Open Thread

Open Thread #97

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50 thoughts on “Open Thread #97

  1. Guys, I had a thought why therapy works on some people more than on others, and what you think about it.

    First, I think 95% of psychology is bullshit, a typical pseudo science. And most therapists are scammers. But not all of them. Some can probably really help some people.

    But my post is more about, why are people fucked in the head in the first place, and I came up with this theory:

    – people lie to themselves. They prefer feeling good over the truth, but so they have to bend reality all the time, which causes cognitive dissonance. Typical example the fat woman who tells herself that “big is beautiful”. She feels like shit, but tries to lie to herself that everything is fine.
    Or the guy who tells himself “I’m good with women” while being a virgin.

    – most people are conformists. They have a strong need to fit into the group. So they will just adopt the belief systems of the group. Now they have a problem when their internal desires are in conflict with the group morality.
    e.g. a guy sees a hot girl on the street and his thought is “man I would really like to just throw her on the ground and fuck her right there”.
    But because he got brainwashed by the group ideology, he also thinks “na this is bad, we have to respect women and don’t treat them as sexual objects!”
    Or they want to see themselves as “good people” but deep down they actually are just as egoistic as most other people.

    – holding contradicting beliefs but not realizing it.
    e.g. the feminist women who thinks she wants to be empowered and go for a career, but deep down she wants to be a stay at home mum.
    This probably happens when social conditioning makes people go against their core biological imperatives.

    – people who are just royally fucked.
    e.g. someone who has no job, no girlfriend, bad health, getting diagnosed with depression.
    But he is not depressed, he is supposed to feel bad in this situation. It’s a completely normal response.

    – having unrealistic expectations.
    basically this happens when someone has a grossly distorted view of reality, sometimes combined with crazy beliefs (like “if you want something really bad, the universe will give it to you!”

    So basically a therapist just helps people to discover the lies they tell themselves

    Now of course there a legit cases of trauma and so on, but if I had to guess, I think most people would not need therapy if they were just completely honest with themselves.
    What’s your opinion about this?

    1. That’s why social psychology is pretty good. It’s what psychology would have been if it were more scientific. And it talks about all these kinds of things.

    2. So basically a therapist just helps people to discover the lies they tell themselves

      Well, psychologists and psychoterapists would admit the same to you in private if you said this. The reason things are over-complicated is for marketing reasons and a false sense of doing something important and complex.

      Why should complexity and big words be just for STEM? We can feel special too… But I’ve seen this in tons of fields. When I first entered these fields as a newbie, the people teaching them would overcomplicate things so much and make you feel like it’s this super-complex thing akin to quantum physics. And then 10 years later you’re like “guys… it’s all basically just different ways of packaging/marketing the same thing, it’s just [1 sentence summary] wrapped and presented in different ways”… And the advanced people who never told you this when you were a beginner nod their head and say “well doh”… And then I want to strangle them like… why the fuck you didn’t tell me this 10 years ago. It would have saved me 10 years? And they’re like “dunno…”

      Aaron did that for seduction community, where he separated the bullshit designed to make things feel complex from the basic 2% which make 98% of the difference and prevented guys from wasting 10 years unnecessarily. But this is a common issue in all fields. Not restricted to psychology or pua.

    3. I wonder how much PC plays into it. The first time I saw a therapist I was a 17 years old. The therapist pretty much could have told me that my problems stem from growing up without a father. But that might be too sensitive of a topic to breach for my single mom.

    4. Hell, even if he had told me that, my mom and society had conditioned me to believe that my dad was 100 percent to blame. If I ever mentioned to my mom how hard it was to grow up without a dad, she would immediately respond, “You’re BLAMING me!!” Even though I wasn’t at the time. But now……

    5. @GoodLookingAndSleazy: good point with the PC insanity.
      This is probably also a reason, people cannot talk about a lot of stuff anymore openly, so they kinda have to develop a fake persona.
      That’s why I don’t have many friends anymore and prefer to be alone, I just cannot stand the fake bullshit anymore.
      I also habe this persona when I need it (in the office for example) but I am very aware what my real opinions are and what is the persona.
      But it is exhausting and if I had an active social life this could lead to issues having to do this all the time.
      But I would say PC is basically just lying anyways.

