Open Thread

Open Thread #332

Aaron "Sleazy" Elias

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!

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39 thoughts on “Open Thread #332”

  1. Roosh V has completely disappeared from the web. He deleted all his blogs, social media accounts, and forums. He stated that he’s left his online activities behind and found a new job.

    I’ve always been intrigued by this figure, unfortunately discovering him late. I’d love to hear your opinions on him. How much of what he said was true, and how much was fabricated for commercial purposes? In an interview on a Ukrainian TV show, a ‘friend’ of his exposed him by saying he had no success with women. How could someone continuously write books, manage a website with numerous followers and visitors, and at the same time have the intense life he always described? I also wonder how much of his ‘redemption’ was genuine and how much was simply a consequence of being economically and socially cut off from the web. Nevertheless, I hope he’s found some peace within himself now.

    Reply

    1. I have written a bit about Roosh on my old blog. In short, I think he is a clown. From what I gather, he did not have a lot of success with women. He was one of those PUAs who almost never got laid. I wonder if he ever had a girlfriend either. Of course, this is not the sole measure of the worth of a man. In fact, men can be happy without women, too. Roosh, however, defined himself as some kind of “player”, despite not really getting anywhere with women, which I found utterly bizarre.

      I think that him turning to God was also motivated by his lack of success with women. He spent one or two decades defining himself by his supposed sexual prowess and managed to keep this up for a surprising length of time. At some point, however, it presumably just became too ridiculous. Here, it is important to also keep in mind that the PUA niche is no longer lucrative. This may also have something to do with his seemingly sudden change as few years ago.

    2. I think Sleazy agrees that PUA is extremely harmful because it wastes your time, and time is extremely precious. I don’t buy the adage that it is never too late to start (or even to start all over again). Past certain ages, certain things will never be within your reach ever again.

      A life of a PUA is downright miserable and pathetic. If you have been in that life for that long, you would look back in misery the time you have wasted following a preposterous ideal.

    3. There are PUAs who have killed themselves, and there are others who look as if they may be close.

      Regarding your general point about time being precious: of course it is difficult to start over when you are older. However, men still have it better in this regard than women. You can turn your life around in your 30s or 40s and still make money, and father some kids. As a childless old woman, though, you are looking at 50 years of misery ahead. Also, with some activities you need to start quite early and if you miss that window, the chance is gone forever. This applies to most sports, acting, serious academic studies, etc. For instance, I do not think that David Irving would have written many books had he started doing his research in his 50s.

    4. One thing that helps is deaging. I now check my age on 3 different age checking tools and they never go above early 30s. I haven’t even done all that much and technology will only improve.

      I think with women it’s different because you don’t only need younger looking face, but also body. Nowadays you can be a buff, successful 48 year old and look like you’re in your 30s (facially). We don’t need our body complexion to be like that of a younger guy. That gives you more time to acquire stuff without looking old.

    5. https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=zLDPL6RiiUTcrLQw

      On this topic. Michael Sartain discussing older men and younger women. He himself is 46 with a 22 year old. Also mentions something about how women peak in tinder swipes at 23, whereas guys peak between 38 and 44. No idea where he got it from, but if true I would add I’m sure most of these guys are doing nothing about looking younger. So it can probably be extended to 50.

    6. This video seems to be blocked in my country, and YouTube deviously redirects the link to this video instead, which just shows a static image with the message that the content is not available on your device:

      This is typical passive-aggressive leftist behavior, similar to shadow-banning. It is also quite nonsensical that some videos would not be available on YouTube on the web versus the app.

    7. I think the link is simply malformed. It doesn’t contain the video ID. si query parameter is the identifier for who shared the link but as far as I am aware it doesn’t identify the video itself.

      I am also curious how much success can a guy potentially have in his 40s and 50s should he decide not to go for a family route. I’m not sure though whether Sartain is trustworthy source of information or just another redpill copium peddler.

    8. Sorry guys, the link had like 23 parameters so i removed them, guess i removed id as well. Was on mobile so couldnt double check. Heres the proper link:

    9. I’m not sure though whether Sartain is trustworthy source of information or just another redpill copium peddler.

      I dont find it unbeleivable considering he literally organizes events and parties for maxim, playboy etc. I only had like 1/10,000th of his status and had much younger hotties throwing themselves at me.

      At that level of social status you would need the worlds worst anti-game to not get laid with younger hotties.

  2. Do you know anyone who has met him in person? So, do you think all the various reports in books and blogs are purely fictional? Did he used to go out in Eastern Europe at night and only got rejection after rejection? I think it must have been a very sad life for him to have to maintain this character for such a long time.

