Open Thread

Open Thread #70

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110 thoughts on “Open Thread #70

  1. So the Name of elon Musk new kid is ‘X Æ A-12 Musk’ – it’s not a typo. I struggle to find words for this.

    1. I bet this was the idea of his wife. Musk himself is a megalomaniac but he’s not bonkers.

    1. This is great! I’ll turn this into an Open Post later today. Another very important angle here is that if she wasn’t attracted to him, it would be sexual assault.

    2. It’ll take a bit longer before that article goes live. The “I cain breef” thingy in the U.S. occupied too much of my time.

    3. “It was wrong to air this video,” – because it exposes our stupid arguments

    4. Has anyone seen the movie (I think from the 1950s) Dr. Srangelove? In the interview with epidemiologist Dr. Wittkowsky that I saw on YouTube about Covid ( pulled of course) they mentioned it. Wittkowsky related it to social distancing and Dr Fauci hinting that we might need to never shake hands again. He said that in the movie Dr. Srangelove didn’t want humans to exchange bodily fluids again.

  2. I’ve read your meditation book, liked it very much and i am trying to apply the material, currently doing 30-minute sessions once a day. You stress the importance of eliminating distractions and finding a quiet place. What advice would you give someone who does not have access to the latter? Is it really that important? Can you reach the same quality with the noise? I live right next to a very busy road and there’s literally always traffic noise, even late in the evening and with all windows shut. And i sadly also don’t live alone (yet, working on that) and the house itself is quite noisy as well, so there’s usually also other noise coming from elsewhere in the house. Wearing buds? Earplugs? Or does it not matter that much?

    1. I personally drown out outside noise with a fan. I find the consistent white noise soothing actually, but you may or may not. You can find different noise videos for sleeping on youtube and play them through speakers or headphones on a laptop as an alternative.

    2. That’s a good idea, too. However, when I think of a really busy road, you’d have to turn up the white noise to a very high level. The soothing effect only kicks in when it is not too loud.

    3. Being in a quiet place is very important for meditation. You’ll fight an uphill battle if you want to practice meditation in a noisy environment. I have never used noise-canceling headphones, so I don’t have first-hand experience of how effective they are. If they can cancel noise without needing to play an audio source for that effect, that should work. Plugs work when the noise level is relatively low.

    1. This is a great video. To put things into perspective, you have to consider that you are looking at a very particular demographic here. This woman is essentially a mail-order bride. Thus, to be part of that demographic, she needs to be a gold-digger. That being said, I was surprised by how blunt she was.

    2. I remember the point I began thinking about American cereal and realizing we were essentially eating candy for breakfast. When I was a kid my mom bought us the more healthy cereal like grape nuts, corn flakes, and cheerios. But my overweight older sister would pour sugar all over it and I copied her.

      Today I have a high protein, low carbohydrate/sugar breakfast. Unfortunately I do put too much sugar in my coffee. Lately I switched to unsweetened tea.

      I like how he told her about exercise, “it’s time, baby.” In the US some women are actually offended if someone buys them a gym membership for their birthday or Christmas. Hell, I requested my current gym membership for Christmas years ago. It’s good the American chick is positive about it. She wants to please this Russian Chad.

    3. The other women seemed offended when he brought up that his broad should slim down, though.

    4. Now that I think about it, I believe that a lot of these lazy, unhealthy breakfast choices have to do with women working outside the home. When my parents were together and my mom was a homemaker we enjoyed some great prepared breakfasts. Even after my dad lost his job and my mom got a job outside the house she still took some time to make me Malto Meal (like Cream of Wheat) with a little milk and butter in it. Tasted great. And oat meal with some milk and raisins in it. Tasted like the a Mexican drink Horchata. After she left my dad, she just bought dry cereal and we dumped sugar on it.

    5. I don’t buy this argument, simply based on the fact that (some) men are able to live on their own, hold down a job, and prepare a non-crappy breakfast. It’s thus an excuse when a woman tells you she is too busy to prepare a bowl with some oatmeal and milk. That doesn’t take longer than dumping crappy sugary cereals into a bowl.

    6. @Deus
      I have to thank you for that video. Eastern Europeans, particularly, are very blunt and into-your-face. They are very honest and do not all the fake niceness of USA. And I honestly like that a lot.

  3. Cute 18 y.o. lass gets a male cat fish tinder account (of a decent guy, I would say), starts out enthusiastic and curious only to feel completely down after 5 days of scarce matches and much ghosting by rather unattractive girls. (This experiment should be forced on every thot.)

    https://youtu.be/DZTIbHIsIYw?t=402

  4. I’m watching the new Jeffrey Epstein documentary and the thing that strikes me is that all these women act disgusted and cry on camera saying they had no idea he would fuck then etc, when in reality what I see is that all of these women were probably obsessed with this guy because of his wealth and status. Now that he’s dead they’re all on video basically saying how they’re the victim and they’re traumatized. Lol…

    1. Women are (self-declared) perennial victims. At this point, it’s basically a cliche that every ex-boyfriend was “abusive”, “emotionally distant” and so on and so forth. Yet, they banged them for months before they got dumped. It’s a bit like how Jews never move to a different country. In hindsight, they always “flee”.

  5. Aaron I was wondering how many languages you spoke and at what level. How did you learn them and was it a difficult process.

    I’m assuming you speak german and swedish but I might be mistaken.

    I’m asking asking because I’m trying to learn a foreign language myself right now and thought you might have some insight into it.

    1. Well, how many people do you know who are genuinely fluent in a foreign language? Their numbers are minuscule. I work in an international environment where everybody supposedly speaks English but the average level is often shockingly low. This sometimes includes even native speakers who went to decent universities.

      What is your goal? If you want to be able to survive as a tourist somewhere and be able to, for instance, attempt to order local dishes before the friendly waitress informs you that she speaks (some) English, then that can be achieved in about two weeks. Being somewhat competent will simply not give you many benefits. You’ll probably not even be able to read children’s books without a dictionary because you don’t know the language’s idioms well enough. Thus, you’re looking at a multi-year effort to become somewhat fluent. However, if you want to get to the point where you are genuinely fluent, you will also need “immersion”. This term is really used in the field of language acquisition. This means that you need to live abroad for an extended period of time and get out of your college or expat bubble. Yes, this also means having sexual relations with the local women because you’re not going to learn pillow talk in a foreign language from books and I don’t think you can call yourself fluent in a foreign language if you’re not able to use it in all kinds of situations.