    6. This is good reasoning. I think even if people are not consciously aware of the contradictions, the IQ105 crowd may at least subconsciously realize that something isn’t quite right. The kind of magical thinking you describe seems to be more common among women than men. I recall that the nonsensical book “The Secret” is all the rage among frontholes. The key message boils down to “you can have anything you want; only wish for it hard enough and you’ll get it”. There is also the phenomenon that (single) women, as they get older seem to get more unhinged, whereas mothers seem to get more stable.

    7. Kind of makes sense that single women get more crazy.
      The discrepancy of what they wanted, and what they have achieved, grows bigger with each year. So they need to tell themselves more lies to keep up.
      “I’m attractive, just no men are good enough for me!” while their body is rotting, they get fat and get wrinkles, get cellulitis, it’s no wonder they develop huge cognitive dissonance

    8. These questions have been studied extensively. You should check out a book, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), by Tavris & Aronson.

      For groupthink and conformity, check out Irving Janis, and the Asch conformity experiments.

  2. At a big US hospital, only around 600 out of 1,900 employees have signed up for the vaxx:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/hospital-workers-turn-down-covid-vaccine-theres-too-much-mistrust
    I bet there is nothing to see here, so just line up and get that poison shot that may wreck your immune system and/or give you facial paralysis:
    https://www.wionews.com/world/four-trial-volunteers-who-got-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-developed-bells-palsy-348547
    News stories of the latter got scrubbed off Google rather thoroughly. I’m sure this means nothing.

    1. Sounds about like the ratio at another smaller hospital I know of. No reports of any obvious reactions so far, but it’s not so obvious I’m more concerned with.

  3. Now we now why the UK got a new Covid strain: It’s a pretense to further push back Brexit:
    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/23/nhs-chiefs-urge-pm-to-extend-brexit-transition-by-a-month
    They may get new Covid mutations every month until eternity from now on. In fact, viruses change/mutate all the time anyway, so this is complete nonsense to begin with.

    When I first heard of the new and much more contagious Covid strain in the UK, which necessitated banning air travel, my first thought was that this is, in addition to being a pretense to shut down the hated Christmas celebrations, simply the global government punishing the UK plebs for Brexit. There were also reports about an impending food shortage. That’s just the old playbook: first chaos, then mass starvation, then the socialist paradise.

    1. they are really pushing hard for communism now.
      In Austria they talk about 24/7 are facilities for children (obviously to brainwash them), UBI and a government job program, giving more power to the EU for “global coordination”.
      and of course all kind of new enforcement laws to ensure people behave in the correct way.
      it’s really kind of scary, before corona I was hoping the full communist conversion will take another 50 years or so, but now it seems like the have found the perfect hoax to speed it up.

    2. and it’s obviously always to improve “morality”. God I am so allergic to this word.
      They are always framing it in such a way like there is no alternative, if you are a good person, you have to want it like this.
      And people eat it up because they are brainwashed into this universalist bullshit.

      Communist speak:
      “we should really reduce wealth equality and create a more fair and just society for everyone”

      translation:
      “shut up and give me your money”

    3. It is incredible how little empathy those people have. We already live in an unfair world in which it is very hard to get ahead and they want to make it even harder. Then again, they don’t view people like us as human to being with but only as the “enemy”.

    4. https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000122732006/mehr-gemeinschaft
      straight up propaganda for communism
      “Today we have a society of egoistic consumers instead of the ideal moral society”
      and who says what the “ideal moral society” is. The communists, of course!
      The average consumer of this newspaper must really be a braindead NPC.

