Diamonds Are a South African's Best Friend

Second-Order Effects of the Real Nibelungen Ring

"No maltreating them... in front of the press..." — Monty Python

Yes, the left image is someone at de Boers I mean de Beers X-raying a black diamond mine worker to make sure he isn’t hiding any diamonds inside his body. Today I was just wondering, why is everyone in South Africa so violent? Then it occurred to me that it’s because people are physically fighting over all the South African gems. Elon Musk got his money by selling his father’s emeralds in New York. If a black person did that, they would make the money, and we can’t be having that. I already hated diamond rings and all that nonsense, but the only reason they’re valuable at all is, as everyone has heard, “because the prices are artificially high.” Read: because white South Africans are stabbing and shooting black South Africans to make sure they don’t take any gems to sell for themselves.

How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa | Elon Musk | The Guardian

How Elon Musk made his money - from emeralds to SpaceX and Tesla | The Independent

“We went to this guy’s prefab and he opened his safe and there was just stacks of money and he paid me out, £80,000, it was a huge amount of money,” Errol Musk said, according to Business Insider. Errol Musk was then made another offer: to spend £40,000 on an emerald mine. “I said, ‘Oh, all right’. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years,” Errol Musk said.

As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”

When I was thinking about how it’s impossible to afford healthcare or education in America, at least for the younger generation who doesn’t have entrenched careers and would have to engage in soul-selling to Peter Thiel and the other South Africans to get one because it’s just so expensive and linked to employers, I was again looking at how things are priced in other places. It turns out, if you live in Australia or its “little brother” New Zealand, you can afford a house, a car, decent-sized portions of real food rather than a piece of moldy bread just like in America, and you can afford healthcare and education just like in Europe.

So why are these things so much cheaper in certain less-discussed countries when taxes are still much lower than in Europe? It’s apparently… because it costs 1.25x-2x as much to buy things at the store than in America (price depending on where you live.) How much cheap Chinese junk and junk food do you need to buy for that to ever make up for healthcare and education being affordable? Then it occurred to me, yes, most Americans are indeed buying tens of thousands of dollars of Chinese junk, especially once you consider that things like car parts are made in China. If you aren’t buying tens of thousands of dollars of Chinese junk and you live in America, but you use education and healthcare, you are being stolen from.

Europe is quite similar, except they offset the costs onto things like housing and food instead, though this seems to cause fewer long-term problems because the educated population that can use their healthcare has the time and resources to fix things, so the HDI in Germany has actually just passed the US. That’s what the national debt of the US is largely about, going into debt to the PRC to make Chinese goods so cheap, but the cost gets offloaded onto things that are much more harmful, because killing people and making them dumb or unqualified to do work when they do the autodidact thing causes more issues than just taking away houses and giving people small portions of bad food.

It’s true that you can’t produce those goods in America at all, but that’s because America has few mineral resources. China is essentially the mirror image of America, a land of many mineral resources but no farming. Back in the day before there was the phrase “starving kids in Africa,” it was “starving kids in China.” This is because of the volcanism levels and plate tectonics. China finds it useful to put different countries into debt to subsidize them buying Chinese goods, especially America, but America has nothing to give China, because Americans seem to think farming is dumb and they never want to do it despite the entire historical imagine of America being just as radically agrarian as the volcanism levels suggest, even though China would literally starve if they weren’t importing food. However, they’re mostly importing food from New Zealand, which doesn’t depend on China at all, because this is one of the countries in the world that doesn’t subsidize people buying Chinese goods, so it’s quite an asymmetrical relationship.

Geographically, if America were farming, Canada and Greenland would want to trade with it, so China would probably still import farmed goods from New Zealand, but America’s economy wouldn’t be collapsing due to the debt model being unsustainable. There would also be no ridiculous talk of the Canschluss, which basically amounts to trying to enslave Canada to make them make the Chinese goods, which you have to remember, Austria was basically just land with the same ethnicity and same language as the Germans, but the positions just happened to be reversed, where the Germans really wanted to farm and didn’t want to export “the power of German engineering” when they would rather being doing some “Blut und Boden,” but now the roles are reversed and instead, Americans have a huge amount of farmland but think that’s useless and stupid so would rather be making metal items so there’s the talk of militarily invading Canada and Greenland to do it.