    2. I have a method of learning, and my goal I guess is to get good enough to read good literature in that language.

      I was just wondering how many languages you spoke. And how you learned them.

    3. I tend to not directly answer personal questions publicly, if at all. For language learning, I’ve found immersion to be rather important.

    4. What usually works is:

      1. Having a talent for language (musical talent, too), since a language is learned with your ears.
      2. Having a high IQ (since structures must be understood)
      3. Having been raised bi-lingual with two non-similar languages. English and German share too many roots and would not count. Hungarian and German do count (admittedly an extreme example, since Hungarian has no indo-germanic basis)
      4. Specifically with regards to bi-lingual upbringing, it seems to have an impact which parent speaks the non-local language. I have observed that kids adopt better if the mother speaks the foreign language and the father speaks the language of the place the family lives in.
      5. Living in the country that speaks the language and actually working there.
      6. Not hanging out with expats
      7. The respective country not speaking English very well. (Think France or Japan).
      8. Making an actual effort by trying to think in the language.
      9. Watching stand-up comedy in the language one wants to learn.

      Take it from me, all these apply to me. I speak four languages fluently and especially with French you couldn’t tell me apart from a local. I got the jokes, the play with words, the insiders, the non verbal aspects, the sounds one makes that are not words, everything. I haven’t met many who can demonstrate the same level of command.
      Notabene points 1-4 are out of your control, so it is very much a gene lottery thing.

    5. @Neutralrandomthoughts: „I haven’t met many who can demonstrate the same level of command.“ I believe you at once. You are really blessed in that regard. I might tick the first 2 points and that’s it.

      May I ask: your four fluent languages would be German, Bulgarian, English and French? What about Schwizerdütsch?

    6. Immersion is definitely extremely important. We learned about different language learning strategies in a teaching credential course I took years ago (dropped out because of lack of jobs in the field). This is required and heavily stressed to teach the future teachers of America.

      In one class session we discussed it in groups and one of the group members seemed apauled by immersion strategies. A Mexican immigrant in my group said there were no other options when she came here (today they just teach them in Spanish, with a small amount of English thrown in). The SJW white chick was like “See! I can’t believe they did that to you!”

      I tried to contain myself. I said, “She learned English. She wouldn’t be here today if she didn’t.” The strategy was a success! The Mexican girl spoke perfect English without a hint of an accent! And here this stupid white chick is complaining! I have countless examples of immersion working here in Southern California. Not just the grasping of English but the immigrants being fully acculturated. The strategies they currently use only create division and segregation. Exactly what liberals claim to oppose.

    7. I love learning languages. My passion is History and Linguistics. I find them to be intimately related.

      I learnt French in primary school, but dropped it in 4th grade to pursue English. My mom told me to learn it as it became more commonly used than French. I still love French very much and have self-learned by reading French historical works.

      I learnt classical Chinese on my own. First, I just learnt basic and simplest characters, then I realized that they combine these characters to form new ones. When I got better, I bought Shiji 史記 and learnt it by reading original text alongside with it’s Vietnamese translation. It was a gratifying experience.

      I learnt Arabic a bit and found Qu’ran verses rather beautiful. But I don’t have much time so I decided to drop it.

    8. @Simplicissimus

      Yes! Correct, these are the four languages, DE and BG being those I was born with. I did learn Spanish, too and since it is so incredibly close to French, if I went to live in say Argentina, I’d be speaking it like a local in about 1 year, although I only had 2 years of classes at school. Then again, I tick all boxes, so… I’m not average by any measure.

    9. @Simplicissimus

      I forgot to add my comments about Swiss German.
      I consider it a separate language, due to its different structure and tremendous variation in vocabulary.
      That being said, I do fully understand a multitude of dialects, be it Zürich, Luzern, Zug, Bern or Eastern Switzerland, not so much the southern parts.
      I do struggle with proper pronounciation, though. I can pull it off for a few words, but it soon becomes clear that I am actually German.
      Listen to Vitalik Buterin and even though he has a quasi perfect English, the Russian accent sneaks in here and there. That’s about my level in Swiss German. My non-verbal skills are more Swiss than his are English/Canadian/American/whatever, though 😀

    10. @ Neutralrandomthoughts

      Do you where can I learn more colloquial French? I understand literary books, but I don’t know where can I learn more slangs and casual French. My friends told me that I speak like a robot. 🙂

    11. @ Aaron Sleazy

      Do you know any good website to learn German. I teach myself Russian using this channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/vanilla167333

      I find her very cute.

      While German has fewer cases, Russian sentence structure comes more naturally to me, even though they are both flexible.

    12. I can’t help you with that. Check the website of the Goethe Institute. They may have curated lists of books, movies, and YouTube channels.

    13. @Neutral

      Your mention of Argentina seems tailored to elicit a comment from me… ?

      So yeah, I will be waiting right here for you to show up and see how quickly you can pick up our accent.

    14. @Neutral: That’s a cool mix. Especially if you’ll expand it with Spanish soon.

      „I do struggle with proper pronounciation, though.“ I think everyone with an intact larynx and healthy vocal cord does. Native speakers of the various Switzerdütsch dialects properly have fucked up theirs by the age of 4 (no offense to all you Kollege out there 😉

    15. @Yarara, I’d love to take that challenge, hehe

      @CQV – That’s where the stand-up comedy comes in.

    16. “@CQV – That’s where the stand-up comedy comes in.”

      Do you know where can I find these stands up.

      I enjoy Craig Ferguson very much! Is there someone that is somewhat similar to him out there?

    17. “properly have fucked up theirs by the age of 4”

      That’s an interesting line of thought. I think some languages are better than others to have as a mother tongue. It seems that on average, some languages always leave an accent, no matter what, others less.
      Swiss German is a pretty bad example – no matter what language they speak, only very few Swiss German native speakers manage to get rid of their thick accent. Same for most Eastern Europeans. Poland and Czech Republic seem to fare better though than say Russia, Bulgaria or similar. Romania is a different ball game, as it’s not a Slavic language.
      So, some languages are pretty clean, and one can achieve an accent-free level of a foreign language. German can be, American English, too. The Brits and the French are fucked in that regard. The Scandinavians usually do pretty well if they make an effort.