    Reply

    1. Yes, I know two or three people who have met him in person. Thus, I have second-hand knowledge of his success with women, or lack thereof. Roosh strikes out a lot but every once in a while he got some drunk 5/10. What seems not well-known is that Roosh was teaching English abroad as a living. He did this on a tourist visa, which is not legal. Oh, and he also did visas runs as he wanted to stay in the various countries for longer than he would have been allowed to.

      Regarding his books: he has a series on the various European countries, titles “Bang/Don’t Bang $Country”. If he got laid somewhere, even if just once, he was full of praise for that country but if the women gave him the cold shoulder, like in Denmark, he had nothing good to say about either the country or the women. Never was the issue that he may simply not have been competitive in the sexual marketplace in those countries. Danish women, for instance, are not known to be unattractive. However, they are known for being tall. With Roosh, the opposite is the case, on both counts.

    2. A little late to this thread, but I want to point out something Sleazy mentions here – your competitiveness varies from country to country, or from area to area.

      I have no problem scoring chicks in my own country. But I recently spent time in Serbia, for example, and although there are plenty of hotties around, a lot of them are my own height or higher, and do are the guys. So if I tried to pick up in Serbia I would be at a disatvantage.

      Since the russo-ukrainian war started, there is a sizable community of russians and ukrainians who have moved to Buenos Aires, and you can see it on tinder as well as the supermarket line.

      I recently matched with a russian girl on tinder, but when it turned out she was a few cm higher than me she outright told me that this was a dealbreaker. I commended her on her honesty and wished her best of luck in finding a taller guy in a south american country (no irony intended)

  3. Denmark is one of the countries with the most beautiful women in the world, but there he couldn’t leverage his American status because danish women are already wealthier than him. Physical appearance was more important. On the other hand, in Ukraine, maybe 10 years ago being American vaguely held some status, and by spending some money you could get some girl into bed, given that the local guys didn’t have many resources to invest in women. Yet, there was always the language barrier. The poorer Eastern European girls either don’t speak English or speak it poorly, and he obviously didn’t speak Ukrainian, so he couldn’t really have much “game” with them.

    Reply

    1. He is also ethnic, which, while not a deal breaker, is definitely a disadvantage in the countries like Ukraine and Russia (and probably the rest of white countries, too).

      Denmark and other northern Europe must be the worst possible destination for sex tourism. That is because it’s not just the women who are attractive over there, but guys ( = your competition) as well. Add to it the fact that guys you are going to compete with are lean and looksmaxxed in any country, but women’s level of self care changes dramatically from a country to country. In East Asia it’s still the norm for women to be lean, which is not the case in Europe. So by going to Denmark you are going to compete with lean, tall, Aryan chads for a bunch of probably overweight woman. Sounds like a great idea, especially if you are not very tall Iranian-Armenian.

    2. Danish women are still pretty slim. When Roosh was trying his look in Denmark, it was rare to see any fat woman in that country at all. I can well-imagine him, the disheveled US-tourist, trying to score with any of the women in a venue when every guy was more well-off, taller, better-looking, and better-groomed than he was. To use PUA lingo, he got “mogged” by the entire country.

    3. He is also ethnic, which, while not a deal breaker, is definitely a disadvantage in the countries like Ukraine and Russia (and probably the rest of white countries, too).

      Denmark and other northern Europe must be the worst possible destination for sex tourism. That is because it’s not just the women who are attractive over there, but guys ( = your competition) as well. Add to it the fact that guys you are going to compete with are lean and looksmaxxed in any country, but women’s level of self care changes dramatically from a country to country. In East Asia it’s still the norm for women to be lean, which is not the case in Europe. So by going to Denmark you are going to compete with lean, tall, Aryan chads for a bunch of probably overweight woman. Sounds like a great idea, especially if you are not very tall Iranian-Armenian.

      I think I clicked the “post comment” button twice and now it won’t let me post because the I’m submitting a duplicate comment. But I don’t see my comment.

    4. You not seeing a comment you just posted could be a caching issue related to your browser. Both your comments went through, though. I will leave them both up as you raise an issue that others may also have encountered. Also note that if you try to accidentally submit exactly the same comment twice, the second attempt should be blocked by WordPress. This is another edge case that sometimes happens, e.g. if you submit a comment and for some reason your browser tab does not get updated. In any case, I am glad I do not have to do web development for a living because the nonsense I see as a user is hair-raising. Standards in other fields of software development tend to be higher.