No matter how much many Americans think they don’t like the doctor, when you shunt the costs to healthcare indefinitely to try to make up for the national debt, it becomes unaffordable, and when it becomes unaffordable, people die or just become crippled who would otherwise be in good health because it’s just a death by a thousand cuts and you get Luigi Mangione. However, obviously nothing Luigi Mangione did (murder) is going to fix the issues, and two wrongs don’t make a right even if I don’t feel sorry for health care CEOs at all. The issue wasn’t health insurance CEOs even if I think they’re not blameless since they know what’s going on. The issue isn’t even necessarily doctors, because while there are a lot of bad doctors, I’ve read and heard repeatedly the real issue is doctors quitting, not them just being super corrupt. No, the issue is the government wants to make your healthcare unaffordable so Chinese goods will look cheap and people will buy more, even though these are the same things cluttering up people’s attics which they’re desperately trying to get rid of. That’s how the Chinese make goods cheaper than anywhere with comparable mineral resources: they subsidize for you to buy them without you having any say in it in most countries in the Northern Hemisphere (not “Western.”) And PRC is absolutely not the “Global South,” PRC is basically the entire system of “the North,” since all the northern countries are in debt to it, and it’s hard to get any more geographically north than Manchuria even if a lot of that is owned by Russia now.

You don’t need so-called “socialism” or to give up your houses, cars, nature, and food to have healthcare and education despite all the propaganda about Europe, because Australia (and New Zealand, as well as seemingly many other Southern Hemisphere countries such as in Latin America) can have them without having super high taxes, because they’re not doing a ton of useless shopping there. The places that aren’t covertly taxing their citizens for Chinese goods are also largely not on most people’s radars, which has brought to mind what I’ve heard repeatedly in different contexts about the psychological relationship between materialism and attention-seeking, or just greed and attention-seeking. I don’t think most people are doing much serious contemplation of the living conditions of Australia or what they think of as popular vacation destinations like Costa Rica, much less places that don’t even appear on many maps such as New Zealand. People want to take trips with pictures and souvenirs to America and Europe to show off, photograph themselves in front of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben and post it all over social media and show the pictures to everyone in-person and talk about it like it’s their whole personality now, but not so much even to somewhere like Australia that everyone vaguely knows about. People do like photographing themselves in front of the opera house, but it’s not even on the same level, and what on earth are people photographing themselves in front of in New Zealand, the spot of ground where one scene of The Lord of the Rings was filmed? There seems to be a clear correlation between materialism and the issues that are going on today, as well as the idea of attention-seeking, so the solutions to all the various problems seem to largely be defined by their invisibility. After all, no one even thinks that maybe, it isn’t the case that life has to be a tradeoff between having a house and not dying of an easily-preventable illness, but the government is just going into debt to get people to buy Chinese junk and offsetting the costs to you without you getting a say in it.

However, when someone considers the idea of materialism, more than the cheap Chinese junk cluttering up people’s attics and basements, and even more so than people buying new sportscars they can’t afford (which mostly have parts made in China,) they think of one thing: a diamond ring. As we all know, diamond rings are mined in South Africa, even if people have to think a little to remember that. I’ve heard people talking about the BRICS say, of course China is going to come out on top, and then laugh and ask if South Africa would come out on top. South Africa actually very much thinks they’re going to come out on top if you pause for a moment to consider where Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are from among other people, though I think, surprise surprise, no one in the BRICS is going to come out on top. Russia has already tried to nuke everyone in 2022 and the PRC stopped them, and when the PRC economically collapses, I think yes, that’s when it’s 72 minutes (not hours, minutes) until all the Northern Hemisphere countries nuke each other in the famed MAD.