      Even if you give them the point that society should be based on moral principles (which I already disagree with, I think laws should be based on logic and be completely amoral, because obviously there is no objective morality), there still would need to be the discussion what kind of morality this should be.

      The romans for example had master morality. (with virtues like strength, courage, mastery, egoism), basically the opposite of the slave morality we have in the West.

      But they always presuppose their morality is the correct one, obviously.
      Because in reality they are just using the moral argument to advance their communist agenda.

    5. For those leeches, the ideal society consists of us giving our money to them instead of spending it anyway we like. Also, I can’t stand the utter ungratefulness of those people. I’m in the top tax bracket, but it’s really not the case that I’m balling. I would if the effing government didn’t confiscate a huge part of my paycheck and distribute it to the underclass. We’re already paying through the nose for their bullshit whereas those people are, for the very most part, a drain on the system.

      Furthermore, there is a limit with regards to how much you can bleed the taxpayer. At a certain point those who can will simply leave. Our smart future communist overlords also have a solution for that. Probably realizing that building a wall to keep people in didn’t really work that well. The GDR had very low productivity compared to West-Germany and you can bet that it was to a large part because the people knew that the “Klassenfeind” was enjoying a much higher standard of living for their labor. Thus, they lost all motivation to work hard. To sidestep this problem, our commie fucktards now want to wreck the entire world so that you’ll live in socialist squalor everywhere. They also plan to just confiscate wealth, not realizing that people who make more money, in the real world, tend to do so because they are smarter and work harder. They can go ahead and take your “excess cash” or tell you that your apartment is now owned by the state and you’ll get to pay rent, but this will crash productivity so hard they won’t even believe it. Then again, disbelieving reality is a precondition to be a commie, so if it comes that far, we’ll probably see neo-gulags.

    6. “For those leeches, the ideal society consists of us giving our money to them instead of spending it anyway we like. Also, I can’t stand the utter ungratefulness of those people. I’m in the top tax bracket, but it’s really not the case that I’m balling. I would if the effing government didn’t confiscate a huge part of my paycheck and distribute it to the underclass. We’re already paying through the nose for their bullshit whereas those people are, for the very most part, a drain on the system.”

      Now I understand why you vehemently hate European countries, including your own Sweden. I have asked myself this question all the times, it must be your personal benefits that are being chopped off so that you would paint a negative and bleak picture of your own country (or Germany). This confirms my doubt.

    7. I don’t hate Europe. I hate what our hostile elites do to us. Sweden took a massively wrong turn in the 1970. Had they stayed on course, this could be the most futuristic country on earth, instead of one of the most dystopian ones.

      I was just as appalled by government theft when I was still a student, so your conclusions are severely misguided. Unlike the ideologically blinded, I am quite able to put myself in someone else’s shoes. I can also take a realistic look at societal consequences of government intervention programs. In contrast, I would argue that hardly anyone benefiting from those can do the same. This has to do with time preference, i.e. their inability to consider future consequences of present-day actions. This fact may also have something to do with why such people end up on welfare to begin with, i.e. they make stupid life choices so they end up on welfare and because they can’t reason properly they don’t quite realize that welfare undermines their dignity and saps all their motivation, so they end up actively preferring a life on handouts over one of of duty that would lift them up and give them a sense o pride, however limited it may be.

    8. The truth is even darker than people just not being able to think about long term consequences.
      A big class of people actually has an incentive to destroy society.

      Consider this: For a man, being on the bottom end of the social ladder equals death.
      No woman will want to have his children.

      So these people become leftists and vote for redistribution programs.
      In the short run this helps them, but in the long run it destroys society.

      But the thing is, destruction of society is actually in the interest of those people as well.
      If your chance for reproduction in the current system is 0%, destruction of the system is good for you, because in the new system your chance might be above 0.

      So every welfare state is doomed to fail in my opinion. It creates the incentives to destroy itself.

