or that contradicts, what we have already.
So here's my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.
Inevitably, some Kissingerian realpolitiker is going to argue in favor of intervention, because in the vacuum of Western aid, perhaps the Communist Chinese would step in and increase their influence in the area. There are two reasons why this isn't going to happen.
Firstly, the PRC doesn't have that kind of money to throw around; and secondly, the result of any communist assistance will be precisely the same as if it were Western assistance. For the record, Mozambique and Angola are both communist countries–and both are economic disaster areas. The prognosis for both countries is disastrous–and would be the same for any other African country.
Africa has to heal itself. The West can't help it. Nor should we. The record speaks for itself. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Wednesday, 17-Jan-2018 23:30:23 UTC
KFist
@moonman >last month one of my brothers asked me what I knew about bitcoins since he was just about to hop aboard
>told him that I could have gotten in back when they were still mineable with shitty laptops and have a couple grand worth of bitcoin by now
>also told him that even if I had that hypothetical bitcoin by now, there's no way I could cash it out since the overheads are crazy, the exchanges are crazy, and the process is slow
>unless I wanted to get a bucket of KFC in Japan or something
>also tell him that bitcoin would crash within the month because it's a gigantic bubble and there's no long-term investment since it's just a fiat currency with no intrinsic worth other than the electricity costs used to mine it
>unlike every other fiat currency it doesn't have the political, economic, and military might of a country to say it's worth anything either
>this convinces him to abandon the idea of investing in bitcoins
And whoa hey Bitcoin crashed right on time and I saved my brother some money. It's lovely. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1142175 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2018 18:03:31 UTC
KFist
@augustus As far as I can tell, trannyism is a subset of Body Dysmorphic Disorder with the psychosocial-sexual aspects pointed towards an exciting new target.
Before, say, ten years ago, we treated Body Dysmorphic Disorder with scorn and pity, because it was limited to crazy celebrities and crazy rich people who fucked up their bodies and faces in a drive to look pretty. Their underlying issue with their own bodies was a perceived imperfection and displeasure, and so they fixed it with surgical methods. The thing that makes it a disorder is that you can't fix it with surgical methods, only behavioral therapy, which is why all of the victims of BDD either killed themselves, turned into hideous plastic mummies, or had successful psychotherapy.
Then in comes the homosexual/bisexual movement and they pick up a T to become LGBT. Suddenly people who wanted to be the opposite sex has protection under being just like homosexuals and therefore they're really just "normal." Hence, if they're normal, then any sort of disorder is right out. Even though trannies exhibit BDD symptoms to a tee, save for focusing it towards a goal of looking like the opposite sex rather than simply looking like the prettiest perfect human. Then it's taboo to give them any sort of behavioral therapy other than "there there, you go zhir, have some hormones" which is why, unsurprisingly, they are all becoming the classic BDD victims of the 90s: Hideous plastic mummies, or suicide victims. The third option of convincing them that they have a mental disorder and taking steps to alleviate it is just gone now.
To complicate matters, we now have the media and all these progressive types simultaneously pushing the image that trans people are special, privileged, amazing, and social heroes, whilst simultaneously pushing the narrative that men are horrendous, shitty, miserable, hateful beings. Tada, tranny rates skyrocket, and the overwhelming majority of those are MtF. Not only that, but they have suicide rates 5-7 times higher than normal populations and AIDS rates 30 times higher.
And instead of trying to tackle their underlying BDD, we ignore it, say that their dysphoria is because they don't have the right genitals, say that their depression is because of hateful white men instead of the sensation of having a phantom dick and having to dilate forever, and say that anyone who attacks the central dogma of LGBT is a hateful bigot.
These people need help, and the compassion of coddling ideologues is killing them. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2018 04:25:24 UTC
KFist
>we should stop burning so many fossil fuels immediately and switch to wind/solar/hydro power, that nuclear power is dirty dirty
>also we should fight forest fires and make absolutely no city planning around not putting houses next to dry shrublands full of vast amounts of easily ignitable organic fuel
>oh and we should watch our water usage but make no steps to mitigate the largest sources of water usage other than token taxes and unenforced fines
<oh fuck the entire state is on fire, what could have caused this
<I bet it was global warming, Al Gore was right all along
<pay carbon taxes now https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/944452 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2018 02:26:00 UTC
KFist
@awg Having a relatively empty apartment is great because it behooves you to keep it clean. You can't hide dust, grime, and untidiness when it starts becoming a statistically significant portion of the category "things that you can see in the apartment." -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Saturday, 06-Jan-2018 18:35:01 UTC
KFist
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1019093
All Bobinas P4G content and data are available under the 
