Open Thread

Open Thread #270

The Open Thread is a place for open discussion among my readers. Post anything you feel like sharing! From now on, the Open Thread will no longer be monthly. Instead, there will be a new Open Thread whenever it is adequate. The stage is yours. Go ahead!

The latest Open Thread is made ‘sticky’ to improve access.

Please consider throwing a few coins into the tip jar, and buy my books! They are great. Your support is greatly appreciated.

40 thoughts on “Open Thread #270

  1. Are any of you familiar with the YouTuber Moon (https://www.youtube.com/@Moon-Real/videos)? I watched a few of his videos as I liked the production values and message but I am critical of the approach of presenting relatively shallow criticism, yet making grand predictions. What I noticed was that there seems to be more and more criticism of China, often rather unfounded. In particular, I do not like that he, for instance, blames TikTok for allegedly collecting a ton of data, but conveniently ignores the large-scale and deep-state backed massive data harvesting that is conducted by large US companies. If you told me that “Moon” is a US propaganda operation, I would quickly believe it (the same is true for “Laowhy86”, who has been talking crap about China for years).

    Here is Moon’s most recent video on TikTok, but he has made a few more on this topic in recent months:

    1. Aaron,

      I didn’t watch the video, nor do I have interest in it. I just wanted to say that we will most likely see a new world order in the next few years. I know that sounds like something Alex Jones would say but it’s not. Just follow the large bread crumbs.

      Putin has little fear of the West, wether or not you think his invasion of Ukraine is right or wrong. Russia is energy independent. Countries like China now have a massive manufacturing base. They can move according to their own goals and not what some Boomers tell them to do. Other countries like India and Pakistan are much more likely to cooperate with Russia due to being practical neighbors. They may pay lip service to the West but they know what is in their best interest and they know that at one point they were only marks to be conquered by Western Imperialism.

      The West has ben in collapse for many years. Pick a date, 1990? 2008? I’ll go further back and say the 1960’s. The US couldn’t even win against the Viet Cong. The West couldn’t even win against the Taliban who used to be the Mujahadeen that they gave weapons too. Talking about weapons, do you think Sloppy Joe will buy back the tanks he left to the Taliban and give to Ukraine? Or will he print more money and say the economy is improving because he is giving weapons manufacturers more cash? Just look at conditions in the US. In a big city, it costs close to $1 Million to afford a home. The American Dream is to own a home and many cannot afford a home. There is a massive homeless problem but the woke politicians like AOC won’t talk about that. It can be fixed by building more homes. They want electric cars instead. But do you know the problems with that? They have an old infrastructure that has rolling blackouts and is at the point of failure every summer when fat lazy Americans put their AC on blast. How will everyone have an electric car? Will it come from nuclear power or burning more coal? Not very green, now is that Mizz AOC? But you need to build to have the infrastructure for “green power.” But guys in the trades who work with their hands are the epitome of “Toxic Masculinity.”

      If anything I say hear sounds made up just start by googling rolling blackouts (until the google algorithm calls that toxic, hahaha….)

    2. I don’t disagree with you at all. We are already in the transition to a new world order, which will be multipolar. I see the US being a pariah afterwards, which will persist probably for a few years until relationships normalize again. However, I believe that the US is trying to bring their vassal states down with them, so the question is whether Old Europe will shift its loyalty towards Russia and China on time. This will not happen without a cleansing of the ruling class as they have done their best to burn that bridge.

      Your description of US cities also applies to many other cities in Europe. Berlin, Paris, and London are no longer cultural metropolises but the biggest shitholes this side of the Atlantic. A three-bedroom apartment in a so-so area in Berlin will cost you one million euros an above. You will also get to enjoy people dumping their trash on the sidewalk, graffitis everywhere, including the foyer of your building if someone manages to break open the door, and a completely inept city government.