    9. Of course they are not aware of this, but the genes which control them.
      imagine a gene:
      “if you find yourself in the body of a loser, do whatever maximizes chaos and destruction”
      This gene could spread in a population.

      This idea is from this book:
      “The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans”
      was an interesting read and shows how fucked we really are.

    10. Basically to summarize my idea:

      If you create an underclass of a lot of dependent men, ironically these men also have an incentive to destroy the very system that is feeding them.

      because in evolution it is not personal survival which matters, but genetic survival.

    11. Basically the only way a welfare state could work long-term, is when you combine it with a strict birth-control & eugenics program.
      otherwise the underclass will just mass reproduce and you get ideocracy until the system collapses (which is happening in most European countries at the moment, general IQ levels are declining, education standards are declining)

    12. @Cuong: even if Aarons position was completely self-serving, there would be no issue with it. There is nothing fair about taking money from someone who is productive and giving it to someone who is not.
      And outside of this… do you have a hard time grasping simple concepts? What do you think will happen when you punish productive people and reward unproductive people… can you extrapolate this trend into the future?
      I have a hint for you: at the end of the causal chain, everyone will starve to death.

    13. Sorry to make it sound like you are bitter. I mean I feel you. So much money could be devoted to build up your own family. Now all that is used to support a class of people who are unproductive to society and to mankind in general.

      For humanitarian purpose, one can argue that that much money could be placed in the hands of taxpayers and let them decide what to do with it. We can always donate the money, with appropriate proportion to our income, to people who need care (unfortunate old people who still have to work to raise their families). That way, money can be allocated more effectively and address the grievances of the poor and the unfortunate.

      While I think a state like China is not ideal because it absolves itself from building a viable welfare state (they could build up a viable welfare state, but the Chinese elites want to spend more money on other issues, including to their own pockets), I also dislike states that support amply to the unproductive class and force the most elite class to take a flight (if they can).

      The US is in a better shape, I suppose. Though welfare spent on single mom is just as much a waste as anything found in European countries. I only wish that the government here should not try to take care of its citizens like babies and spoil them to the point where they all enjoy financial supports without putting much effort into works. At least, I can see that the unproductive class is limited to food stamp, EBT card and Medicaid. They wouldn’t rise to prominence by just leeching off the middle class.

  4. “– people who are just royally fucked.
    e.g. someone who has no job, no girlfriend, bad health, getting diagnosed with depression.
    But he is not depressed, he is supposed to feel bad in this situation. It’s a completely normal response.”

    I think this is something where the causation might go both ways. Like, having nothing going for you can cause you to feel depressed, and in some cases, depression in a misdiagnosis. But also, perhaps there is some sort of underlying issue (maybe in the brain, as is posited in the mental health community) that’s causing these people to both have nothing going for them and to feel bad.

    “So basically a therapist just helps people to discover the lies they tell themselves”

    Regarding AlekNovy’s account about therapy being overcomplicated, I’ve noticed that any therapist will claim to do CBT, or DBT, or whatever, but really, they’ll just talk to you however they feel like talking to you – often as if you’re their friend, or as if they’re some sort of father figure. I would agree that most therapists are awful, but someone who is awful for one person might be a good fit for another. Your typical normie may do best with a therapist who gives them simplistic advice. I’ve found I do best with someone with whom I can actually discuss psychology and psychotherapy, and actually talk about what the therapist is doing in a rational way.

    As an aside, a (female) therapist told my sister to go on Tinder and whore it up. The therapist probably wanted to live vicariously through her. I, of course, told my sister not to do this, but I’ll say that therapists are a big part of dating, and rest assured, if you date a woman who sees a therapist, the therapist is really the third wheel in the relationship.