      That’s why I stress the upbringing with two “confronting” languages. It sort of creates a flexibility in your brain and maybe also physically in your vocal cords. I don’t know, I’m just speculating, but someone who speaks perfectly Arabic and Norwegian seems to fare better compared to someone who was raised with Italian and Portuguese.

    18. @CQV
      “Do you know where can I find these stands up.
      I enjoy Craig Ferguson very much! Is there someone that is somewhat similar to him out there?”

      I don’t know about Ferguson and I won’t look him up and provide you with a comedy-style equivalent in French. That’s quite a lot to ask from me, if you think about it. There are plenty of French-speaking stand-up comedians on Youtube and it’s a question of personal taste.
      I suggest you start becoming a go-getter (like it’s needed to learn a language) and do the work yourself.

    19. @Neutral: I agree with all your elaborations. “someone who was raised with Italian and Portuguese” Yeah, pretty “pointless” combination. (Somewhat fitting anecdote: I once came across a Brazilian hooker making rather fluent (it seemed), lively conversation with her Romanian bawd in Italian. And this was no very high level venue at all, so I don’t think they had some kind of (pseudo-)academic background like some girls form a “high-class” escort agency.)

    20. “I don’t know about Ferguson and I won’t look him up and provide you with a comedy-style equivalent in French. That’s quite a lot to ask from me, if you think about it. There are plenty of French-speaking stand-up comedians on Youtube and it’s a question of personal taste.
      I suggest you start becoming a go-getter (like it’s needed to learn a language) and do the work yourself.”

      I am sorry. But that’s only a request for a simple recommendation, similar to book recommendation. It’s just that simple and nothing too much for you to react that way.

      Thank you though

    21. @Neutral

      What about Vitalik Buterin’s non-verbal skills? I got the chance to meet him when he was in Singapore and nothing in particular struck me about them being un-North American. I remember that he habitually chewed on his fingernails and had gaudy cat designs on his bag and watch.

  6. Well if you want to read good literature in foreign language then you should get to know professor Alexander Arguelles. He is able to read classic(!) literature without using dictionary in many languages. And by many I mean 20+ (probably 30+) languages. And he claims it is not his talent, but his hard work and good methodology is the reason he is so advanced in his languages. He can study for 14-16 hours per day. There is no magic bullet here. Here you can find his daily routing in highlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oudgdh6tl00 .

    One also has to remember that knowing Portuguese make it much, much easier to learn Spanish.

    Here is his excellent youtube channel with advices for language learners :
    https://www.youtube.com/user/ProfASAr/videos

    I also recommend listening to this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUqME-RTtIs

    The very interesting fact he says in it is that typical movie consists of about 9000 (different) words, whereas in classic book you can find even 20000 words.

    In old times there were no translation of literature. The reason of it was that is was completely normal thing for educated people to be able to speak multiple languages.

    Now I moved my interest more into Software Development, but later in life it would be nice to learn more foreign languages. And I started to learn English by myself in my early twenties and learn more in half a year than in 12 years of school education (Couldn’t say a sentence after I finish high-school.)

  7. Serious question:

    Do you guys think the United States will balkanize at some point in the future?

    1. I think it’s quite plausible. I’m not familiar in detail with the demographics of the United States, but from what I gather, there are very large Mexican minorities in Californa and Texas, then there are Cubans in Flordia, and in addition the black population seems rather discontent. If the United States has proven anything, then it is that the “melting pot” is nothing but a fantasy. One key element of Balkanization is the presence of hostile groups of different ethnicities. That’s already a given. The other is drawing some new lines on the map. That essentially exists already. When I visited a friend in Chicago years ago, he pulled out a map, traced some street on it, and told me to not explore the city beyond it, for my own safety, and even in some of the supposedly safe areas I felt rather uncomfortable in.

    2. Well with this hoax riot going on I wouldn’t be surprised if the US doesn’t get involved in a civil war.

    3. Depends on how you define future… I would say, not in our lifetimes. Current riots and instability are a far cry from other more serious situations they have gone through without splitting. The existence of ghettos in itself is a menace to local peace and order, but it wont split a country up just by itself.

      The different minorities in the USA are too intermingled geographically to make physically splitting the country and unrealistic option. The part attempting to split off needs to be physically, militarily defensible and economically viable by itself. No minority is numerous enough in any part of the country to pull this off. Plus this minority in question must percieve themselves as sufficiently different, a different nation by themselves, and motivated enough to want to fight for independence. Torching cars, vandalizing property and looting stores is not a prelude to an independece movement.

    4. Let’s not get hung up on semantics here. Segregation also happens if there are large parts of a city in which the rule of law no longer applies.

      Also, the issue of intermingled minorities can be resolved. I could easily see the various Latino gangs in Los Angeles claiming part of the city for themselves. Just watch what will happen once Democrat states really dismantle the police!

    5. @Aaron: “When I visited a friend in Chicago years ago,…” This made me think of your “Deathwish” review:

      https://www.aaronselias.com/2018/04/10/death-wish-1974-and-death-wish-2018-as-timely-critical-social-commentary/comment-page-1/

      “Death With (1974) is set in NYC and at the end, the protagonist movies to Chicago. In Death Wish (2018) the opposite movement takes place as the protagonist moves from Chicago to New York City…Chicago is currently a mess. There is even the sometimes used moniker “Chiraq” to allude to the war-like environment.”

      I recently came across “Chicongo”, which I like even better.

  8. Here is some food for thought: To me, it seems that the current riots in the United States are an example of a virus bringing down the host. There have been speculations that Covid-19 originated in the United States and was an attempt to conduct biological warfare against China (do a bit of research first if you want to challenge me on that; I view it as a very plausible hypothesis). If that is true, then Covid-19 backfired spectacularly as it led to the U.S. wrecking its economy. Similarly, the State Department has spent decades on perfecting the craft of subversion via psychological warfare. Just read up on “color revolutions”. However, now the Deep State has lost control and they have unleashed, perhaps even deliberately, a color revolution on their own soil. It’s quite fascinating.