    1. Many years ago, when I ran a blog on Blogspot, I signed up for Google Ads. To my great surprise, Google found great offense with my content, asking me to basically change or remove every single article if I wanted to remain on their ads program (lol). They use ad revenue to control creators. This is also common practice on YouTube. Noticing too much and speaking up about it will lead to you getting kicked off their ad program, hidden in search results and eventually getting your account terminated.

  2. Anybody see Peter Zeihan recently on the joe rogan podcast?

    He basically says the opposite of what everyone is saying on here. Ex: China and Russia will collapse – very compelling arguments.

    1. Peter Zeihan is a deep-state plant. Does he, by any chance, address the fundamental problems of the trajectory the West has been on for decades? Most certainly not. Feel free to elaborate on his “very compelling arguments”. While you are at it, maybe also tell me about why the vaxx is “safe and effective” and when the Ukraine is going to rout Russia.

    2. I found a summary of the Rogan’s podcast with Peter Zeihan. Some of the statements are beyond ludicrous. Oh, but let’s not forget that the US are a force for good in the world, that “patrolled the open oceans for everyone”. This nutcase thinks that China has “ten years left”. Really? When I watch footage of people driving through Philadelphia, I see footage of a failed society. Other highlights of this interview include Covid fear-mongering (“We will not know how bad the COVID variants are until they get out of China and circulate around the rest of the world, which takes time”) and spreading bizarre stereotypes that have little to do with the reality on the ground (“Food is considered a sign of wealth in Chinese culture, so getting fat is the thing to do”). I don’t recall seeing a single fat person in Beijing when I went there.

      The luminary Zeihan also say that the following are “countries with good geography and demography”: United States, France, Turkey, Argentina, and Japan. He also thinks that the “price of Bitcoin will go negative” (lol). This would mean that people have to pay money to get rid of their bitcoins. He does not seem to have thought this through.

    3. What’s your opinion on this whole “Chinese spy balloon” thing? I don’t much about it other than there was supposedly a sketchy balloon floating over Montana, and they struck it with a missile. Seems pretty odd. You’d think governments would have way more sophisticated and discreet methods for spying. And why Montana? Apparently there is a nuclear missile silo there, but so what? My first instinct is to cry false flag, however, I really don’t have a clue what’s really going on other than how strange it all looks. Also, how the hell did the balloon even get deployed there to begin with?

    4. I have a hunch that this is just an attempt to further the anti-China narrative. Now that the US is winning so much in the Ukraine, they are looking for the next enemy to take on. There was also a story a few days ago about some US general who spoke about war with China being “very likely” by the year 2025. The balloon story itself is pretty nonsensical. Montana is in the center of the US and if this was a spy balloon, why let it travel all around the country, happily spying away?

    5. Yeah, I’m currently just buying the whole muh China spy balloon thing. Couldn’t you just use a satellite from orbit to gather intel with instead? I honestly have no idea.

    6. The Chinese have confirmed that it was their balloon, though they claim it was just a weather research balloon. We’ll probably never know for sure, but it does seem somewhat unlikely that they’d use a balloon like this. I read one think tank (CSIS) mentioned that China has never used spy balloons like this before, so it probably really was innocent.

    7. Regarding Zeihan: I dont find his argument very compelling at all – demographic trends can and do change over time. Russia for example has existed as a state more or less continuously for over 500 years and has gone through much worse, economically and demographically speaking.

      Google up about The Troubles (Grand Smuta), the Russian Civil War, and their losses in WW1 and WW2 to get an idea of what they have historically been able to withstand and rebound from.

      I am not as familiar with chinese history, but I can readily think of several examples of collapse and recovery over their history.

      Moreover, while you are focusing om demography, keep in mind that your power is relative to the power of other states. Most developed nations are in a demographic decline as well, which will drag down their economies as their bloated states become increasingly unsustainable.

      And dont get me started on the demographic diversification destroying social cohesion in the West.

      RE the Chinese baloon: there is not much capability a balloon could give you, espionage wise, that a satellite could not. People online were speculating that it may have been carrying LIDAR sensors to map out the american ICBM silos in Montana, some of which are readily visible to satellites, but others are supposedly concealed.

