Open Thread

Open Thread #194

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24 thoughts on “Open Thread #194

  1. Some more conspiracy theories were proven true recently. First, several German Twitter accounts with which supposed doctors spread fake news about “safe and effective” vaccines were revealed to have been funded by Big Pharma:
    https://twitter.com/SHomburg/status/1485343134498361350
    Second, during the protests against the Covid tyranny in Brussels yesterday antifas were throwing stones at an EU building. This was used as a pretense to disperse the protests. Yet, those antifas were later filmed running towards the police for protection. They used a red hankie as a sign so that they would not get doused with pepper spray.

    Note that according to Uber’s mom, public disinformation as well as false flag attacks are conspiracy theories and therefore not real.

    1. Thinking Ape did an interview with this guy recently, which I listened to for maybe ten minutes. Frankly, Wheat Waffles did not immediately appeal to me as I do not think that he has any interesting takes. However, I should point out that I have a pretty high bar. At the moment, the only video content creators I follow and consume a good chunk of their output are Thinking Ape (YT), American Krogan, Computing Forever, and Looks Maximus (all Odysee), and the only podcast I regularly listen to is Fash The Nation. Oh, wait, I just used the wrong notes. Of course, I wanted to say that I religiously listen to these podcasts: The Guardian’s “Smash The Patriarchy”, the SPLC’s “Going to Zero: Solutions to the Whiteness Problem”, and the ADL’s “This is Who We Are: Jonathan Greenblatt on Creating Racial Harmony”.

    2. I have one of the highest ranked comments on one of his videos. Where I do a takedown on what he does.

      He tries to oversimplify things into neat categories and act like he’s reinventing the wheel or saying something smart or special or unique.

      He kind of reminds of people who got a following rehashing pua crap. He’s doing the same for blackpill.

    3. Recently James Allsup left whom I quite liked whereas I am at lukewarm about Jazzhands McFeels with his bizarre “finkelthink” concept (in short: Jews play both sides, and somehow even unintended pushbacks are part of their plan). Sometimes I wonder if he wants to deliberately demoralize the audience with this nonsense. There is a cycle going on between hope and despair, i.e. he tells you about this and that, which was a setback for ZOG, but this does not go on for too long until he brings up finkelthink again. If you told me that Jazzhands is controlled opposition and that he is running a deliberate campaign of what the GDR’s Stasi called “Zersetzung” [1], I would at least not dismiss the claim out of hand. At times, I had the impression that James and Jazzhands played out some kind of good cop/bad cop strategy.

      I do not think that FTN is lost yet. Their new co-host brings up a lot of deep historical knowledge, and some insights were genuinely unknown to me. Sometimes, he refers to obscure books written in the 19th or early 20th century on various topics. This is a good approach. I also liked this about William Luther Pierce’s radio broadcasts.

      Still, I also found that I am listening less and less to FTN. Some time ago I stopped listening to The Ralph Retort, so at this rate, I will be out of a podcast to listen to in a few months. My quality of life would take a bit of a hit if I had to revert to listening to EDM or classic music while doing chores, so I hope that I will find a new podcast to fill this void if need be. There was one guy I quite liked, he calls himself “The Unknown Quantity”, but he recently switched to a model where you have to pay $4.99 per one-hour episode.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

    4. Alek, that’s a great point. It’s always black and white thinking with these types. PUAs say you can get tons of women by using the right game no matter what. black pillers say it’s all over no matter what, it’s only looks and there’s nothing 95% of people can do to improve, etc.

      Would you be able to paste your comment here, or link to the comment?

    5. Well in case it’s not so much that he says “it’s all looks”. In fact he’s not a classic blackpiller. He believe in shit like game. He even says if you’re a 5 and not getting laid it’s your fault because you didn’t learn enough game ?‍♂️

      The issue is that he likes to pigeonhole things into very narrow boxes and categories, because that’s what sells. People don’t like subtlety. They want things to be categorized into categories. Not always black and white.

      Sometimes they might come up with like a model that classifies everything into 4 categories, but then they try to artificially cram everything into those 4 categories.