    To my American readers, I hope you’re safe and that you’ve stacked up on food and ammo. It’s sad to see that Trump is such a fucking pussy. Wasn’t he supposed to be the law-and-order guy?

    1. I hope that you don’t believe those rubbish conspiracy theories. China is the origin of that virus.

    2. So far, no conclusive argument regarding the origin of this virus has been presented.

    3. Covid-19 as bioweapon is still nonsense. And yeah, I have been doing my research on this since january, and still ongoing. And no, I will disagree strongly here, I do not find it plausible in the least.

      1) getting a modified virus out in the open is a little bit like sending out a computer virus. The code (dna) is there for anyone who catches the bug to study it for signs of manipulation. I very much doubt this can be done skillfully enough to hide traces of gene editing, as multiple genetics experts from multiple countries and affiliations have already expressed.

      2) If someone did design this as a weapon, they need to be fired for incompetence. Who the fuck spends time and resources to weaponize a bug that has an infection fatality rate of between 0.2% and 0.8%.

      3) Bio attack strategy makes zero sense for either country, even if the virus was efficiently deadly. Once the bug is out, you have no control over where it goes. We see the same in cyber warfare – lots of splashback damage if you cannot control who the virus infects. Attacks directed from Russia to Ukraine have led to secondary infections in russian computer systems, as well as all over the world. The US-israeli Stuxnet virus directed against Iran infected a lot of systems around the world, the only reason it did not cripple any was because it was very specifically designed to affect the industrial control systems of uranium enrichment centrifuges. This kind of strategy only makes sense if you are a Marvel comics villain, or some doomsday cult, and want to see the world go under. Not even Al Qaeda or ISIS had a strategy that called for this.

      4) given the interconnectedness of world travel (and the apparent high contagiousness of the virus), it would have been obvious from the start that it would be close to impossible to contain in China. And it should have been evident that, in case it was possible to contain, the authoritarian chinese state would stand a better shot at it than democratic north america or europe. If you are the USA leaking out a virus, way to cripple yourself and your allies. If you are China leaking the virus, way to cripple your customers you depend on.

      5) Still, its even pointless to even argue this point, since this is a virus that has a very low fatality rate and kills overwhelmingly old and sick people who are close to death anyway, so the virus by itself is not really making a dent in the economically active population. If governments had focused on isolating at risk populations in hospitals and care homes from the beginning, and let everyone else go about their day with some common sense hygiene recommendations (you know, like they did with H1N1 a decade ago), none of this would have happened. Instead, in order to free up beds in the hospital systems, places like New York and UK discharged Covid-19 positive patients (who were not very ill but still contagious) back to nursing homes, thereby infecting the very population they were supposed to be protecting. Speak about bureaucratic incompetence, do you really think the “deep state” bureaucrats are orders of magnitude much smarter than these people, to the point of being able to pull off complex global conspiracies? Call me skeptic.

      6) which brings me to the point I already made before on your other blog: the global chaos caused by the pandemic is a result of panicky governments improvising measures on the fly, and copying each other. And there was no way to predict that governments around the world would react to the outbreak with such nonsensical panic. If anything, before the pandemic hit, the weight of available evidence would have led to the opposite conclusion. Experience from previous epidemic and pandemic outbreaks stretching back the last 100 years makes it clear that governments and society usually did NOT panic and engage in nonsensical lockdowns (basically every flu epidemic since 1918, even when they had deadlier infection fatality rates than covid-19), and targeted more or less rational and common sense measures to deal with the deadlier ones (SARS, MERS, Ebola), stamping out the outbreaks before they got too far. Why suppose beforehand that Covid would be any different, especially when it is so mild most people wont ever know they had it? Especially after the H1N1 fiasco a decade ago had already made us suspicious of exaggerated claims about pandemics.

      7) Moreover, lockdowns were never part of the plan pretty much anywhere. This question had been studied during saner times, at least in the US, and it was rightly concluded by epidemiologists that lockdowns were counterproductive and that the damage would outweigh any benefits by far. I heard mention of similar analyses performed in EU countries in the wake of avian flu and H1N1, but I have not looked up the documents themselves. So if you are planning a bio-attack, if you did any intelligence on your targets likely response, there you had another reason against deploying a virus barely deadlier than the flu.

      8) As is increasingly clear, politicians basically chose to listen only to the “experts” who told the scariest stories and improvised their lockdowns overriding the recommendations of those experts who disagreed. Court cases have already brought brought relevant documents (like the british SAGE meeting minutes) to public light in the UK and Denmark. The drive to be seen as “doing something” is strong in “public servants” who depend on votes and popularity to keep their offices and bureaucracies, even if that something is extremely counterproductive. In the case of the Covid crisis they have gone severely overboard, but its basic underlying principles not much different of those at work in policies like the several pointless “wars” against climate change, poverty, drugs, porn, sex work, gender or racial “inequality”. In the counterterrorism community this is seen in the concept of “security theater”, where cumbersome and expensive measures that are largely ineffective at fighting terrorism are nevertheless implemented because better to be seen doing something, anything, just in case, better safe than sorry. You know, the mentality that leads to waste billions, but “if it saves at least one child from being sex-trafficked…. blah blah.,”

      9) race riots are nothing new in the US, they occur with some regularity. The massive unemployment caused by the lockdowns surely has something to do with the virulence of this new round. Antifas, leftist militants, foreign agents and other opportunists are always ready to add to the havoc when possible. We have plenty of experience with this destabilizing strategy in Latin America (the culprits around here are frequently directed by Venezuela and Cuba).

      10)If the US had a coherent strategy for crippling China, trade war in coordination with the europeans and chinese rivals would be the way to go. China should hardly want to cripple the US or Europe at this point, since their economy is based on exports and heavily dependent on western markets, as the effects of the recent trade war and the effect of the 2008/09 downturn on the chinese economy showed. Given the interdependence of the economies, however, this is a risky strategy with unpredictable results and secondary effects, it would be much wise to focus on decoupling your economies step by step.

      11) Not saying the US State Dept are not attempting to manipulate countries, elites, public opinions – that is, in fact, part of the mission of every foreign service of any country. The US doesnt seem to be much better at it than other powers, if anything they frequently come across as rather incompetent, as the last 20 years of US policy in the Middle East and Asia can amply attest.

