Open Thread

Open Thread #154

Aaron "Sleazy" Elias

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61 thoughts on “Open Thread #154”

  1. Question for AlekNovy:

    Are Jealousy ploys(deliberately trying to make a woman jealous,usually done by flirting with women hotter than her,if you have such a friend who is willing to play along)just one of those things that spike interest but has no effect on short-term attraction? and that such ploys just create false-positives? (getting women to flirt with you,but not changing your conversion rate in any meaningful way..)

    Before Assanova’s MoneyMadeMen blog(really such a shame..)went down,I recall one of his posts saying not to bother playing such games and to simply ignore a woman(in other words: Don’t invest any attention or energy engaging her) if she’s not playing ball.

    Of course,in the end,its just about not wasting time and energy on bad leads,but assanova says ignoring a woman is actually far more effective than any games you can play. I believe him.

    Reply

  2. I hope everyone is doing well on here.

    I recently watched this video and since I’ve always liked math, numbers, and odds, I was wondering what others think of this video?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q7aS2gFlUU

    Long and short, guy claims to hook up with 18 new women in 2.5 day period.
    I’m not saying he didn’t but when I thought of the odds of all this happening, it was hard to wrap my head around it.

    Basically, he’s arrives in a US city and gets new women over to his room every 2 hours (or less in some cases).

    I believe 14 of them were from online and other 4 were bar pulls.

    When you think of the odds, for the online part, at least, it’s quite mind boggling. To get 14 women to come straight to your hotel from online? How many matches would that take? Not one girl flaked? Not one girl was late? Every girl that went to his hotel room was dtf? He was able to ejaculate that many times?

    There’s also the factor that he’s not very good looking. Probably falls in the 6-7 range which doesn’t make it easy to get a ton of matches online.

    Again, not saying he didn’t but I think even “Super Chad” would have a hard time lining up what he did.

    Reply

    1. Why did I think, before clicking on the link, that this is probably a video by John Anthony? The guy is a known scammer who pays chicks to pose with him.

    4. I figured out what he really did. He counted by weight. If the girl weighed 240 lbs he counted it as 2 girls, and so on…..

    5. Haha. Exactly! No way a 6.5 guy would get enough matches on Tinder to pull this off. Plus, John seems to have bad social skills and comes across as uncharismatic and aspie.

      Also, a little while back someone posted they used John’s exact pics that he claims work so well for him on a Tinder catfish account and the guy got 6 matches in a week. 2 tranny’s, 2 fatties and 2 single moms lol.

  3. Did the Jews in Israel get jewed by their elites? According to their own newspapers, almost all severe Covid cases these days are among the vaxxed:
    https://gameruprising.to/index.php?threads/leading-israeli-health-official-🚨vaccinated-account-for-95-of-severe-and-85-90-of-new-covid-hospitalizations🚨.26316/
    Remember that this means that the vaxx is working. Also, I’ve read a few shallow takes online that the vaxx can’t be harmful because the Jews are vaxxing themselves. Yet, this fails to take into account that Jewish society is stratified, and if you ever get to talk to an Israeli expat about their workplace culture and typical leadership styles, I’d encourage you do it because you’ll learn that managers treat their direct reports like cattle goyim, and the same applies for each level in the hierarchy, i.e. Jews seem to really enjoy lording it over their fellow man. You could also work in banking/finance and get a Jewish boss; it’s basically only a matter of time in this industry. That’ll also teach you a thing or two, based on what I’m hearing.

    Reply

  4. The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

    This book is causing a stir right now in Vietnam. It was written by a British-Chinese feminist journalist. I don’t lnow how reliable are those stories.

    I find China being influenced very much by feminism now. We will see how a blend of Western liberalism and Asian authoritarianism mix together to create a unique cup of coffee.

    Perhaps Chinese women will become more like Japanese?

    Reply

    1. I just looked up this book. It was released in 2003, i.e. 18 years ago. I don’t have the impression that China has been breeding an army of feminists, so you can probably dismiss the author’s thesis.

    2. I actually think they are much better at both granting women freedom and, at the same time, keeping them in their places.

      Women now certainly enjoy much more freedom in China, but they are not spoiled by femi-Nazi ideologies.

    3. “I don’t have the impression that China has been breeding an army of feminists, so you can probably dismiss the author’s thesis.”

