As I understand it, Microsoft slipped SCO 16.5 billion bucks to stall and screw around with Novell computer company. Years in court, tons of cash down the drain, and the "Big Guy" comes out the winner, Novell. I look at this case and see a nothing company, SCO, one that seems to make its profits by suing and settling out of court, and I see them backed big-time by Micro Soft, and I see the little guy, SCO, taking the "Big Guy" to court. SCO lost their case, such as it was.
"SCO investors saw few positives. The stock lost 72% of its value Monday, falling to 44 cents a share."
The market kind of gives away the truth of the story here. SCO didn't have a case from the start, and they weren't, it seems, meant to have one. It was a scam. It scared a lot of investors and users away from Linux. SCO made 16.5 billion dollars, and what did MicroSoft get for their money?
"Microsoft makes [billions of dollars] a year on Windows ... any minute, second, or day they can slow a competitor is good for them."
Here's a bit more on this from a computer geek site:
Linux proponents are turning their attention to Microsoft as the next front line in the battle to protect Linux, she [Pamela Jones] said.
"Microsoft is the next SCO. They positioned themselves that way with their patent saber-rattling," Jones said, referring to Microsoft's claims earlier this year that Linux violates more than 235 patents it holds.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, agreed that Microsoft will continue to be a thorn in the side of Linux.
"I don't expect these questions around legal issues to go away, but I do expect people to see it for what it is, which is FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) fostered by competitors of the platform who have a lot to lose from Linux's success," he said. "Microsoft makes [billions of dollars] a year on Windows ... any second, minute, or day they can slow a competitor is good for them."
Zemlin also reiterated what some in the industry have already suggested, that Microsoft's $16.6 billion licensing deal with SCO over Unix, an OS that Microsoft has never offered commercially, was to fund SCO's lawsuit against IBM to spread FUD over Linux. Microsoft has denied these claims.
This is the nature of things. I don't take it personally. In fact, were I to have myself beheaded by crazed jihadis I wouldn't take that personally either. Why? It's my head, my life, and my miserable end, but it's still not personal in any real sense because life goes on regardless of individuals, and it goes on in predictable patterns one can follow with ease if one knows how to spot them.
Microsoft hires SCO to tie up Novell and Linux users.
Saudi Arabia hires jihadis to tie up Western Hostages.
Shi'ites hire Paleostinians to tie up Israel.
European neo-feudalists hire Lefties to tie up Europeans.
American Left careerists hire naive students and Death Hippies to tie up the American working classes.
Third-World dictators hire anybody at all to tie up anyone they can.
FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.
Any second, minute, or day they can slow a competitor is good for them.
I take all this seriously, but I don't take it personally.
You might notice that Ayan Hirsi Ali hasn't had her head cut off but that Theo Van Gogh did (nearly enough.) You might notice that Salman Rushdie didn't get stabbed, shot or burned to death but that many of his editors and translators from Norway to Japan to Turkia did. You might notice that Daniel Pipes is still speaking but that commuters in London are blown to bit on the bus or on the tube train. dose this tell you something, dear reader?
It tells me that were I to think this is in some way about me I would be mistaken. It's about the power plays. All the screaming and hatreds of the Left dhimmi fascists amounts to some small satisfaction for the ones who make it all happen. Ask" Did a dozen Danish cartoonists get beheaded? Ask: Did embassies get burned all across the Middle East? Ask: Did the French State pay dearly for the scum kids who burned to death fleeing the police? Who does the dirty work, who do they do it to, and who benefits from it all? Blow up yourself for allah, or go scream at Jews at the local university or whatever, and then ask yourself how it is you came to be doing that. What's in it for you? Then think FUD. FUD on you, friend. They're having you.
It ain't poisonal, and even if you get your head cut off it really doesn't mean anything much, it being the nature of the game.
7 comments:
"I'll show you how an Italian dies" - Fabrizio Quattrocchi
"Let's Roll" - Todd Beamer
It is personal.
You can see patterns in history? Of course. But no one could have foreseen, for example, how individuals with a strong sense of personhood would have acted on Flight 93, or when taken hostage by Jihadi scum. By making it personal they entered history as models for the rest of us, as signs of the covenant we need to affirm if we are going to defeat the Jihad. History is made by exemplary individuals embodying the ethical revelations that are the motor of history. So-called impersonal material forces are nothing to do with cause; they are all effect.
