Open Thread

Open Thread #144

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48 thoughts on “Open Thread #144

  1. Anybody ever seen the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington from 1939? I haven’t seen it. It stars Jimmy Stewart and directed by Frank Capra, who also collaborated in It’s a Wonderful Life. It explored corruption in politics. At first glance it looks inspirational, but idealistic, similar to It’s a Wonderful Life.

    1. Yeah I saw it as a kid. It’s of course, well-shot, and has some memorable moments. Might be worth it if you’re feeling a classic black and white film.

      I’d recommend The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance if you’re feeling a Jimmy Stewart flick. Also has John Wayne, who is does a serviceable job in the film. I’m biased because I love John Wayne.

  2. Do you guys think that fake tits could be a reaction to women putting off marriage? I mean when chicks are in their early 20s they can be skinny, have perfect tits, and no enhancements. . They can’t afford them, and why would they bother anyway? I think the popularity of fake tits is related to aging women trying to emulate a young womans body. Because that is what men naturally want. Sometimes I think early 20s girls have fake tits even when they are 100 percent natural.

    1. Not just fake tits, the whole billion dollar industry of cosmetics turns on making women pay good money to look younger and more appealing to men. Just like men, age tends to correlate with income,the older women get, the more money they usually have available to spend, and the more willing they are to spend it.

  3. My stack of PS3 games has now dwindled quite a bit. The biggest issue is that I seem to have gotten very picky about games. Also, my interest in replaying games I played years ago is apparently rather low.

    Yesterday, I played a bit of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and was quite taken aback by the Wakanda-fication of the story. I had no recollection of this at all. Not only, as Pickernanny mentioned, is the main conflict that a bunch of white terrorists take over an African country in order to “give war a chance”, you also have an enricher as a frequent point-of-contact, which has the unlikely name “Kevin Washington”. I dropped the game after the first boss, which is, admittedly, the most impressive fight in the game anyway. The game is still mechanically solid, though. Looking at this game with a more critical perspective, I quite dislike how front-loaded it is. This was probably pioneered by the first God of War game, but it has been used in quite a few games since. It’s basically a scam: the best part of the game gets packed into the first 30 to 45 minutes, then there is a long stretch that is quite good, but does not nearly have the same production values as the opening, and at the end you’ll get a decent-enough battle against the final boss to end at a higher note.

    I think I have to revise my view on Platinum Games. They have pulled off the same kind of “strong opening, OK main game, good enough finale” too many times. It’s in MGR:R, Vanquish, Bayonetta 1 and 2, and maybe even in Astral Chain (there is an impressive boss fight early on, but I couldn’t stomach playing the game). Their best games, which most certainly does not include Astral Chain, would have had a much poorer reception if they didn’t put their best stuff first. This works well on games journalists but also on players who often enough do not even play their games to completion.

    Other games I recently tried out were MGS: Ground Zeroes (phenomenal graphics on PS3, but a bit too slow-paced for my liking), Persona 5 (great intro, but decided not to bother with it after I found out that the main story takes 100 hours to complete), Tomb Raider (couldn’t motivate myself to keep playing even though I really enjoyed my first play-through years ago), Catherine (too story-heavy, puzzles not engaging enough the second time around but, again, I really enjoyed my play-through years ago), Max Payne 3 (atrocious controls; somehow this did not bother me back in the days), Red Dead Redemption (not engaging enough anymore, the graphics also aged a bit; the first time around I binged on this game) and Dragon’s Crown (I’ll keep this one for the time being; I did one play-through with the warrior class years ago, and the little I played with the sorceress was quite fun).

    My stack of PS3 games I do not want to sell in the immediate future contains only seven games at this point (Dragon’s Crown, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, Virtua Fighter 5, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Demon’s Souls, and GTA V). Of those, I only finished Dragon’s Crown and GTA V once, back in the days.

    1. I started replaying Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, and lost interest.

      Max Payne 3 was one I was considering. A little bummed out about that.

      All I’ve got is a laptop rn. If I get a better machine or a console, I may play the newest Devil May Cry.