      Well, she does not say that China is infested with feminism like the West. Her book is a series of short stories that describe the suffering and humiliation of Chinese women during the Cultural Revolution and, therefore, expose the condemnable social conventions at the time.

      I just don’t know how true are those stories, and whether it could be cherry-picking that is at work here.

    4. I remember somebody posting a video about women in modern China addressing this. It looks like they are in a transitional period. Feminism is rearing it’s ugly head, and the patriarchy is trying to slap it down. I guess it would be similar to the US in the 1970s, but could very well be met with different results.

  5. https://zingnews.vn/tu-ban-gai-den-nguoi-day-ngo-diec-pham-vao-tu-post1243184.html?fbclid=IwAR1VP1XYfAokOuSZaPH64aDq-il5GUGBvlwUiPgF5KVFQtkNZRKZRxiJp74

    This article, “From girlfriend to the person who pushed Ngo Diep Pham to prison” shows that Chinese media and Chinese public are much more conscientious and clear-headed than American poisonous media. These false rape accusations are all exposed by China Time.

    Please use automatic translation of Chrome on your phone to read this article.

    Just for further clarification, Ngo Diec Pham is Vietnamese rendition of Wu Yi Fan, while Do My Truc is Du Mei Zhou.

    Reply

  6. The elites were parting it up at Obama’s modest 20-million-bucks abode:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pictures-surface-obamas-maskless-birthday-bash
    Not a mask in sight. Champagne and weed galore. Meanwhile, we can’t even have hot chicks our vidya anymore.

    In related news, U of Wisconsin-Madison spends “less than 50k” to remove a rock that students used to refer to as “jogger rock:
    https://www.foxnews.com/us/racist-rock-university-of-wisconsin-madison
    If we start to refer to Capitol Hill as “Birdwatcher Hill” (“Hebe Hill”?), are we going to get it razed to the ground?

    Also, in quaint Munich a bunch of “public servants” went through thousands of street names and flagged 320 of them for being potentially racist:
    https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article233006191/Muenchen-Nun-geraet-die-Erich-Kaestner-Strasse-ins-Visier-der-Moralisten.html
    It’s reassuring that the West has money for such important projects. Of course, we have to understand that trivial matters such as securing our borders against illegal immigration or ensuring that young women don’t get gang-raped, which happend a mere 710 times last year in Germany (real number probably significantly higher):
    https://gameruprising.to/index.php?threads/germany-police-now-registering-2-gang-rapes-every-day.26273/
    It’s also important to note that “mostly peaceful protests” are endorsed by the elites. Meanwhile, if you don’t want to wear a mask, even women and children get their face smashed in:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/un-special-rapporteur-torture-authorities-are-viewing-their-own-people-enemy

    Reply

    1. I used not care about eating meat. After going to the Buddhist monastery in Cali, I’ve restricted my meat consumption. I guess Thich Nhat Hanh has left an undeniable effect on me.

    2. It’s not that I enjoy looking at animals being slaughtered, by the way. But I’ve recently taken a deeper interest in eating better and knowing where my food comes from/how it’s processed, and that includes meat.

    4. I think it’s too early for him to say that. The deleterious effects of vegetarianism may take a while to manifest itself.

    6. @Sleazy Gal
      I see. My mom also pays meticulous details on what kind of foods we should eat.

      @Aaron

      If you are a monk, you cannot consume meat. But you can enjoy milk. Besides, you have a large variety of nuts and beans, though I think almost no plants contain more protein than animals.

      I do eat meat once or twice a week, sometimes two weeks. I think it is beneficial. After all, meat in America had all kinds of growth hormones anyway. That is why you see so many people getting cancer and getting chemo therapy, undergoing excruciating pain.

    7. On this issue, I marvel at the difference between developed and undeveloped countries. You guys desire and sometimes pay good money (either to buy or to strive to raise your own animals) for natural meat, and we have ubiquitous and affordable access to it. OTOH, we still hear of cysticercosis cases once in a while, and occasional suspicions of counterfeit horse meat, both of which are unheard of for you.

      There should be a middle point for this issue.

  8. The U.S. Army will require vaxxing:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/pentagon-pulls-trigger-all-troops-ordered-get-covid-vaccine-sept15

    Meanwhile, Canada happily lets in unvaxxed refugees but not citizens with a negative Covid test:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/canadian-refused-entry-own-country-despite-proving-strong-natural-covid-immunity-and

    Does anybody of you still not pay any attention to this hoax regime that is being rolled out globally?