That's all well and fine but not anything to do with the point I was making, which is that the players of power games, governments and leaders of political factions, and so on, use the average adherent as a useful idiot, not caring one way or the other who dies and who gets ruined or not.
No one can know all the Jews, for example, so to hate "The Jews" is not to hate them at all but to hate something one cannot grasp at all. And so it is with leftist who hate America or what-have-you. It is personal when a person acts as an individual on grounds of person and privacy; but where I ask is the privacy in bombing a group of by-standers? There's nothing personal in it at all, just a fool following a dream concocted by others who use him or her or them as a "useful idiot."
I'm sure that Microsoft and SCO and Linux really don't care about me at all, regardless of the good or bad that comes to me from their products. But the point I was making is that those who do take it personally, those who think the "Palestinian" issue is important to them, those people are fools playing a game they know not of. If they don't know they're being used by political game-players, and if they don't know me from anyone, then if they attack me or Tod Beamer or anyone else, it's not personal, it's just phantasy with people as props. And that means not a thing.
So, the conclusion I expect readers to draw from this is that they have no personal stake in the issue of this or that grand cause any more than they do in the law suit between SCO and Novell, it being a game played by professionals for their own purposes that have nothing to do with individuals; and those individuals who think it has to do with them, those who might go off and kill a Novell programmer are as crazy and stupid as any leftoid who supports a cause to do with Islam, a thing that is outside the realm of the person, even the Muslim who is being used by political game-players for their own purposes.
The forces of History in some deterministic sense, I leave that to others to fiddle with. Whatever they decide is not to do with me, and I don't take it personally if they decide one thing or another. It certainly won't excite me to the point of going out to kill someone over it. Some might. Some Leftists might kill for that. They kill for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with anything about them at all.
"Forgive them for they do not know what they do"
Profound words and a truth I generally accept. So I admit your point about the useful idiots.
Still, it shocked me a little to read Dag saying it wasn't personal, because I know with you that in some sense it is. And that's how it should be. We're locked in a world historical struggle between those who don't think individuals matter, and those who do. So, I say, forgive them and take it personally. That, as I understand it, is what Jesus did, our divine model of personhood.
The professionals play games. The true person works to show them the profession that really matters.
What I find so discouraging is the young Leftist who throws himself whole-heartedly into a game of politics that he knows nothing about beyond some dubious figures, some absurd cliches and is moved mostly by the emotional thrill of being "righteous" in the face of "the world's greatest evils" like America, Israel, Globalism, Global Warming, and so on. It can't be personal in any meaningful sense to these people, divorced from reality as it must be to reach the depths of ideology, to be a nothing that consumes people with hatred manufactured by remote manipulators in nations far away.
It is time to put away foolish things, I too would suggest, and time to examine oneself and ones motives for the anti-whatever to see clearly what the purpose of it all is. Why the ideologically based hatreds? Why the self-deceptions in the face of clear contradictions? What is the thrill of being a young fool giving in to manipulators?
There must be a terrible ache left in the lives of many young people, and no doubt of many old people as well, when the meaning is torn out of them and they are left to deal with a life in a world of nihilism and banality. If the only replacement for meaning in life is to adopt someone else's hatreds, that is a terrible failure on the part of the adoptee, and yet it is prevalent, for what I see, among the Chomsky/Moore crowd. Nothing but some vague hatred of things they really have no idea about, having read it in books, having heard from ones friends, knowing what all of us know so it must be true. There is no volition in a person who attacks from a base of instilled hatred. What man among them knew of Tod Beamer while they killed him? Not a one. He was, to them, not a person, or likely even a thing. So it is with the Muslims and the Leftists and the fascists of all sorts who dehumanize and dismiss the possibility of humanness in others. They act on orders, not so much from distant places in the world as from a loss of their own minds, the thing that could make them Human. They act and do not live as they do, being robotic and stupid, or maybe like dogs in a pack. Why would illiterate Pakistanis attack a building full of strangers from a place they know nothing of and kill innocent people they do not know? Only because they are not aware of themselves as people either, cut off from reality and Humanness, used as proxies by those who have an agenda that is to foil others of their same standing. Syrian diplomat attack Danish diplomat by using peasants to do the work, and that' not personal at any level.