    4. There are claims that the virus shows traces of gene editing. Also, a low mortality rate is very helpful for spreading it far and wide. In contrast, a much more lethal virus would simply burn out quickly.

      I don’t disagree with your other points. However, you also have to take into account that there are some genuinely evil people among the elites who do not act rationally. The same is true for the less elite local politicians. I think one of the reasons so many governments jumped on the Covid-19 bandwagon was that it allowed them to push through societal change on a grand scale such as restricting freedom of movement for the average person. I would be very suprised if air traffic returns to pre-crisis levels. Instead, I fully expect a two-tiered system in which only the elites and well-off will have easy access to air travel. This is the logical consequence of the mass hysteria before Covid-19: man-made global warming.

      On a related note, look at the mass hysterias we went through this year alone: man-made global warming, Covid-19, and race riots. All of them were manufactured. I wonder what’s going on here. Maybe guys like Kissinger and Soros are afraid they are going to die soon so they are making an extra effort to see their new socialist utopia ushered in before they finally kick the bucket. I think that what is currently unfolding is an attempted reenactment of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Probably it’s only a few years late because they didn’t think that Trump would get elected.

    5. @Yarara

      Thanks, you are making some great points and I highly appreciate your inputs.

      I would like to point out that from a “weaponize it”-perspective, a low-mortality, yet high-infection-rate virus is much better as a bio weapon than a virus that has a high mortality rate and makes people drop dead on the spot.
      From an evolutionary perspective, the most successful virus is the mildly infectious one, as it gets to get transmitted before the host dies.

      Covid19, with it’s very long incubation period and its rather low mortality rate is just perfect.
      Was it engineered? I have no clue, but it does smell very much like a fantastic panic-generator that receives a totally out-of-proportion-response from governments and legitimizes even more government control.
      9/11 and he Patriot Act anybody?

    6. @Neutral

      Sort of agree-disagree there. Very aggressive diseases are very self-limiting if they incpacitate or kill the host too soon. Think rabies. In order to spread far and wide, the organism in question faces a strong selection pressure to become less virulent and more symbiotic with its host (parasites too, by the way).

      From a weapons perspective, you could argue the best combination is high transmissibility (like flu), long incubation time, long window of contagiousness, and then impairment or death of the host. It also depends on what your objective is, really. Plenty of weapons are intended to be disruptors rather than killers, as long as it diminishes the capability of an enemy to fight.

      For example mustard gas in WW1 had a very low fatality rate (~5% perhaps), but it incapacitated soldiers and overhwelmed medical facilities. Also, mustard gas is more persistent than chlorine (or sarin, but that was developed much later), so the surfaces and equipment affected remained contaminated and needed cleanup. VX similarly has an extended contamination effect. Antipersonnel land mines and cluster bombs are another example of disruptors, generally designed to maim rather than kill. Notice that all these systems tend to have a lot of collateral damage on the civilian side.

      Bioweapons, however, do not usually rely on natural transmission methods, rather a bug is incorporated into a weapons system and deployed by a military force. Think gravity bombs, artilley shells, sprayer aricraft, etc… this is a way to limit the possibility I mentioned of “splashback damage”.

      Even so, its effects on the battlefield were not really worth the cost. Plenty of complications arise, most biological agents are living organisms (or almost living, like viruses) that have to be produced and kept alive while integrated into a weapons system, in storage and during deployment, they must be able to survive the firing of the weapons and associated stresses in temperature, pressure, etc… and be dispersed in a certain concentration over a target in order to be most effective. Most bugs do not survive for long outside a host, so the effect timeframe is very limited (anthrax spores are a notable exception, which is why they were popular with bioweapon engineers).

    7. My fellow Latinx (LOL at the term) Yarara bringing some “down-to-earth-ness” as always.

      To prevent this from being just a groveling comment, I’ll add that what guys like Aaron and a Norwegian expat I met in Prague whom I keep in touch with are missing is that they’ve probably only treated with elite Chinese showing their best faces (one may argue ALL Singaporeans are elite Chinese BTW). Elite Chinese from the CCP and lower class dog-eaters from the 99.9% might be a different experience for opposing reasons, though I can’t say I’ve ever met one personally.

      I mean, do you really believe that those Chinese oligarchs my Norwegian pal does business with don’t belong to the same class of exploiters as the guys from the US’ “Deep State”? BTW, I acknowledge the Deep State exists, and not because I’m a fan of the show 24, but because they’re obscure enough while being in-your-face about what they want the masses to believe (case in point: George Floyd means COVID-19 is no longer relevant).

    8. Doesn’t the same argument apply to your own race? I’d be surprised if you had meaningful interactions with members of the bottom 25% in your country. I agree with your statement, though, as I have not interacted with a regular, blue-collar Chinese person. Similarly, though, I don’t meet people of the same social standing here in the West either.

    9. I worked with chinese manufacturers back in the day, when I was in international supply chain. I have a rather negative view of the experience. It was almost as bad as working with India, but I might be biased because I mostly worked with India and Sri Lanka. Maybe if I had worked more with China I would have gotten more plenty more containers of defective products that no one would have taken responsibility for, and my view would be even worse. In defense of India, they did at least pick up the phone and listen to your complaints, and promise to make up for it. I dont want to extrapolate too much from my single experience, but I knew from industry partners than I was not alone.

      I think some people (Aaron included) are so fed up with the current decadence of western culture (a diagnosis I fully share, by the way) that they are less sensitive to the dysfunction in the asian cultures they so much admire. Not only culture, but their political systems in particular.

      I always laugh inside when people talk about how wise the thousands-year-old culture of the chinese is compared to us…. such wisdom never stopped them from adopting some of the worst western ideas, like communism, and slaughtering millions of their own in the process.

    10. American here, but thankfully not in the states rn (although I do miss hanging out with my fascist friends, expatistan is shitlibby as fuck). I completely agree that Trump is a pussy and has let us down. It was kind of a last ditch thing ya know? Since Trump failed, we are on an unmovable political trajectory to Brazil status. Whites will lose majority status in a 2-3 decades unless the whole country falls apart before then.

      My understanding is that the CIA has a fair amount of control over the media:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion#:~:text=These%20individuals%20provide%20the%20CIA,and%20other%20foreign%20media%20outlets.