    Reply

    1. “Does anybody of you still not pay any attention to this hoax regime that is being rolled out globally?”

      I think you are raising many important questions concerning the epidemic. But I, speaking on my own behalf, find that alternative narratives can sometimes sound too fantastical and conspiratorial. Perhaps this is because many sources that you draw from, even though they are all anti-vax in nature, do contradict each other.

      As with the issue of election fraud, commoners like us are constantly bombarded with contradictory information, to the point where we don’t know what to believe anymore. This is frustrating and cause headache.

      Another thing is it just doesn’t make your life happier with all these apocalyptic outlooks. Advanced societies will collapse due to mass immigration, your race shall be erased on earth, humanity may become extinct due infertility caused vaxx. It’s just too much. On top of that, I have other things to do in real life as well, and this can interfere with my other activities.

    2. Here is where your autism fails you yet again. This is an unfolding narrative and none of the critics of the mainstream narrative sits in on WEF and Bilderberg meetings, or has Fauci and Gates on speed dial (notice how the ghoul Gates disappeared as a figure in the mass-vaxx propaganda campaign!). We see what’s going on, draw attention to unreported aspects, and construct our own narrative. All of this is unfolding as we speak. I know that you’d much prefer to read some kind of authoritative history book on this, but you won’t ever get this because everybody has an agenda.

      Nobody is forcing you to read about the dangers of the vaxx or white replacement. This does not mean that it is not happening. Also, the mainstream spreads highly contradictory information as well: first masks don’t help, now they do; first the vaxx prevented you from contracting Covid, now it doesn’t; first one jab was enough, now you’re signing up for at least three (a narrative of a minimum of 5 shots is currently being seeded by the powers that be).

    3. Canada also lets in citizens and Permanent Residents, but there is a quarantine procedure to follow. The person in the article refused to follow it, and chose to return to Europe instead. So she wasn’t kicked out as she falsely claims, but left of her own free will because she disliked the procedures in place in Canada. There’s a pretty big different between the two IMO.

      Also, these procedures are no big secret. If she had bothered to do a quick Google before going then she would have known the rules before buying her ticket.

      She has one point, though – people who have acceptable immunity levels from actually having the disease should to be treated the same way as vaccinated people, IMO. The important thing ought to be the immunity itself.

    4. “know that you’d much prefer to read some kind of authoritative history book on this, but you won’t ever get this because everybody has an agenda.”

      I am well aware that it is impossible to get any authoritative source on this matter. That is why I said you don’t know what to believe anymore.

      In fact, the conspiratorial aspect of alternative narratives represent the desperation of commoners when trying to obtain truthful information. After all, if we are well informed by media firms that compete each other to report news, we wouldn’t be crafting all these complicated spider webs of conspiracies anyway.

      “Nobody is forcing you to read about the dangers of the vaxx or white replacement. This does not mean that it is not happening. ”

      Thus depressing, no matter how well you look at it.

    1. I’m surprised that this has been green-lit. I wonder how much this movie will focus on the Sackler family. I’d bet that they won’t get mentioned as the “corporation” is to blame instead, and surely there will be no discussion of their ethnicity either, because it is obviously irrelevant that they are Jewish. Of course, I agree that we shouldn’t blame the Sacklers just because they are Jewish. This would be bigoted. Yet, we should judge them by the “content of their character”.

      Here is a hot take: if the Sacklers get featured in this movie, they will be portrayed as evil white people.

    2. It’s not that surprising, Aaron. The opioid epidemic has been major news for years, and a number of U.S. authorities (including several states) have been going after OxyContin makers, including Purdue (the Sacklers’ company), as well. Purdue even had to file for bankruptcy protection about two years ago.

      There have also been many articles written specifically about the Sacklers over the past years. BBC even made one about them being the most hated family in America. 🙂

      Now I know you don’t read much mainstream media, Aaron, so you may have missed all this. I think it’s a good idea to keep up with the mainstream media, though. Personally I think everyone should read both mainstream and “alternative” media to get all the information. 🙂

      PS. The Sacklers/Purdue are actually receiving more crap than they should, because the excessive focus on them misses the fact that they only had a 3.3% market share at the height of the opioid epidemic*. The two major players, who each had about a third of the market, are SpecGx (Mallinckrodt) and Actavis Pharma. Both those companies are still alive and kicking.