    2. Max Payne 3 is probably acceptable with a mouse and keyboard. With a gamepad it is insufferable. Still, the sluggish controls of the main character do not help the game in any way. A mind-boggling design decision is to hide the reticle if the gun is inactive. Only if you pull the gun, the reticle gets activated but it is so small that you may end up not finding it right away. Then there is the issue that you can’t properly move the reticle around as it is easy to oversteer. This is due to the game running at a very low framerate. Obviously, while struggling with the controls, it is easy to get pumped full of bullets. Maybe the problem is the PS3, though. I played this game on the Xbox 360 shortly after it came out and I don’t remember it having been this bad, minus the slide show at the end of the game, where it seems to run at around 10 fps.

  4. With GTA V, I’m mostly interested in how much wokeness I overlooked. I can already think of a big one (spoiler alert): You play three characters in this game, obviously not concurrently. Two are white and one is black. At one point, you control the black character and have to decide which one of the two white characters you want to kill. It’s probably a complete coincidence that the player is not given the chance to kill the black character.

  5. I struggle with internet addiction as well as mindless guitar playing, i.e., my focus at this point needs to be recording guitar as opposed to writing and noodling.

    Any advice for this? Or is it pretty much just get a spine and stop doing it.

    1. Just turn off your router and put away your phone. I have never been a fan of any kind of gradual reduction of an activity. Just go “cold turkey” for a while, suffer for maybe a week, and enjoy your new life. What I find very helpful is to separate the mere consumption of information from creative work, i.e. I read books and websites on an iPad instead of the computer. Also, this allows me to easily track how much time I spend on reading.

  6. I and few of my colleagues got supposedly “fake” Johnson&Johnson vaxxx. I’ve done it, because I would like to go on vacation soon, but obviously didn’t want to put in my body some not completely known liquid.
    It’s a long story, but at the end we got injected with saline solution instead of real vaxxx.
    Do we have here any doctor or knowledgeable person about the topic who can tell me it’s possible to do any medical examination that can verify it?

    1. For the Hepatitis A vaccine you can check afterwards if the protection is still there and if a booster is needed. I suppose there’s a way to find antibodies after the covid-vax, too.
      However these might be of short lived nature.

      The conspiracy theorist in me says that if the mrna shit really fucks up an immune system, we will have ways to find out who’s unvaxxed. Their sperm will trade at a premium.

      In practical terms, just get the certificate, man 😛

    2. Thanks for the answer.
      I’ve got the certificate. I am bit paranoid and suspicious usually, though.

    3. The mRNA isn’t relevant here because the J and J doesn’t work that way. However, if the spike protein is showing up in chick’s ovaries, there’s prolly a way to verify if you’ve gotten one or the other.

    4. Yeah vaccination can be verified by antibody test. My parents actually did blood tests in two different labs before and after getting Pfizer and it checks out.

      Of course, you can also have elevated antibodies if you went through COVID infection, but I’m not sure how long the immunity lasts.

    5. Hey Michal, if that’s true consider yourself very lucky.

      Probably in the future there will be some test for people to verify who get vaxxed.

  7. My colleague works in the hospital as Anesthesiology Assistant and because of that he knows a lot of people there. I am not even sure whether the doctor knew about what he was injecting as the vaccine was bring from another room by a nurse, which whom we payed before. He probably knew about it, but was pretending he doesn’t know what’s going on. And they didn’t do this for the money as we payed symbolically(55 euro per person) and the law consequences for it could be much larger. In Poland it’s hard to put a doctor in the jail nevertheless, so maybe I am wrong here.

    The doctor said the certificate will be probably worth for one year and this farce is all because pharmacies wants to make a money. So maybe vaccines are money machines and not a killing machines.

    1. Vaccines ARE money making machines have no doubte about it. Its called policy capture/regulatory capture. We have plenty of examples if it in public policy literature.