What brings Tod Beamer to life is that he was a living man right up till the time he died. He was one of those Primo Levi might have called "The Saved." How many of us can say of ourselves that we are Human rather than dogs in a pack or robots shuffling off this mortal coil just because the clock ticks?
Of course I have in mind a particular commentator who delves into the depths of idiocies to find his sentence here. Condemned. To give up ones privacy to be a parody of a public person, to ask others what it is to be him, that is a horror, and he seems to love it more than life; therefore, nothing he does can ever be personal. He has no personness in any meaningful sense, not being in the world enough to have a sense of it and others who make him Human by constricting his being and giving it shape and context and depths of realities. Some new cliche comes, and he will spout that with fervour, as unthinkingly as the others he's spouted.
"Patterns in History?" Yes, the Young Pioneer education comes to the fore at times even when I refer to Edmund Burke. There is a line of Human consistency always, and the nature of Nature doesn't change just because we would like it to. All that is is already, only waiting to emerge, in my opinion. The free man is capable of all things he can do, and the slave is capable in the same way if only potentially. And it is that potential that one might hope to release in struggles such as ours. To make that happen it will indeed take Great Men to move the obstacles and barricades to let in the Freedom of Humanity where it is now cloistered in slavery. That pattern is set, it doesn't change, it is a part of Humanness to be free. Also, it is a fact of nature that power requires for some the binding of the mind and the slavery of the soul. Those who volunteer the latter for themselves are the ones who have no personhood, and therefore nothing they do can ever be personal, they being sticks used by others to beat.
Were I a Leftist hater I would ask myself who is gaining from my actions. What terrible emptiness in myself do I feel compelled to fill with hatred for those I do not know? And why would I choose this particular group or cause to attach my hatreds to? What part of this has to do with me who has no connection to it on the obvious face of it? Why would I be pleased to burn down a hotel in which the editor of a book I have never read had escaped from, killing a dozen people I do not know, as was the case of one of Salman Rushdie's editors in Turkia? Why would I choose to kill and die for some cause I have no part of? Why support savages who kill children? There will always be those who have no mind or personality of their own who need others to make them alive. And those, corporate beings, as it were, are not Human enough to consider seriously as volitional.
Having made that point, I suggest that we in the West are like Tod Beamer more of us than not. We, not the Muslims, got up and charged forward into the end of all. That particular heroism is what makes us free and Human. That rational decision of an individual acting under his own sense is beauty that we cannot find in the impersonal murders by robots or dogs in packs. It is the man who stands up and says: NO, I refuse this evil. The evil is most often some garbage idiocy that doesn't warrant consideration in any serious sense. We might wish to know something about the underpinnings of the ideology of our enemies, but mostly what we must know is our own personhood, if we have it. If a thug comes to kill me, he is not acting, as a rule, under his own volition but as a game piece in a game he has no understanding of, as most of our illustrious Leftists have no sense of themselves, only their pitifully stupid cliches and hotch-potches of facts and figures and meaningless idoicies strung together in a rant. Those people do not warrant the recognition of enemies.
We've had occasion here recently to look at some work by Archilochus.
Look here:
Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.
Here we have a man who is both poet and warrior, a man who knows the value of Life and who yet faces death as a matter of Life cold and true. It's just a shield, and another one is just as good. But then there is battle against men, not strangers far away but men close up and dangerous who will kill, men who are equals in battle and personhood, men one must respect as men.
Moslems kill civilians in the same way they slaughter sheep, unthinkingly and stupidly. It is a man like Archilochus who knows the man he faces is his equal and who has respect for the man's life even if he intends to stop it. He likely doesn't know his opponent by name or family, but he would know his opponent by virtue of the man's obvious virtue. Even in killing a man he would come away with some deep respect for the man who might have killed him. We admire and respect Tod Beamer but not the killers of 9/11 because Tod Beamer was a man and the others were killer dogs. What Tod Beamer did was the act of a man who was a person, and his opponents were not men at all just movers on a plane who did. They lacked volition, as do our Leftists today. They go through the motions, through the emotions, no understanding, no recognition involved.
In a real struggle one can stop momentarily and praise an opponent. Listen: "Nice move!"