      * https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/76-billion-opioid-pills-newly-released-federal-data-unmasks-the-epidemic/2019/07/16/5f29fd62-a73e-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html

    3. @Sleazy
      I have been reading MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique. I would probably post a reflection after I read it.

      It is an important and complex book. I do have some reservations for some of his points, but the way he portrait Jewish domination of the US media is eye-opening.

  10. Senile Joe Biden is not only the most popular man in the history of the world, with his 81 million votes, he is also one of the greatest orators ever:

    Reply

  11. Interesting video for any of you conspiracy theorists. The theory is that the moon is actually a reflection of our earth and that we live in one of the craters.

    Reply

    1. No. We live on the earth. The moon is actually a hollowed out space station for grey aliens, and they keep in direct communication with the Third Reich which is located somewhere underneath Antarctica.

    2. Are you a converted flat earther yet? You were the one who sent me down the flat earth rabbit hole with the documentary link you shared. And as I already thought the moon landing was a hoax (I read ‘One Small Step?’ in 2019), it was not a huge leap for me to take to at least consider this a possibility.

    3. The idea that the moon landing was faked, or that the Earth is flat, have one thing in common: they are utterly silly. 🙂

      You can Google pretty much any argument people put forth for one of those ideas and find it debunked pretty easily. For example, see this site: https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/moon-landing-conspiracy-theories-debunked

      My favorite conspiracy idea about the moon landing is probably about the flag not being able to wave in the wind on the moon. Well, no, it can’t. But you can look at the picture and quite literally see, with your own eyes, that there’s a metal bar extending along the top of the flag, holding it up. 😀

    4. I think you should look more into the moon-landing conspiracy. The site you linked to does little more than knock down straw men, with an obnoxious air of superiority, to boot. In particular the section on the Van Allen radiation belt annoyed me. The author claims that this was no issue because the astronauts flew just right through it. By the same argument, x-ray scans should be harmless because they likewise take just a fraction of a second. There are many more points that just don’t check out, like moon rocks NASA gifted to museum which turned out to be fake, like this one here:
      https://newspunch.com/moon-rock-nasa-holland-fake/
      I would also like to read a good explanation of how the lunar lander, which looks like a joke high-school science project, was able to land. Have you looked at high-resolution pictures of it? Here is one:
      https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6i1zt9/the_lunar_lander_is_held_together_with_tape/
      I have not spent an inordinate amount of time on looking into the moon landing, but I have come across enough problems with the official narrative that I find it more likely than not that the moon landing was staged. Note that this is opinion is strongly related to my extreme distrust of government. We’re ruled by a bunch of complete psychopaths who do engage in “conspiracies” and have no problem with lying to the public: The murder of JFK (look up the official “magic bullet” theory!), MK Ultra, the Waco siege (cold-blooded murder), 9/11 (building 7!), made up WMDs to have a pretense to invade Iraq, made up chemical weapons claims to invade Syria, the Putin-Trump story (look up the FBI’s involvement in concocting this steaming pile of b.s.!), the subsequent Muller investigation. This is all just off the top of the head. If I spent two more minutes on it, I’ll probably come up with a bunch more from the last few decades. Of course, Covid-19 is just the latest hoax.

    6. They’re not straw men, they’re arguments commonly used by the “fake lunar landing” proponents. How can you say they are straw men when you turn around and use the Van Allen belt argument yourself? 😀
      Incidentally, you’re right about the Van Allen belt and X-rays – X-rays are harmless because they are so brief and limited. That’s why dental and medical patients around the world get X-rays all the time without ill effect, while the dentists and doctors have to leave the room. They do them all day so that would build up to a harmful level, while for patients it’s safe since it’s usually only once per year or so.

      The fake moon rock story is pretty well known and has been reported on the mainstream media. There’s a summary on Wikipedia that you can read here:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_lunar_sample_displays#History

      The equivalent of “the lunar lander looks ghetto” isn’t really a very strong argument. 😉 Also, remember that that was just what they used to get from the ship to the surface and back. This is what actually got them to the moon and back:
      https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Apollo_11_Launch_-_GPN-2000-000630.jpg/480px-Apollo_11_Launch_-_GPN-2000-000630.jpg

      That is definitely no high school science project. 🙂

      Various governments have definitely done a number of despicable things, and covered them up. Doesn’t mean the moon landing was fake.