      There have been plenty of white cop/black suspect shootings, but there hasn’t been a chimpout since 2015/16. The media put this shooting on blast for reasons we can only speculate. Maybe the COVID-19 lockdowns didn’t quite generate the amount of compliance necessary from people, so they figured nationwide chimpouts may get the people begging for totalitarian control?

      I don’t really know. Not losing any sleep over rioters getting hit with rubber bullets, but it’s hard to watch such obvious decline as if we all just accept that decline is inevitable.

    11. I think this is the most plausible explanation. First, the attempt was to push man-made global warming and hope that this kind of “nudging” would lead to people changing their life. That either didn’t happen or didn’t happen fast enough, so Covid-19 turned from a harmless flu into a pandemic. Yet, this facade couldn’t be kept up for long either, thanks to twerking nurses and that soyboy doctor in the UK, Neil Ferguson, who told us we’re all going to die and have to lock us into our homes, yet those rules didn’t apply to him so he traveled across London to bang some fat chick in her 40s. People just stopped taking it seriously, so it was time for more race riots.

      We are watching the US unraveling and, by extension, the West. Previous revolutions I only read about in books, but now I get to experience one first hand. There is also an element of catharsis in watching all of this unfold as we’ve all been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now it’s finally happening.

    12. “I think some people (Aaron included) are so fed up with the current decadence of western culture (a diagnosis I fully share, by the way) that they are less sensitive to the dysfunction in the asian cultures they so much admire. Not only culture, but their political systems in particular.”

      If you ask me: was Chinese bureaucracy advanced compared to the rest of the world prior to the 1800s, I am gonna say yes. They were very much advanced, well-ordered, and centralized. But if you ask me what about the political system of China right at this moment. I am gonna say if you stay there, you are going to live in an immense cage. No google, no youtube, no facebook. Only Baidu, Wechat, QQ. All internet contents were strictly censored.

      Land ownership in China do not have “private land” category. Lands are theoretically properties of the peoples of China. But who are these “peoples”? Isn’t it the government that “represents” its people? From there, one only need to read Chinese to find articles that describe how public officials use their power to seize lands of “peoples” with a price that is much lower than their market value.

      There you go. Freedom of speeches. You guys complain about the lack of freedom of speeches due to a ban on Holocaust denial. Yet you ignore how much information is censored in China. Sleazy even said the only thing you could not say, is against the government. So you are happy with that. Here you can talk about decadence of Western government, over there just open your mouth and you are gonna be a dissident.

      Which is better? Use your head.

    13. @Manuel

      I have to jump in here. It’s laughable that you say ALL Singaporeans are arguably elite Chinese. I don’t know what you mean by this but we are so not! We’re the descendants of illiterate and landless Chinese peasants. The officials and scholars stayed behind in China. Thus Lee Kuan Yew said to Deng Xiao Ping in 1978 that what Singapore has accomplished, China is capable of doing better.

      @Yarara
      Aaron has a penchant for strong authority :p He very much yearns to have been born at a different time in his country’s history, if you know what I mean *cough cough*

    14. Take a look at this video
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFa-cHIwca4

      Project Camelot predicted this would happen 10 years ago. It’s a move that pretends to control and depopulate the earth based on the Georgia Stones. Bill Gates plan to vaccinate everyone, he even resigned off the board of Microsoft to focus on this endeavor with his Bill & Melinda Foundation.

    15. Herkerderker:

      That CIA influence study is from 1976. A lot has changed since then, including the Internet. A powerful agency like the CIA will always have a lot of influence, but it’s nowhere near the level it used to be.

    16. What is this based on? You could as well assume that they have more power than ever. The term “fedposting” exists for a reason, after all.

    17. @Aaron: Well, consider yourself surprised then, because I do regularly treat with people from the lower rungs of society through my work. Of course, some issues arise (cockfighting is a thing in Latin America, to state a famous example), but not to the same level as the DEE in my admittedly biased view.

    18. Interesting. How does that happen? In the West, society is much more segregated, so wouldn’t even know where to meet people from that stratum of society. Only by going to nightclub was I able to leave my own bubble, but even in those clubs I hardly encountered a random sample of society as I hung out with the artsy crowd.

    19. @Aaron: Civil engineers and construction enterpreneurs in the “first world” still have to hire working class men for digging and mixing concrete, right? I think Yarara has mentioned he works in that field and so do I. The only difference is that in these countries, construction handymen (as in, non-specialized workers, contrary to heavy equipment operators and such) are *really* piss poor, not only “low tier”.

    20. @Manuel S:
      Interesting. I think exposure to regular people very healthy. I work in a much more artificial technical environment. You’d be surprised how naive some people are. Those people live in their white, clean enclaves and virtue-signal on social media about man-made climate change, refugees and, more recently, black lives that matter. I bet if they had just one encounter with the realities of multiculturalism, they’d change their tune right away. Wait! I know that they would because I live in one of if not the most segregated Western country.

    21. Ok, this thread is getting long, and there is already another open thread, so my replies will be brief:

      @Aaron: it is still possible that the virus was somehow edited for some purpose and that we find out about it in the future. I am rather arguing it makes no sense strategically. I find it plausible that the virus leaked from the lab, for instance, although some evidence now seems to point to another region as place of origin, months earlier. Maybe a sample was isolated at the virology lab which then was released accidentally or deliberately by some disgruntled or unhinged employee. I think that is more plausible than this being a state directed policy, for the reasons i said before.

      @SleazysWife
      I know, but sometimes I think he is looking too much to the wrong model. I would very much prefer the German Empire 1871-1914 as a role model. WW1 was not a historical inevitability.

      @Manuel
      Indeed, I have a foot in both worlds, I am in the academic world, and at the same time I regularly interact with the working class. Truckers, mechanics, construction workers mostly. I grew up working class myself, originally.

    22. Yarara, My heart swells with pride when I read up on the Second Reich as well. The history of Germany makes me proud to be German. Today’s Germany, not so much.

    23. @Sleazy’s Wife: sorry for the late reply, only after Yarara @ at you I was aware that you had replied to me.

      I think you know what I mean, Singapore is a rich country and quality of life is enviable, etc. In the present. To me the past during the foundation of the country is irrelevant to the point I was making. Or are you telling me that there’s a strong sense of entitlement among “old money” and they despise most Singaporeans as “nouveau riche”? That happens in some places in Europe, I understand, Catalonia particularly.