I heard this wouldn’t really affect the Southern Hemisphere, except apparently just South Africa because it’s already really cold there, and some Northern Hemisphere countries like Switzerland have ton of bunkers and enough infrastructure that they probably have a good shot at surviving, though they’re still going to be targeted, and even other countries like the Netherlands are working on repairing their Cold War shelters even if it’s not enough for every resident including guests like it is in Switzerland, and other places such as Iceland, Greenland, and Bhutan just have too many geographic barriers and aren’t going to be targeted because they don’t mess with anyone. So overall, the results of a nuclear war look a lot less like the end of civilization to me, and more like an inversion of the current political dynamic. Even if the population is reduced by billions of people, this is mostly just in places that people actually pay attention to, which seem to correlate with the whole materialist greed dynamic.

What I think is a really sad thing about the whole South Africa situation is no, Africa is not geographically cursed to an eternity of poverty if it has the most mineral resources of anywhere ever and people are literally murdering each other to try to limit access to them and make themselves rich. That behavior is cursed, but it’s not exactly cursed to poverty. Africa has plenty of wealth, it’s just all in the hands of the Musks and Thiels of the world, insert “go back to Africa” here. If you’ve ever read The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein, you’re familiar with the scene where tech advances so much because someone finds there’s cheap gold. I don’t think this is very realistic at all based on exactly what we see in South Africa, because all these minerals are actually common, and people are just artificially limiting the supply. I keep seeing these stupid Marvel ads for a movie about how the discovery of adamantium would supposedly change everything. The sad part is I’m sure these South African gems would change everything, but these aren’t a new material, they’re just in restricted supply. People knew what copper is long before they knew it was conductive and how to make it into circuits, and people knew what quartz was long before they knew what piezoelectricity is and how you can make a clock tick with it. Magnetite is not named after magnetism, but after the Greek region of Magnesia, and the Greek word for amber was electron, meaning “shining Sun” because of its color, which only later gave its name to the phenomenon of electricity.

I think it’s not some new, well, material I think that would advance technology, but some unknown property of something a bunch of South Africans would rather turn into overpriced tacky jewelry by artificially limiting the supply, which in turn is done by murdering black people. That’s not very nice of them, but then, we’ve never met a nice South African, and that’s not bloody surprising, man. It’s even more coincidental that the fictional idea is “adamantium” and that literally is just “diamond” (a-damant = diamond.) Diamonds in particular seem to be the ultimate dielectric material, which I’m sure Elon Musk would know if he actually did his degree in materials science, since I know that and I didn’t even do that and I’m not planning to either because I’m not so materialistic I guess. It’s also funny that that’s also what he always claimed to study, yet he made his whole fortune wasting South African materials that would otherwise be technologically useful even if we certainly need more studying of them to know exactly how.

I disagree that Africa has the worst geography. Clearly, all of the world’s wealthiest people are African. I think the issue is that the top approximately five Africans are hoarding 99.99% of the wealth. Yes, I mean top five, not top 5%, top five. Just remember, we don’t ask people why they’re white, Karen. It’s because they hate black people. Not everyone who’s white, but these people who specifically moved to South Africa because they thought Canada wasn’t racist I mean moral enough and because they wanted to punch a black person, take the gems, and sell them in NYC, yes, they specifically are white because they hate black people.

Additionally, most of Africa used to be rainforest, just like North America, apparently Europe, and most places inhabited by humans prior to the invention of farming. I would hazard to guess Africa has so much desert just because this is where farming was invented so it’s had the longest to become artificially deserted, then Europe is second to get farming and get deserted, and Asia is third.

Humans drove rainforest into savannah in ancient Africa

So no, Africa isn’t even poor, it’s just a few Africans taking all of the wealth, and people pretending like they don’t count because they’re white and they take it out of the geographic region of Africa. But clearly they’re still African even if they’re white and living abroad.

Perhaps the legend of the ring of the Nibelungs that inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Wagner’s Ring Cycle as well as being referenced in Django Unchained has some basis in reality, but it’s not some generic “power,” and certainly not invisibility, but visibility that’s granted by greed and materialism, and this is what they want. Throw the de Boers I mean de Beers Nibelung diamond rings back into the river and make the South Africans who unleashed the Balrog and trapped Broomhilda (sic) go back to Africa already. We see the real corrupting influence of greed and the display appears to be the whole point.