    1. It seems like a lot of women get much more fucked up by therapy than they were before.
      Imagine you have the media already telling them how awesome they are, and now they get a personalized version of that.
      Because I assume, that most therapists will tell them, that they are not the problem, and that everyone else is.
      The therapist has a big incentive doing this… make the customer feel good… and they will come back fore more.
      That’s why I think most are scammers. They have a big incentive making you feel good with bullshit, but not solving your real problem
      (which could make you feel worse in the short term, when you have to admit your mistakes and problems)

    2. Just imagine your typical fat 35 year old woman going to the session and telling the therapist “I really feel lonely, what should I do”

      How many are going to tell her:
      “you are fat, you need to slim down, if you want to attract a man”
      or
      “these men treat you very bad, you deserve more, men who not like you when you are fat are assholes, they are not worth your time!”

      We all know how it will go in 99% of cases

    3. You imply that the therapist is actively lying, but what if the therapist is deluded herself and believes that her client, as well as she herself, deserve their buff big-dick billionaires?

    4. Your other point, I agree, the causation can go both ways.
      But I think it is much more, that how you feel reflects your position in life, than the other way, that somehow if you feel good, you will get better outcomes.
      If it really worked that way, evolution would lead to everyone feeling good all the time.
      But this didn’t happen. So I think feelings are more a reflection of your position in life, and a generator for motivation, to get you to do stuff/ avoid stuff.
      On the other side there are people who are objectively doing quite bad in life, but they still feel good about themselves. Our brain is complicated, we will need much more science to figure it all out.

    5. There is also the phenomenon of the very well-off who are bored out of their mind and end up overdosing. Musicians are rather infamous for this, but among the wealthy you’ll also find plenty who don’t look like happy campers. There is probably a balance necessary, i.e. you need to struggle at least a little bit to appreciate life. On the other hand, if you’re lazy, be it as a member of the welfare aristocracy or the upper classes, you’ll have a hard time enjoying life.

    6. I think it’s a complicated mixed bag. For instance if you go to the gym a lot and look great, dress well etc you can draw a lot of positive attention to yourself. But noticing slight flaws and having a little insecurity will help drive you to keep it going. I think a lot of you gym rats out there know that you’re never really “happy” with how you look. Even if you look better than 99 percent of the male population. And get really pissed if you can’t go when you wanted to. As the Frank Sinatra song says “that’s life.”

    7. Your comment about the therapist being the third wheel in the relationship is spot on. However, there are a lot more wheels: her girlfriends, her mother, her sisters, work colleagues, potentially her female boss, and even the women she hates and wants to one-up.

  5. I also really think a therapist is not the appropriate person to be talking to if you can’t get a date, or when it comes to the early stages of dating. Like, for a fat guy who can’t get laid, a personal trainer and a dating coach will go a lot further. A therapist might help him get to the bottom of why he has poor motivation, but he certainly shouldn’t be giving fitness advice or dating advice. (Yet, it seems most therapists like to play dating coach.) The same would be true of the fat 35-year-old woman.

    I’ve personally struggled with how, exactly, to approach my hobby with therapists. Unfortunately, I have some issues that have pretty much forced me to accept I need to be in therapy. But hearing a therapist talk about dating is just cringeworthy. I’ve also had therapists express extremely judgmental attitudes about what I’m doing, or insist that it’s not healthy and not what I really want, in which case I’ve had to explain that, while it’s challenging, it’s a great way of improving my social skills and feeling better about myself. Indeed, being an ongoing client of Aaron, going on tons of dates, and getting laid a ton, did way more for my anxieties and self-efficacy surrounding dating than any type of armchair analysis would have.

    1. If people would just have the intelligence to understand how incentives work…
      You reward people for playing the racism card…. so what will happen… surprise! more and more people play the racism card.
      Really I’m just waiting until I can retire in my house in the mountains. Escape from this madness.