    7. If anything, the biggest argument in favor of the moon landing being real, at least for us laymen out there with (very) limited knowledge in spacecraft construction, is that the Soviets didn’t call any bluff in 20 more years of Cold War, despite having all the interest in the world to do so.

      Flat Earth is just straight kookie territory. I mean, the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round, way before freemasons and Juice infiltrating anything, FFS. It’s waaaay different than distrusting modern man-made climate change theories.

    8. How could the Soviets called the bluff? After all, they never went to the moon themselves.

    9. I mean, by doing the same thing as you, picking up clues and investigating, but with way more resources (they had spies and shit)

    10. Oh, spying on the US, you mean. I was thinking of checking the evidence. The Soviets not calling the bluff seems like a good counterargument. Still, there are a few issues with it, mainly that I don’t think this could have had high priority. While mainstream propaganda built up an imposing imagine of the Soviet Union, reality was a bit different. For instance, I was a little kid when the Soviet Union collapsed, and this had been a long time coming. Yet, normies back then were often completely puzzled by it because to them it came suddenly, and literally over night.

    11. Of course, the USSR was a house of cards since at least the times of Brezhnev. But think about it this way: the Russians would have gained a lot, perhaps even more than by building something that reached the moon themselves, by putting the US in evidence of forgery and destroying their reputation, arguably spending much less money in the process. Bringing down is cheaper than raising up.

  12. Thanks mostly to discussions on this blog I’ve decided to quit the bullshit object-oriented world and find some work in one of the proper functional languages. And starting from the September I will be working as an elixir developer. The one minus I see is that it’s dynamically typed. Nevertheless, it’s still a massive upgrade over Java. I also had an interview on the Haskell role, but my skills were too low to get the job. I must admit the homework and the following interview were quite hard.

    So again thank you all for sharing your knowledge here!

    Reply

    1. This is incredible. Congratulations! You can use Dialyzer, which is an external type checker, with Elixir as well. I’d suggest that you keep honing your Haskell skills, though. In my opinion, it’s the most pleasant-to-use programming language out there.

  13. I just finished the book, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War by Pierre Asselin. It was recommended to me by CQV (thanks man!!).

    I thought this would be an easy read as it is just over 200 pages long. Boy was I wrong. It is dense! A lot of new names, governmental positions, committees, etc to get used to. This is because it is told primarily from the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong’s perspective. The author, Asselin, has done a massive amount of research for this book and it is very well sourced and referenced. Including untapped information from the Hanoi archives. Not just anyone gets this access. Asselin knows Vietnamese and has spent years developing relationships with the Hanoi archive employees.

    Now, I originally thought that a book written from the enemies perspective would make the communists look good. Wrong again. What it made me realize is that Americans have no fucking clue about the Vietnamese experience, or who our enemy even was.

    Nobody I know, including myself before discovering Asselin, knows who Le Duan was. Or what Resolution 9 was. Le Duan essentially mounted a coup in late 1963 and led North Vietnam from that point through the rest of the war and beyond. Resolution 9 was essentially his declaration of war on South Vietnam with the introduction of regular NVA combat troops into the South in 1964. Which LBJ responded to with American regular combat troops (it had been only advisors until then).

    One of the many things that communist Hollywood and communist higher education in the US gets wrong is that we underestimated the Vietnamese communists “willingness to win.” Bullshit. We underestimated the willingness of Le Duan to win. He was willing to put his country through absolute hell for his victory. He was a militant Stalin-like character who saw everything through the lens of world revolution. As opposed to Go Chi Minh and general Giap who favored diplomacy and peaceful coexistence of the USSR. The Vietnamese communists lost 1 million soldiers and North Vietnam was bombed relentlessly for Le Duans victory. A victory that goes uncelebrated in Vietnam to this day, because of the losses revealed by the police state once the war was over. The Vietnamese people have decided that it just wasn’t worth it (something that Marxist Hollywood and Marxist American professors never reveal). I actually am reminded of Winston Churchill here, but that’s another story for another thread.