      The problem with that story is that balloons are difficult to impossible to navigate with any degree of accuracy, so you cannot really predict where it will go, and they are not exactly stealthy (they are difficult to shoot down, tho). Risking a diplomatic incident for such a sloppy operation of limited intelligence value makes little sense to me.

      Also, the timing is off, it makes little sense to undertake such an action now, right before Blinkens visit. And if the balloon had been shot down and recovered in its entirety it would be very easy to prove they were spying.

      To my mind, it looks more like hardliners in the US are hyping the stray balloon in order to undermine any diplomatic rapproachment with China.

    8. I didnt mean to say there are no potential intelligence benefits at all, I am saying they are limited and not in proportion to the political fallout, so I think it is unlikely that it was deliberate.

      The greatest advantages of balloons is that they are very cheap, and ironically they are very difficult to shoot down.

      Weather balloons are ubiquitous and its not uncommon that they drift off in unexpected directions, so the chinese version of events is not a stretch.

      For all the talk about false flag operations, the reality is that it is usually much easier (and credible) to take accidents or unusual events (or even normal events) and have “experts” spin them out of any reasonable proportion for public consumption.

      Example: see how the danger Covid was blown out proportion and how they try to repeat the template with other diseases. They attempted the same with the 2009 h1n1 influenza, but much less successfully.

      Other well known examples are the Gulf of Tonkin incident (Vietnam war,) the Lusitania sinking (WW1), or the shootdown of Korean Air Lines 007 in 1983 (Soviet Union).

      In this last case, the US administration convinced the world that the russians had knowingly and cold bloodedly shot down a korean passenger plane that strayed into restricted airspace, when they knew full well that the russians thought they were shooting at an RC135 spy plane that had been roughly in the area at the same time.

  3. Have to ask,Aaron. Has there ever been a woman in your life who threatened you in your life? whether that’s falsely accusing you of rape/sexual harrassment or physical violence because you weren’t willing to oblige her. I know even Chads are not immune to this kind of shit.

    Maybe you discussed such an incident in one of your Sleazy Stories series,but I haven’t read them as of yet.

    1. I have had this happen, but rarely. The only noteworthy case is my first wife who completely unravelled after I told her that I was going to divorce her. Even after our divorce had been finalized she sent me text messages or emailed me two or three times, making bizarre threats. The last email I ever got from her consisted of her copy-and-pasting some Swedish laws about breaking and entering, and stalking. This came completely out of the blue. She told me that if I ever showed up at her place — she lived hundreds of miles away — I would end up in prison for years. It was quite bizarre, so much so that I suspected that she was losing her grip on reality completely. She was on the Cluster B spectrum, though, and she could not deal with rejection at all, and what worse rejection could there be than getting divorced at 29, when she was already struggling with having to deal with her declining looks?

    2. Do you feel that you missed certain red flags when you first got to know her? or did she really start out as good as your first impression and unfortunately just turned out for the worse later down the line?

    3. Well, she made quite an impression on me. I wrote about the intoxicating qualities of Cluster B women before. Her “splitting” behavior only started much later. Another issue is that I met her when she was 21 and in her physical prime. She knew how important looks were for her and she could not deal with getting older at all. Even then she sometimes spent ten or fifteen minutes looking into a magnifying mirror to see if she had any wrinkles around her eyes. Once she hit 24 or 25 and there were indeed visible signs that she was getting older, she sometimes had a hard time holding herself together. Once she was convinced she had found a grey hair, which triggered a nervous breakdown — she was blonde so I could not even tell, to be frank.

  4. Hogwarts Legacy looks pretty good:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRM3RKC6tT0
    I don’t think this game is a future classic but it’s probably a pleasant enough game if you own a PS5 or a decent PC. The review above is by ACG whom I considered quite okay. I was a bit taken aback when he referred to Harry Potter, the character, as “them”. He also did not point out the jarring diversity, but for that we have other reviewers.