      One interesting thing I found out last year while researching covid, vaccines, overreaction and public policy, is that we have a good forerunner with the yearly flu shots! It never came to my attention before, but it seems that the yearly flu shots are also useless, or close to useless, but government and people spend millions on them year after year.

      https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f3037

      Since, I have learned that other vaccinations probably fall into this camp too – there is an overreliance on industry funded studies to justify their deployment. I have not delved into the matter more deeply, but I understand there is a similar concern regarding HPV vaccinations, or at least some of them, having more to do with marketing than actual science.

      I am not surprised that Covid if following the same pattern, but turbocharged. Big Pharma has every incentive to make their product appear as neccessary if not compulsory, while at the same time covering their asses from unknown side effects. If they can get their way, they will probably hype up the variants as much as possible in order to justify turning the covid jab into an annual ritual, pretty much like the influenza vaccine, but on a larger scale.

    2. The plan for the world is depopulation. Wars are too dirty so I think this mystery juice will make most people
      Infertile and chemically castrate them.

      It’s a long term strategy. If everyone just died it would cause too much disruption.

    3. The vision of the elites is to rule over an easily controllable “mongrel race”. These are not my words. It is taken straight out of the mouth of Kalergi, the proto-globalist and mastermind behind the formation of the European Union. By the way, Klaus Schwab of the WEF has recently gone on record with stating that Europe will be hit by one billion immigrants from the third world as a consequence of economic disaster (he is perhaps relating to the mandated shutdown in reaction to the fake pandemic). Unfortunately, the elites do not live in reality and are always very surprised that the third-worlders they import by the millions are not perfect replacements of the indigenous population. The new goal seems to be to run the world due to automation, and plebs are probably only to be kept around to sacrifice them to Baal as well as for sexual entertainment and indiscriminate raping.

  8. Aaron,

    Might I suggest having a service where folks can deposit funds for article requests? Perhaps a cheaper, less extensive, and less personally tailored alternative to private consultations?

    1. What’s an “Ind URL”?
      EDIT: “Ind” is apparently a shorthand for a cryptocurrency called “Indorse”. I haven’t found anything about Ind URLs, yet, though.

    2. lnd url is like your BTC address, just for Lightning.
      I know you have an on-chain address, where we can donate and yes, current fees are very low, due to the CCP “crackdown”, but this will likely change. Lightning is fast and cheap and more and more exchanges support withdrawals/deposits for it, Bitstamp and Kraken are working on in, Bitfinex already has it. So you should be able to convert off-chain BTC into fiat if that’s something you want to do.

      I mean, it’s about time you run your own node anyway, it’s 2021 after all.
      mynodebtc or nodl.it or umbrel are good places to start. Get a raspberry 🙂

  9. The NYT calls “freedom” an anti-government slogan:
    https://gameruprising.to/index.php?threads/ny-times-calls-‘freedom’-an-‘anti-government-slogan’.25183/
    Is it peak clown world yet? On the plus side, when did we ever have an oppressive dictatorship being so blunt about what it is doing? Today, they are telling you that if you want freedom, you’re against the NWO and thus an anti-government terrorist. Tomorrow, they come knocking at your door.

    1. How do you think the Cuban government would describe itself? Do you seriously believe they would proclaim that they stand for the suppression of their people and the abolishment of freedoms? If this is too esoteric a question for you, then look at what the U.S. government does and how it describes its own actions. To get your noggin joggin’, look at the image the U.S. wants to promote (“regime change”, “infinite homosexuality”, “female liberation”) and what they really do, i.e. slaughtering millions of people, installing puppet regimes, and extracting natural resources.

    2. Your rambling is incoherent and disconnected. The point is that the word “freedom” is used against Cuban government. You’ve taken those words out of context.

      As for slaughtering, is this just a rhetorical device?

      Your long habored hatred towards the US is strange indeed. Ask your motherland what she has done in the past? Since when humans are kind when secure their throne in the palace of supremacy? Romes? Persia? China?

      The US, while might be brutal to outsiders, are indeed still gentle to her own citizens. Ask China for the kind of brutality she commits to her own citizen.