    Great book and highly recommended. I will read Asselin’s Vietnam’s American War next, which deals with the war from 1965 to 1975. Asselin also teaches at my alma mater, SDSU. I’m interested in taking one of his classes, and I’d like to get office hours with him if I can. As good of a writer as he is, he is an even better speaker. I recommend looking him up on YouTube.

    Thanks again CQV!

    Reply

    1. No problem, my friend. Glad that you like the book.

      Asselin has painstakingly worked on this book for years.

      When we think of mathematicians, we usually call them “genius” because it requires raw intelligence and natural instinct. When it comes to historians, however, we rarely use the term “genius”, but “erudite”, because to be a good historian, you need to dwell into thousands of records, to interpret them, and to construct a plausible and lucid narative.

      And Asselin is indeed a great historian.

      I also wish to applaud you for your determination to complete this book. As a native Vietnamese, I cannot easily relate to the difficulty of an American upon encountering Vietnamese names and different government titles, it is quite a challenge to retain them in your memory.

    2. Thanks man, I appreciate it. While tough to get through at times, I appreciated the great effort he put into sourcing every single detail. I wrote a manuscript that employs similar tactics. While not even in the same universe as Mr. Asselin, I referenced every detail with unimpeachable sources. I didn’t want my critics to have a leg to stand on.
      I utterly refused to put bullshit into my book. I salute Assalin once again for his incredible diligence with what he has done. Impeccable work.

      I remember an interview he did where he found in the Hanoi archives information so “juicy” that he even refused to put in in his book. He was afraid of getting his archivist friends in trouble. He hinted that Hanoi faced an antiwar movement similar to what Johnson and Nixon faced in the US but refused to say more. My feeling is that the NVA mowed the protestors down Tienamen Square style, and it was all covered up. What do you think?

    4. “My feeling is that the NVA mowed the protestors down Tienamen Square style, and it was all covered up. What do you think?”

      “We underestimated the willingness of Le Duan to win. He was willing to put his country through absolute hell for his victory. ”

      I think the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Western historians tend to hypothesize that there were 2 main camps within the North Vietnamese government. Pro-war vs anti-war, pro-Soviet vs pro-China. I think that there was indeed such a difference, but the common goal of almost all members of the Communist Party is to unite the country, one way or another.

      Ngo Dinh Diem’s election was fraudulent, so naturally Vietnamese veterans who fought against the French from 1946-1954 found themselves being betrayed by the US.

      The Vietnam War from the north Vietnamese perspective was just a continuation of the anti-colonial efforts to combat the French ambition.

      We must not forget that North Vietnam won the propaganda war as well. It is extremely crude political and ideological indoctrination that produce soldiers of steel will.

      My father was a veteran of North Vietnam army, and even though he was disillusioned with the current corrupted Vietnamese government, he is still under heavy influence of indoctrination.

    5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROgYHCYU9Zk

      You can consult this small interview of Ho Chi Minh, 1964. Ho spoke of the general attitude of top leaders at the time. The gist of all these is that if the US decided to escalate the war, the North would do everything they could, even at staggering cost, to expel her.

      The problem is this, very critical: the US was supporting a hungry ghost, South Vietnam. It was the South that did not have the will to win the war. Its generals were cowards, its soldiers were weak and ill-trained. No matter how the US had tried, she could do nothing if the land which she wished to defend had no will to fight. South Vietnam was a failure.

      The second failure is the geo-political position of Vietnam. The US could not stop the influx of materiel and weapons from the Soviet Union and China. Had Vietnam been located in Africa, I would say the US would have more chance to bring down her enemy.

    6. https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%E1%BB%A5_%C3%A1n_X%C3%A9t_l%E1%BA%A1i_Ch%E1%BB%91ng_%C4%90%E1%BA%A3ng

      You could try the automatic English translation. It was a real event when party members of North Vietnam were arrested and incarcerated for being “revisionist”

      You could also try some books on the Soviet and China relations with Vietnam. During the time period that you mentioned above, the Soviet tried to halt the conflict in Vietnam, while China wished to accelerate and escalate the war. Vietnamese leaders were equally divided due to this.

    7. I believe that we are in general agreement, but a little bit of perspective is needed to iron out the details. Firstly, it can not be understated how significant it is that I, along with the vast majority of Americans, have no idea who Le Duan was. I can’t help but believe that this is intentional and sinister on the part of American film makers and professors. Who, I should reiterate are extremely anti-American and sympathetic to communism. Ho Chi Minh is a much more likable guy and easier sell as a nationalist freedom fighter, so they misled the American people about his significance during the “big war” period.