That very move was meant to harm ones self, and yet one must in fairness and in a state of personality admire the beauty and skill of the Good even if it is meant to harm or kill. And in the winning, if that's how it comes out, one can admire the courage and the skill of another man who is now dead. It's very much personal. It is, in a sense, a privilege to engage in such a struggle.
Who is the fool? Ajax. "Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad." Ajax, the would-be hero, sneaks off to kill and destroy in the night, a madman who returns to bast of his exploits only to find that he's slaughtered a a herd of sheep and goats. He is despicable and scorned for it, regardless of the damage he might have done to the enemy. There was nothing brave or manly or personal in his act.
And so it is with the Leftist haters among us who rage against this or that, not knowing anything at all bout who and what they rage against. They cannot know because they cannot see the Humanness of others they themselves do not have.
When we meet in public each week we do so as individuals against the mass of the mob. We are not foot soldiers in a battle we know nothing of. We meet because we have volition, some based on privacies and others based on universal publicities. We talk. Were we to be attacked by others, they would act under orders, if unspoken, by others. We are few at this time because there are few who are willing to stand up against the crowd and be free of them. Most are "The Drowned." there are very few Tod Beamers in the world, it seems. I don't know, and I cannot know, how I would have acted in his place. I do know how I act in my own place. I don't sniff the wind for ideas from the mass given by the elite. I don't care. if I did I'd either be ashamed of myself or such a hollow man I wouldn't even know enough to be ashamed of myself.
There are people of worth in the world, those who are truly volitional and decent. And there are those like the PETA creatures Charles writes about above who are so deluded and personless that they are automatons. Nothing they do is meaningful because they have no volition. Others wind them up and set them loose on the world to do damage. I cannot take anything that comes from that seriously. These are the Ajaxes of our time.
I cannot find any strength in me to hate the nature of things. Some are simply stupid and dead in the mind, and what harm they do is nothing more than falling rocks on a village or a storm at sea. It is for those who are Human, those who have the innate Humanness of free people exercised to act and make, to be poetic and war-like in the pursuit of the good. Great men must first be men rather than rocks and water. Beamer was such a man. The Muslims and the Leftists, they are not anything much at all but wind and noise and fire in the night, mindless and meaningless regardless of the harm they cause.
For us, yes, it is personal, and that is because we are ultimately persons in our own right. It is personal because it resides within our persons rather than being something laid over us to cover the holes in our beings. It is personal, and it is real. And it will come our way to deal with it as we are capable in our time.
It's time to put away foolish things and to accept that we are and that many others are not. We have great things to do. We can do those great things because we are individuals. We can be the movers who move even though we are moved in our turn. And we can say no to being moved. We can move as we will because we are free to be persons in ourselves.
I have no concerns for the slaves of fashion, regardless of the dresses they wear or the make-up that is their face. I'm not obsessed with sheep and goats in the night. We meet, we talk, we think, we rethink, we learn, we act. The others, they move like twigs broken off in wind-storms, and they are not significant regardless of any harm they do. I kick them as dust off my sandals. Then I say to myself, "Let's go on."
This is a telling quotation from Voltaire's Mahomet:
OMAR.
Ay: the best,
The fittest instrument to serve our purpose:
As Zopir's hostage he may find occasion
To speak with him, and soon avenge his master.
Thy other favorites are too wise, too prudent
For such a dangerous enterprise; old age
Takes off the bandage of credulity
From mortal eyes; but the young, simple heart,
The willing slave to its own fond opinions,
And void of guile, will act as we direct it:
Youth is the proper period for delusion.
Seid, thou knowest, is superstitious, bold,
And violent, but easy to be lead;
Like a tame lion, to his keeper's voice
Obedient.
Well said, Dag
If I provoked you, it may not have been fair, but it was quite worthwhile. you should put that comment on the main page.
I perhaps mistook the term "leftist hater," because I very nearly hate leftist. Rather to say I hate the politicized collection of human foibles that is called leftism. I can't imagine anything that gave me a special birthright to volition. No they were likewise born with choices to make, but have chosen to relinquish that responsibility for an itellectually easier -mindless- life. And that initial choice, however directed they may be in particular actions, infuriates me. They were born as human as I, with similar duty to human potential, but repeatedly neglect that duty.
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