      That’s what a lot of PUA rehashers did to sell lots of products. People want cut-and-tried shit, they don’t want to hear about subtley and conditionality. They want simplified models. And that’s why this wheat-waffley dude does.

      For example he classifies 100% of mgtow as “coping ugly guys”. He doesn’t even allow for the idea that someone might have decided that women aren’t worth pursuing. In his mental model, guys are either:

      – Too ugly to get laid
      – Or if they’re not too ugly to get laid, they should maximize game and get laid
      – If a guy chooses not to waste time trying to get laid, he must be ugly or lazy. No other option is allowed in wheat-waffle’s model. It’s not even possible in his model that a guy can get laid, but choose not to spend energy trying to.

      In that way Wheat Waffles is much closer to PUAs than black pill. In fact, he’s like a PUA that just admits the “too ugly to get laid” line starts at like a 4 in looks, whereas classical puas didn’t want to admit any level of looks was unfuckable to women.

    6. Tl;DR

      If you’re a 5 or above, wheat-waffles is a traditional PUA, he’ll tell you the exact same bullshit that PUAs tell you, with no subtlety. Like the 2005 PUA crap.

      But if you’re a 4 or below, he’ll be a blackpiller with you.

      So he’s carved out a niche where he’s selling both types of oversimplified bullshit at the same time.

    7. Interesting. I only saw a debate he had where he had held the lookism postion, I wasnt aware he promoted game. Sounds like an oversimplification regardless.

  2. Over roughly the last week I binged on the manga Berserk. Last year, I lost interest some time after the Golden Age arc, but this time I decided to push through. I think the second half has some noticeable weaknesses such as inappropriate goofy humor at times or sub-plots that seem like filler like a battle with some pirates that show up out of nowhere and after the pirates as well as all the creatures they summon have been defeated, there is no payoff for Guts’ new band either. I think that it would have been better had the manga ended after the Golden Age, and this would have been easy to set up. In fact, I fully expected Guts to be put in a position where his rage will consume him, he will overexert himself, and eventually pay the price. Plenty of panels in the first half of the manga can be interpreted to hint at exactly such an outcome. The second half of Berserk is not without its merit, though. Some of the side stories are very good. I particularly liked the Lost Children arc, as well as the sub-plots in which the witch Schierke plays a prominent role. Also, the second half has some of the best artwork of the manga, and thus of this medium.

    At first I was concerned that the manga does not have a proper conclusion. Theoretically, it does not. However, by the time you make it to the end, a lot of questions will have been answered. In fact, (spoiler!) Guts seems to be at the end of his journey. He saved Casca, and he seems to have gotten over his hatred for Griffith. There is even a page where Guts, for the first and only time in the manga, contemplates death, when he is about to drown in a pool of blood.

    The posthumously released last chapter, ties up the story quite well. In fact, there are several points in the last few chapters that could have served as the ending. My favorite would have been Guts’ getting confronted with the question of what new goal to pursue. This would have been a rather natural cut-off point. This scene also ties back to the original impetus Guts had for joining Griffith (“be part of someones dream”), him later on leaving and causing the downfall of Griffith as he wanted to find his own dream, and, at the end, realizing that all his anger and aggression were a poor guide for his life and that it is not a productive use of his time and energy to define himself merely as Griffith’s counterpart. Anyway, if you did not know that the manga prematurely ended, you would not necessarily think that the ending of the last chapter is poorly made; the story is wrapped up nicely regardless.

  3. Denmark is next in line to drop the Covid bullshit (Reuters):
    https://news.trust.org/item/20220125112915-6i1qh

    Here is one of the key parts:

    But health authorities said it estimated between 30%-40% of those currently in hospital with a positive coronavirus test are there for other reasons than COVID-19.

    I guess you are no longer a conspiracy theorist for claiming that the authorities have been conflating the for/with Covid numbers, in an attempt to stoke fear in the population.