  6. The modern welfare state as a breeding ground for psychopaths.

    This is another downside of the welfare state which is not discussed anywhere (at least I’m not aware of it).
    Consider this: why do humans have feelings like empathy, love, friendship, fairness and so on? These are survival adaptions.
    If you had no friends in a tribe of hunter gatherers, they would throw you out, which would be sure death.
    Basically in a society in which your survival depends on the goodwill of your fellow humans, there is an upper bound on how big of an asshole you can be before it becomes a liability.

    Now, in a welfare state, the rules are different. In this society, your “tribe” is basically the government. You don’t need friends anymore. Actually, friends are a liability now.
    (the destruction of the nuclear family… a side effect of the welfare state, also plays into this)

    The most successful life-form in your modern welfare state, is the high functioning psychopath. In the anonymity of the system, you can be as big off an asshole as you want, with no downside.

    People are surprised that psychopaths are running our society….. when they are the very product of our society.

  7. Heeey, love the new header lol. Any of you guys ever heard of the reptilian conspiracy? I think their are some serious truths with the theory. All you have to do is replace reptilian with ‘Albanian’ and voila. The whole ‘feeding on the psychic energy of humanity’ etc. then become metaphors.

    1. When I first heard of the Reptilian conspiracy theory, I thought it was an allusion to the fact that very old men are pulling the strings, e.g. men like Kissinger or Soros. I’d say it would take only moderate Photoshop skills to turn Soros’ face into a reptilian head. The similarity is striking without any modification at all, I’d say:
      https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a8/b0/77/a8b077cbcfd42b61992df8945913a458.png
      http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/130215095825-george-soros-gold-1024×576.jpg
      As we’re big on gender equality here, I’d like to mention Christine Lagarde as well.

    1. @GoodLookingAndSleazy

      The first one (D. B.) with a full head of hair would also look quite attractive, imho.

    2. The fourth one (A.S.) does have potential, but looks too skinny and “fragile”. Still a Babyface.

  8. Out of curiosity I just looked up a British broadcast of the Dresden bombings during WWII. I couldn’t believe what I heard. They claimed only 25,000 civilians died during the bombing and that there were 20,000 military troops there making it a military target. And only cited right wingers and Nazis as saying that over 300,000 civilians died and that Dresden was a non-essential target militarily. Pat Buchanan cited the same numbers as the “Nazis” and he even believes in the official version of the Holocaust. Or at least he claims to.

    1. Actually, I think Buchanan wrote that “up to” 300,000 died in the bombing campaign. At any rate, there is a huge discrepancy here.

    2. I think if you add up the number of civilians killed the allies are quite close to the axis powers in WWII (if you count the soviet union to the allies, they would have a much higher kill count, mostly their own people).
      On the other side, in the defense of the US, if your enemy declares “total war” what were they supposed to do? The Germans/Japan would not give up even though the war was lost.
      In this case the total destruction strategy seems like the only option.
      When your enemy sends women and children to the front lines.. they would die anyways.
      Obviously we can assume the number of German civilian casualties was much higher than the allies wrote in the history books…. but still I don’t really see what they could have done to prevent those.

    3. Germany declared “total war” out of desperation, and it means that the economy was changed to completely support the war effort, i.e. to shut down restaurants etc. The Allies wanted a total, unconditional surrender and they also wanted to completely eradicate the German race. Read up on the Morgenthau plan and maybe take an evening to read the book Germany Must Perish! to give you an insight into what was going on back then. In Germany, we brainwash our school kids by telling them that we were misled by some crazed Austrian painter who led Germany to ruin when in fact surrender wasn’t an option. What would you have done if your enemy had told you that they’d kill all of you if you put your weapons down? Of course you rather go down fighting even if it meant sending teenage boys to the frontline.

    4. Thanks Aaron, I was planning on updating my history knowledge anyways. Probably going to read this book. I’m aware there is a lot of brainwashing going on the paint the Germans as super evil. I wonder if it is even possible to get an unbiased picture of this.. as most of the evidence is lost. And stuff which put the allies in a bad light was probably destroyed on purpose.

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