    3. I should have removed the word “might”. In “might be brutal”. There is no “may” or “might” here, it is a certainty.

    1. Haven’t listened to Moly in a minute. Listening now.

      He put out this video in response to that:
      https://rumble.com/vanbzh-an-urgent-message-from-stefan-molyneux.html

      And while the drama and oversimplification he adds is a bit much, he is right tho… Big tech gets away with these crap coz we’re lazy and just do what’s convenient. Like freaking type something else instead of YouTube is a small price to pay in order to give less power to the oligopolies, yet out of convenience we don’t do it.

    2. I posted a comment with a link to a Rumble video. Seems to have gone to the bulk folder. Funny how YouTube links never end up there. No, the tech oligopolies aren’t conspiring with each other to keep out competitors… that’s a conspiracy theory.

    3. The comment was in the spam folder, which was most definitely a coincidence. We are at the point where Big Tech and Big Government lie, deceive, trick, and cheat, and they no longer even care that it is obvious. It’s complete and utter contempt of the general public. Thankfully, things here in Lithuania are a bit better than in the West, it seems.

    4. @AlekNovy, I lost interest in Molyneux mainly due to finding therightstuff.biz in 2015, and not having much space in my podcast listening rotation after that.

      I agree with you though. The way Keith Woods phrased it was “best to embrace decentralized alternatives before we’re forced to.”

  10. Having recently completed my first play-through of MGR:R recently, I wanted to bring up some interesting points about the narrative that I probably wouldn’t have given much thought to if I had played it back during its initial release. Story aside, the game was a blast and it was always very enjoyable to string along a complex combo or dodge and parry several consecutive enemy attacks. The graphics and animations were also pretty exceptional. I didn’t expect some of the overtop boss battles going in either (especially early on). At one point during the prologue, Raiden is running full speed down what appears to be a collapsing church building while dodging missiles and hopping over debris to eventually land on the back of a Metal Gear Ray (recognizable from MGS2), then running down the length of its body while your sword traces through cutting it in half. As Aaron pointed out in another comment, the game gets much less intense in this aspect as it progresses. Most of the later boss fights merely take place in an open arena with little to no utilization of the environment, but the combat in this game felt so good to me that I kept playing with much enthusiasm. I do think it would have been nicer to have maybe 50% less cinematic scenes and 20% more game play in the end.

    I remember by the end of the game during the final boss fight having a big WTF moment because I found myself actually sort of siding with the main villain, Senator Armstrong, and his philosophy. You see, these American terrorists (along with a suave Spanish man serving as the main antagonist) are implementing this extremely far out plot to harvest the brains of third world children, training them to be elite soldiers via VR simulations, and finally transferring their brains into highly advanced cyborg bodies to be used in what I presume is a highly capable private military outfit. What is the purpose of wielding such power, you might ask? Well, it seems to me from Senator Armstong’s speech during the final fight that he plans to bring down the current political regime and usher in a new, more just era where “the weak will be purged and the strongest will thrive”, as he plans to “make America great again” and create the optimal environment for true individualism and freedom of thought to reign at the expense of the parasitical classes. Having come out in 2013, that latter quote obviously stuck out to me. Senator Armstrong honestly appears to be ‘our guy’, the true populist that we have been waiting for with the power and determination to bring down the corrupt and destructive cabal that rules over us, with the stated goal to end war as a business model and place the destiny of the people in their own hands. It appears to me that this Armstrong character wants to create a new aristocracy based on merit. Have a look at this approximately 7 minute long video containing his speech in an attempt to convert Raiden over to his side: https://youtu.be/IMpuUUV2HeE