  4. Anyone else finding these abruptly changed courses (right after Davos) with these (allegedly) high numbers of people contracting Covid highly suspicious? Seems like Phase 2 is right around the corner.

    If Germany and Austria also abandoned their mandatory vaccine program, we’d know there is something up.

    1. I think the next play will be supply constraints (food, energy). We may even see a partial breakdown of vital infrastructure instead of blackouts or brownouts. All of this has been war-gamed by the elites already. There was also an exercise recently about “resetting” the global financial system. You have probably heard of Central Bank Digital Currency, which will tie your money to your ID, enable full surveillance, and make it a lot easier to sanction you for wrong-think. Imagine that instead of your Facebook or Twitter account, your CBDC wallet gets shut down. Note that this is already happening on some level with the existing financial infrastructure. Identitarian activist Martin Sellner, for instance, has had twenty or thirty bank accounts terminated, and the number of people who have gotten kicked off PayPal or Patreon is legion.

  5. Bitcoin … how do you pay during blackouts? Or when they shut down the internet? Which merchant in his right mind accepts such a volatile „currency“ anyway? I‘d rather stack cash, gold, silver, booze and cigarettes.

    1. The point of bitcoin was to siphon off excess liquidity into nothingness that has no true effect on the financial system because it is highly tied to the dollar and is pumped/dumped via tether and the miners.

      The trillions that flooded bitcoin previously would have flooded into gold and demanded delivery which would have broken the comex because of the leverage that exists there. There is even more leverage with silver which can also break the comex. If the comex breaks then the current financial system implodes.

      Bitcoin is just a ruse that was created by the system and the rubes bought it very easily. The rubes have even built the infrastructure and the psychology so that the elites can implement a central bank digital currency on everyone as this financial system fails. Quite frankly, the rubes are massive idiots and cannot see past their nose due to greed and their own thinking that they are beating the system when it is really just a ploy being used on them.

      With that being said, this electronic system wont last long as the current civilization is basically dead from what I can see. This is the end game and there are many reasons why.

    2. The tone of your comment reminds me of FTN’s “finkelthink”. I do not think that Bitcoin was a CIA project. However, your observations are correct nonetheless because the effect is that digital assets, not just cryptocurrencies, soak up tremendous amounts of money. Cryptos have a market capitalization of two trillion US dollars. It does not take much phantasy to imagine the effect on inflation rates if this money was circulating elsewhere in the economy. There is also the insanity surrounding NFTs where people pay six or seven figures for a claim of ownership of a digital asset that can be easily reproduced. Essentially, you are paying for bragging rights.

    3. If a blackout is the base case, then we have other problems than the “bitcoin vs. gold” debate.
      A gasoline electricity generator , canned food and shitloads of guns and ammo is a more realistic hedge against a blackout.

    4. “The trillions that flooded bitcoin ”

      You slam around loads of financial lingo, but the above phrase exposed you as someone who has no idea what he’s talking about.

      Trillions never flooded Bitcoin. The market capitalization might have been at a trillion USD at some point last year, but that has nothing to do with the funds that went into the asset class. According to your primitive understanding, to take BTC from USD 1tr to USD 2tr market cap, investors need to inject net new money of 1tr USD.
      Turn off the FUD news from CNN about “bitcoin is boiling the oceans” and think hard why the above line of thinking is incorrect.

    5. ” It does not take much phantasy to imagine the effect on inflation rates if this money was circulating elsewhere in the economy. ”

      Exactly. Real Estate for instance would’ve gone up much more without digital assets which have acted as an escape valve to the monetary policy over the past years.

      “Essentially, you are paying for bragging rights.”

      Agreed. It’s worth noting that humans like to brag with whatever they perceive to be art. Look at the Louvre and the Mona Lisa in it. NFTs are art galleries on steroids. Nothing new under the sun.

  6. Blade, very well put. I see it the same way, although not as eloquently.

    If all the money went into precious metals, we would‘ve seen panic moves. And I am guessing the elites are buying all the hard assets they can, while dumb money ‚invests‘ in something intangible and ultimately useless in the real world.

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