  9. What’s your guys take in general on the US? I had an offer for a position literally a week before COVID hit. The company is on a hiring freeze now but I’m wondering how economy will bounce back? I know things seem bad now in the US but riots will eventually end and the economy should pickup pretty quickly, I think? The one thing that freaks me out about the US is the bad health care. I spoke to an American colleague of mine and even with company benefits he had to pay $6K American out of pocket for being in the hospital with a stroke last year. That’s pretty scary! Well, maybe Trump being president, for the time being, is pretty scary, too. He’s a wildcard, alright. I live in Canada now, by the way.

    1. @Mitchel: Maybe post your question as well on at https://www.reddit.com/r/metacanada/ ?

      Do you know any one who is Canadian who went to the US, i.e. did the same thing you contemplated?

      As much as Canadians preen on about their superior “free” healthcare, it is paid for via high taxation (as you may have already experienced) and subject to long wait times (thanks refugees!) and truly meh quality.

    2. It depends a lot on what kind of position you are being offered, what pay, and where. $60K in Houston might be a better salary than $80K in NYC, considering NYC taxes and housing.

      Check with the company exactly what your health coverage would cover. Ask them for a copy of the info – most of them should be able to send you a PDF of it. If they’re not willing to share that information (though I think that is legally required, but don’t quote me on it) then that’s a surefire sign to stay away. If they don’t offer health coverage, also stay away, obviously. 🙂

      I’ve lived in both Canada and the U.S.A., in several cities. I’d say the U.S.A. has lower taxes, lower prices, and you overall get more for your money. Health care in the U.S. is less accessible, but of higher quality. It’s not uncommon for CEOs of foreign companies to have health insurance that covers U.S. treatment of serious conditions as an employment benefit.

      The people of Canada make better friends than in the U.S.A., though. I did make good U.S. friends but they were harder to find. The ratio of people who make good friends is definitely more favorable in Canada.

      If there are any questions you want to ask, feel free. Hopefully having lived in both countries long-term (and originally being from a third country, so hopefully a bit more objective) I can be helpful to you. 🙂

    3. @ shaking my head

      I do know 2 people from my office who moved to the US. One to Philly and the other to Las Vegas. They both love it and I believe both are looking to become permanent residents.

      I think you are right about healthcare in Canada. We pay for it. Big time !

      @ karl

      Compared the pay to what I’m getting now and with the exchange, it is higher in the US. Also, the cost of living would be better than where I live now. That being said, who knows when this would happen now?

      Aside from Canada having free healthcare, which in many ways, as others have mentioned, it’s not the best, anyways, I feel like it doesn’t have much going for it.
      Unless you live in BC you are guaranteed AT LEAST 6 months of winter every year. Economy is shaky. Most people are “fake friendly” and very insincere. Cost of living is insane compared to most parts of the US. I also don’t buy that “Canada is so much safer than the US”. There’s many sketchy places in Canada and that mass shooting that happened in NS earlier this year is close to where I was originally born. Bad things can happen anywhere. I would say women are about the same in the US as Canada. Both countries have lots of great options.

      Although the US looks bad now, I do think it’s a great country and will rebound quickly. I believe Aaron even mentioned that it was likely one of the best places to live in the world if you want to make a lot of money and keep the majority of it. If you’re doing well in the US, you seem to be doing really well.

      What’s your take on the future of the US? Which country did you like better?

    4. I’d recommend you wait until the situation in the U.S. improves. Healthcare is a big concern. It does not matter how good your healthcare plan is because chances are that if you really need it, and you can’t work, your employer will simply fire you. Look into stories of medical bankruptcy. It’s truly hair-raising. In your case, seeing that you are Canadian, you can always go back to Canada and get treatment there, though, so you should be fine. Obviously, I don’t know about the details of Canadian healthcare, so better do your own research on this issue.

  10. Don’t know if anyone posted this guy but he is very interesting:

    https://youtu.be/ifsa91eTwdc

    Approached 1000s of women going nowhere (for obvious reasons). But he has a very kind personality, was a straight a student and lined up for a career in Investment banking before turning into an alcoholic because of his life’s faith

    1. This is ridiculous. It’s a great example of how incredibly stupid some women are. Sadly, there is no evolutionary pressure on them because the average guy would fuck her no matter how dumb she is.

  11. Aaron,
    Over the years, you have emphasized the importance of looks, money, and status in the sexual dating market to tip the scale in your favor to increase one’s odds. However, with so much competition in the real world, and with so many Chads that looks > money, what can men do to gain an edge over their competition? In other words, theirs always that one girl that every guy is lusting after (let’s think of a maxim or playboy model). She has her pick. Can a guy develop some sort of edge that would distinguish him aside from looks, money, and status? Or does it boil down to finding a woman who is simply interested in you over other guys, and not bother with women who have hundreds of guys chasing after her?

    1. When we’re talking about Chads, we’re oversimplifying. Imagine there are two Chads going after the same girl. Whom will she pick? That’s where personality differences come into play. She may simply like one Chad more than the other. Yes, I know that “personality” is largely a crock of shit, i.e. if a woman swoons over a guy due to his personality, she is insincere. However, mutual compatibility is real. It even helps with one-night stands but obviously more in longer relationships. Also, consider this: You have two very attractive women who are giving you signals that they are into you. Which one are you going to pick? Or assume that you’ve banged both of them: how would you decide between them, if you had to?

    2. Aaron,
      On a related note, you have emphasized the looks are the upmost important factor for random hookups, one-night stands, etc. However, is there a specific look or preference that women are more attracted to for casual encounters over others? For example, if you took Brad Pit at his prime and a guy like Scotty from Good Looking Loser who is all tatted up, are women more likely to choose a guy like Brad Pit (being clean cut) for a quick fling or Scotty who is all tatted up? Or does this vary from women to women? For instance, a stripper, escort, pornstar is more likely to choose a guy like Scotty, whereas a decent woman is more likely to choose a Brad Pit for a fling?

    3. I met Scotty in person. I’d definitely say that there is no shortage of women who would rather fuck Scotty than Tom Cruise. We’re talking about one-night stands after all and not the prospect of extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from the latter. Extroverted, hypersexual women are more likely to go for guys who look dangerous.