      Secondly, the vast majority of Americans who hold a view on Vietnam already see the US as imperialists propping up a puppet dictatorship in Saigon. That Hanoi and especially the Viet Cong were freedom fighters continuing the war for liberation against the French, and even earlier against the Japanese, Chinese, and so on throughout their history. Essentially upholding Hanoi’s narrative. Asselin makes the point in videos I’ve seen that this was a very successful part of their propaganda campaign internationally. As was infiltrating ARVN forces and convincing them to retreat, desert etc. So perhaps they weren’t quite as incompetent without communist infiltration, as the official narrative would have us believe, which originated in Hanoi. Asselin also makes the point that Vietnam was not just perpetually at war with occupiers throughout it’s history, but also in perpetual civil war at odds with Hanoi’s propaganda and the narrative of Western films and college professors.

      Thirdly, I am interested in an alternate history where Diem would have allied the Catholics with Buddhists, offshoots of Buddhism, student activists, ethnic minorities and any other anticommunists during his reign. According to Asselin Diem was hated by the French and visa versa. It’s been one of the reasons the US selected him. So instead of destroying the Buddhist sects, maybe he could have aligned with them seeing that they were more powerful than the Viet Cong at the time, maybe this would have precluded an invasion from the North. The US should have promoted this type of coalition rather than praising him for attacking non-communist rivals.

    8. Also, what would you postulate that Assalin actually found in the Hanoi archives that was so “juicy” that he refused to actually put in any of his books due to fear of getting his archive friends in any danger?

      I did find, through my research, a female, Vietnamese American historian who found evidence of an assumption plot by Le Duan’s people on Ho Chi Minh in the lead on to the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive itself is good evidence IMO that Le Duan did not care too much about his countrymen’s lives to achieve his goals.

    10. “Thirdly, I am interested in an alternate history where Diem would have allied the Catholics with Buddhists, offshoots of Buddhism, student activists, ethnic minorities and any other anticommunists during his reign.”

      This is honestly a hole in my current understanding of the Vietnam War. Why were Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother, so anti-Buddhist. The Buddhists were usually portrayed as harmless and passive, but was this true? I don’t know. Perhaps this is something future historians could look at.

      ” Asselin also makes the point that Vietnam was not just perpetually at war with occupiers throughout it’s history, but also in perpetual civil war at odds with Hanoi’s propaganda and the narrative of Western films and college professors.”
      This is absolutely right. Vietnam was indeed in constant war with China, but it also went through civil wars that were very similar to the changes of dynasty in China as well.

      “Also, what would you postulate that Assalin actually found in the Hanoi archives that was so “juicy” that he refused to actually put in any of his books due to fear of getting his archive friends in any danger?”
      I don’t know. But I would harbor a guess that it could shed some more lights on the power dynamics between different factions within the Communist Party of Vietnam, internal friction and struggles. This is obviously silenced by the Party up till today.

      “Thirdly, I am interested in an alternate history where Diem would have allied the Catholics with Buddhists, offshoots of Buddhism, student activists, ethnic minorities and any other anticommunists during his reign.”

      I think this is quite a bit unrealistic. Diem did orchestrate a rather bloody purge of Vietnamese Communist supporters or suspects who were sympathetic to the Communists. This caused grief, fear and resentment among the population.

      Diem’s regime, despite being more independent from the US than later regimes, was also constantly under the US political machination, so it was not possible to independently forge an alliance with perceived Communist sympathizing elements, like Buddhists, student movements, ethnic minorities, etc. In short, division was so deep in South Vietnam that a practical coalition was impossible.

    11. It’s a dream scenario to be sure, but it hindsight I see it as the only way the South could have remained independent in the face of communist aggression. The Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects had fought both the Japanese and the French. They also opposed the Viet Minh. Karnow speculated that they would not have leaned in favor of the communists had Diem not cracked down on them, and may have even rallied to his colors. While they seemed the biggest threats to Diem at the time it also seems shortsighted to crush potential allies in light of the looming bigger communist threat because of the North’s support of the Viet Cong. Karnow also said that part of the frustration of the population with Diem was his inability to deal effectively with the communists.

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