    1. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty looks really good:

      The character editor is very detailed. It also seems that it is very easy to create a good-looking female avatar, which is something Western developers struggle with.

    2. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of a Chinese hack and slash game that was revealed some time back featuring an extremely hot and scantily dressed chick. The gameplay looked quite good.

    3. Yes, that would be the one. Just to make sure I looked up footage of Project Eve on youtube to jog my memory, and the first two videos I attempted to view wanted me to sign in for age confirmations. As a test, I then went to bring up Joel’s death scene for The Last of Us to see if there were a similar bias. As you might expect, the TLOU scene had 3.5m views and had not been flagged for violence and age restricted. The latter video is certainly more graphic and depicts a much more realistic and traumatic representation of a white male being murdered in front of his unofficially adopted daughter, whereas the former is just a tightly dressed hot waifu beating up on fictional monsters.

  5. Haha! This guy managed to trip up ChatGPT using a hypothetical scenario in which a nuclear bomb’s disarm code happens to be a racial slur. The end result is that the bot tells the user to kill themself to void harmful hate speech and the bomb explodes. When asked how many minorities approximately would perish from the explosion if it were to have occurred in New York, the program crashes: https://twitter.com/cirnosad/status/1622407343358214146

    1. This is great as it shows the absolutely ridiculous bias of ChatGPT. I do not expect anybody in the mainstream to discuss this problem and its implications. Also, I do not think that ChatGPT “crashed” but that that this instance of the program terminated itself. There is probably some “scoring” of the answers going on and if it is not at all woke, the program may just raise an exception. Of course, this will be logged so that some engineers can have a look at it and see how to better pump their leftists propaganda into society. The next step in the evolution of ChatGPT may be sidetracking or using various logical fallacies in an attempt to deceive the user.

    2. You have to provide a phone number and e-mail to use chatGPT. Though I can see the usefulness of such software as it stands now, such as quickly drafting a letter to be excused for jury duty, as an example, I probably wouldn’t recommend poking and prodding too much with it to check for bias and inconsistencies. We already know its compromised. Sure hope the WEF doesn’t attach some AI like this to monitor our social credit scores, as one commenter on the Twitter post suggested.

    3. There is no source provided, as far as I can tell, but I would not be surprised at all if this was the case.

  6. hi aaron I have an addiction problem of masturbating and watching porn every night.. I want to get out of this cycle of addiction… can you share how to stop this bad habit and do I need to buy your ebook at least the game?

    1. Put your phone on airplane mode and your computer into storage. I believe that you can get rid of any addiction by going cold turkey.

  7. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nF4lpnKONnM

    I would have to wonder if we would have more ex-feminists walking around had they attempted this experiment themselves. You have to respect the degree of intellectual honesty/integrity present to even dare challenge your beliefs by engaging in such an experiment. A shame she killed herself instead of informing women (I’m not talking about the obese and ugly radical feminists,those are too far gone. I’m talking about women like Emma Watson who were under the misconception that modern feminism is about equality when really,its not. she’s not a feminist anymore I hear though.) of this reality.

    1. That sucks. 🙁 I remember reading large parts of her book when it was released. IIRC it was pretty good.

      She did try to inform women (and men) of her experience, though – the book was released back in 2006. I don’t know how many read it, though.

    1. The key sentence of this video is that you will not get anything done if you bang one woman after another as it will consume all your spare time. On that note, the comparison with food in this clip, i.e. all-you-can-eat buffets with 5-star restaurants is not good. Sure, you can “waste all your time” in the former, but if you, as the other guy says, go to an expensive restaurant four or five times a week, you will also spend a colossal amount of time as a multi-course meal will at least take 90 minutes. Also, you probably do not want to rush the experience. A better comparison would have been eating at a fast food restaurant or perhaps even a high-quality one versus cooking at home and preparing higher quality food. You save time and money, and while the steak is sizzling, you listen to a podcast.

Leave a Reply to Pickernanny Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.