    1. I heard this shit was happening is London. I wasn’t aware of Sweden. White people sure do willingly take a lot of bullshit it seems.

    2. The police was sent there to break up the demonstration, but that lady defied orders. The rest of the police did break it up using pepper spray. The rank-and-file of the Swedish police are actually pretty good over all.

    3. @Karl: „The police was sent there to break up the demonstration, but that lady defied orders.“ In order to secure the downfall of civilization just appoint women as its guardians. Mission accomplished. #CuckDaPolice!

      “The rest of the police did break it up using pepper spray. The rank-and-file of the Swedish police are actually pretty good over all.” Good to know. I rather have dem fellas proclaim ACAB (all cops are bastards) instead of ACAC (all cops are cucks).

      Reminds me of a german green politician’s twitter rant on how the police dare shoot dead an axe- and knife-waving savage who already severely injured 4 train passengers instead of just shooting him “unfit to attack” like it is protocol in stoner la-la-land.

      GERMANY
      yes

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl0Jq8sUEMU

      (Neither her nor there, but I personally find it kind of amusing that the “killer cop’s” last name is “Chauvin”.)

    4. This was a missed opportunity. I think she should have taken that dude’s dick or, better yet, have had a train run on her as this would have perfectly symbolized the relationship the Swedish state has towards the third-world immigrants it clothes, houses, and feeds.

  12. Molyneux has a great breakdown of the events surrounding Floyd’s death:

    https://youtu.be/cbZ2tMV1Eoc

    Some key points:

    -Floyd was a 1st degree felon, plead guilty and spent 5 years in prison.

    -He attempted to rob a pregnant black woman and held a gun to her belly.

    -There was a history of gang related activity.

    -Most recent employment was as a bouncer for a club (businesses have been halted obviously).

    -The cops were called because George Floyd attempted to purchase cigarettes with a blatantly counterfeit bill (the ink had ran or had been smudged, suggesting that the process had been rushed or that Floyd was too impaired to notice).

    -The 911 transcript details that the caller had reason to believe that Floyd was impaired in some way.

    -Floyd resisted supposedly can be seen on video resisting arrest and tossing a bad with a powdered white substance at one point (I have not seen the video, I may have misinterpreted the accounts of these events).

    -The autopsy showed Fentanyl in Floyd’s system, arterial sclerosis (I think) and a confirmative diagnosis of covid 19.

    -The cause of death is believed to be cardiovascular related with no signs of strangulation present.

    This is their black Jesus.

    1. “This is their black Jesus.” He who is of black kin can cast the first stone (might have been an “ally”, though):

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jCpUMUezzY

      (I wonder if Uncle Tim will learn his lesson or double down.)

      By the way: Did you know, Floyd also starred in a porn flick (the habibi show or so)? I also saw a video, in which he is condemning the celebration of thug life amongst black youths. (Why did he not lead by example then?)

  13. Serious Question:

    When you have multiple women(and I mean legitimately beautiful women,7’s and higher)who have Oneitis for you,does this necessarily mean that you are a “Chad” or Chadlite? Or are those women simply needy/crazy/insecure types rather than a representation of a man’s attractiveness?

    1. Who knows. Quit overthinking it and mentally masturbating. The important thing is (I doubt it’s really oneitis) is that you have good-looking chicks interested in you, so I hope you’re actually banging them and not wondering whether or not you’re Chad enough.

    2. Are you really in this situation or are you merely “theory-crafting”?

    3. I’m hesitant to go into detail,because this entire thing sounds completely ridiculous in all honesty,but you are all aware of women and their need to maintain plausible deniability,right? Well…apparently,for the girls in my area/vicinity,this also applies on facebook.

      What I’m talking about is them making posts on facebook(and getting certain people to like them,such as people who look similar to me or share some part of my name) in a subtle attempt to send signals to get me to message them first.

      How do I know this? Because I dealt with a girl like this in the past when I was in college. (I didn’t close the deal in the end because she seemed legitimately crazy and I started to fear the risk of being potentially baby trapped/rape accusations if I pump and dump.) I thought she was just a weird outlier,but apparently this is more common in my place than I thought. I further confirmed this as I messaged one of them and received a positive response. (The virus and country lockdown is the only reason I can’t close the deal right now. I do plan to when it all goes down however.)

      The thing though is that…I don’t really want to get actively involved in the dating scene at the moment,so I’ve been ignoring these signals and merely scrolling/observing,but…the girls who I noticed that have been doing this aren’t stopping. They have been at it for literally weeks(they’ve been getting more and more obvious with the signals…but of course,they won’t message me first. *sigh*),and it doesn’t look like they are going give up anytime soon. Oneitis is the only explanation that comes to my mind here.

      Anyway,I’ll leave it up to you guys whether to believe my story or not. I think its ridiculous,and I can’t talk about it with people IRL because I fear people will think I’m crazy. Maybe this thing is unique in my area and not something you guys have personally dealt with.

    4. You better make a move. This sounds simply like mental masturbation. You’d be surprised how often guys told me about some girl who was supposedly interested in them when they were only being groomed for the friend zone. Your case is a bit different. However, if she does not want to meet up with you one-on-one, she’s not interested. Thus, you need to make a move.

  14. I actually post 2 long posts here and on Aaron Elias blog. The posts are censored. Sleazy was too fearful to let everybody know that he had encountered serious opposition.

    1. On this blog, there is currently nothing in the moderation queue. On my other blog there might as I haven’t logged in for about one week, but I’m about to. As I mention in the comment policy of this blog, if your comment contains more than one hyperlink, it is very likely to get flagged. I use the same settings on both blogs.

    2. On my other blog, one post was stuck in the moderation queue, and it wasn’t from you. So, please don’t make up stuff.

      EDIT: Two of your blogs were stuck in the spam folder on my other blog. On this blog, there is no post from you that was stuck in either the moderation queue or the spam folder.

    3. I apologize for slandering you. I thought you find my opposition harmful to your blog, thus censoring my content.

  15. Sleazy, in your forum, you said that you studied Economics in London. You also said that you are highly gifted in both natural sciences and humanities. Why don’t you choose Mathematics?

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