    1. The game seems self-aware enough to point out in an early conversation between Raiden and his Wolf AI counterpart that Raiden is merely acting on his own bias having been raised as a child soldier, to which Raiden has no objection. This, to me, sets up the hero of this game to be a complete tool who is a slave to his environmental circumstances and at the mercy of the whims of his emotions. He fights because he doesn’t want others to have to endure hardship and adversity. Raiden would rather life keep on going at the expense of those who build civilizations and maintain them, because those who are less capable will either get left behind or dealt with by nature. I believe that it’s implied that Senator Armstrong’s intentions are not to simply go around mass murdering ‘the weak’ as his stated goal is to end war and conflict as we know it. Think of the Bantu in our world, for example, if Western civilization would simply butt out of their affairs and let nature take its course, their numbers would be significantly less as they would no longer be able to feed their current numbers. Not to mention that their population levels would simply not be near as large as they are in the first place if it weren’t due to the medical interventions and standards of living given to them by Westerners in the first place. This would also help with those overpopulation concerns that the left seems so concerned about, though we should be certain that those concerns are merely veils that commoners eat up to fuel a sense of righteousness while allowing our captors to rule without suspicion from the majority. Give an R selected group of people access to K selected technology, and the results aren’t exactly harmonious. Give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish.

      It might sound evil and cruel on the surface to turn foreign children into to killing robots, but it’s not necessarily the worst fate for these poor souls. While Raiden takes it upon himself to stand against this outcome, it must be noted that in the process he goes on a killing spree taking the lives of dozens of police officers as they stand in his way. “We’re making the mother of all omelets here, Jack. Can’t fret over every egg”, Armstrong tells Raiden. The question is, how do you go about reversing the colossal fuck up that we find ourselves in our actual reality without the use of force? Armstrong is attempting to overthrow the elite ruling class and you’d have to be naive to think something like that could ever be accomplished through peaceful means.

    2. I write this review because you can find similar themes playing out in all kinds of media from games to movies, you name it. It’s irrational once you dig into the meat of the topic, however, this game illustrates how easy it is to portray a certain message in a positive light no matter how hypocritical and irrational it actually is. To me, Raiden defeating and killing of Senator Armstrong is merely delaying the inevitable. Sure, now some children are spared a particular kind of fate, but it’s not unlike going more into debt. The further you go and the longer you put off your debt, the more interest you incur until eventually it become too insurmountable to ignore. Something radical will eventually come along and disrupt the status quo either way, even though it’s not a very fashionable idea to deal with these types of issues swiftly and effectively, the reaper is coming for his harvest one way or the other.

      Another quick example of this type of theme that vilifies the right and exonerates the left in gaming is Vanquish. I haven’t finished the game yet so I can’t exactly tell you what the main villains stated objectives are, but I have a feeling I’ll end up leaning toward their agenda by the end of the game. Vanquish takes place in a sci-fi future where the Earth has become so overpopulated that food and resources are scarce. To help remedy this, a space colony has been constructed that orbits the earth. Without going into too much detail about what’s happening, some super evil Russian guy uses this massive micro wave beam to vaporize San Francisco effectively declaring war on the American government. It’s worth noting that the president of the US looks eerily similar to Hilary Clinton. Anyways, I want to link to this recent music video of an all gay San Francisco choir where they sing about literally coming for your children and converting them. I believe some of the members of the choir are even on the national sex offender registry. Have a look a note how psychopathic the main gay looks into the camera as he talks about corrupting your kids: https://youtu.be/ArOQF4kadHA

      Now, imagine what kind of place San Francisco must be in the future if things continue on the same trajectory. When this Russian guy effectively decimated the city, I can’t help but kind of support this narrative. Maybe this example is a little extreme, but the US unleashing nuclear weapons on Japan during WW2 seemed justified, so why not just microwave San Francisco? My final point here will be that perhaps we need to make our own media somehow. We need our own games, tv shows, movies, novels, music etc. and we need them yesterday. It’s easy to propagandize people and it’s necessary, the right has arguably lost the culture war because they didn’t see the value in having a stake in the media. The Right has failed to conserve anything and is continuously seceding ground. Perhaps the reason why the left is so viscous current day, however, is because they are afraid the winds are changing against their favor. The pendulum can only swing so far in one direction before it either comes back crashing into everything on its way, or the entire machine is destroyed into nothing and can no longer function. Which will it be?

    3. Thanks for your great review of MGR:R and for sharing your thoughts on the implications of its story. I have reposted those three comments as one article and will reply to it later on.

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