    5. After people saw that PUA was a scam in the US, the new PUA sales pitch was that it works in foreign countries – Roosh tapped right into that market. Roosh admitted that he didn’t get any women in the US, was he successful when traveling? No idea

      I was extremely successful when living in south East Asia…. But compared to Roosh I was not a failure in the west (I had multiple long-term girlfriends) and my success in south East Asia is explainable (high status due to well-paid expat job, average height in Europe but tall in Asia). So I don’t think my life experience apply to Roosh.

    1. This is incredible. There is quite some pent-up frustration with those people in the Netherlands and I can easily imagine there being a big backlash. Denmark and Sweden also no longer have as big a heart as they used to when it comes to supporting these people.

    3. The prime ministers (or whatever they are called) of Ireland and Scotland (both south Asians) said the same

  5. Have any of you guys been seeing the term “Medium-Ugly” flying around these days? I guess chicks have found their own classification for male 7’s.

    Reply

    1. Yep, I mentioned it in one of the recent open threads. https://blog.aaronsleazy.com/index.php/2023/12/07/sticky-open-thread-331/#comment-155189

      I agree with you that it’s for 7’s. Reminds me the “Hollywood ugly” thing where whenever they need an ugly guy they cast a seven who looks bad compared to all the 8s and 9s, but is still more attractive than an average person. Hell, in the Game of Thrones books, Tyrion is specifically described as an incredibly ugly, but for the show they casted the guy who is very likely the most handsome midget on earth right now.

    2. Hoemath put out a video about this, but yes, a mid-ugly guy is a chadlight. Its the guy who can bang chicks if he is rich, high status and charismatic. And then chicks will be like I banged an ugly dude coz he has other things going for him. But thats not true. No amount of status or charisma will get chicks to bang an actual ugly guy.

  9. Insomniac, one of Sony’s goyslop vidya factories, got hacked. I find this interesting:
    https://twitter.com/thicc_stick_boi/status/1737019487436902501
    Commitments made in 2023 or earlier extend ten years into the future, with an added five-year window to profit from sales. (Would you sign a contract covering such a time period in clown world?) Total investments of over $600m stretched over a few games is also a really sizeable sum. Gaming, at least as Sony understands it, is completely aping the movie industry.

    This is how they got hacked:
    https://archive.is/jtzXh
    I suppose that this is the price you pay for diversity. This email contains one red flag after another. Yet, someone at Insomniac thought nothing of it and just went ahead. This reminds me of a security exercise we had at a former employer. They had hired a third-party to send us some phishing emails. This was just to see if we would respond. Basically everyone just deleted or reported the first email. Shortly afterwards, the security team told us what this was about, and within a few minutes one of the most senior women in the company, who was one step below the C-level, sent an email to the entire company (reply-all as the first email also went out to the entire company), asking what she should now do as she had gone to that external website and entered personal information. Thus, this woman not only fell for the fake fishing attempt, she did not even understand that the external website was not real and thus did not pose a risk. At least this made her aware that she should not blindly believe anything anybody sends her.

    Reply

  10. I started reading “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius and I’m not getting what all the fuss is about. So much of what he is saying is wrong, or has lapses in logic. If I encountered anything of that sort in a blog post, I would’ve stopped reading it right away. In this case I gave it more time, since this book is recommended by Aaron, but I don’t think I’m going to be finishing it. Here are some examples:

    [taking about death] If it doesn’t hurt the individual elements to to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating?

    That’s because people are not individual elements, but are comprised of those elements. And the separation of parts will destroy the whole, even if the parts themselves are intact

    no one does wrong thing deliberately

    People do all kinds of things deliberately. People kill, steal and rape. Is he trying to say that nothing is wrong whatsoever? I’d be inclined to agree with that, but it’s a weird way to phrase it, and he also doesn’t seem to be a nihilist based on the rest of the book. I think he was trying to say that people are only doing wrong things because they are misguided, and would certainly do the right thing if they knew how. I find this pattern very common among liberals, and very dangerous at that, because they end up underestimating their enemies

    Choose not be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been

    Here he is conveniently forgetting that people tend to have physical bodies, and anyone will be harmed if, let’s say, there fingers were chopped off or their skin taken from them.

    Whatever the nature of the whole does, and whatever serves to maintain in, is good for every part of the nature

    Yeah, right. So being short/ugly/sick etc is good, because it’s all part of the nature. He is basically saying that nothing is wrong ever. How about worker ants dying for the queen? How about your skin cells dying to protect more valuable cells? It’s good for the whole, but those parts are literally dying in pain. Pain and dying is definitely bad in the conventional meaning of the word.

    Now you can argue: but wait, it’s obvious that we he says “nothing can hurt you” he means “except physical things”, and what he says “no one does wrong” he means “except those who do” etc, but I am not buying that. Those things he says don’t make much sense, and it’s not my job to find creative interpretations which will fix that. If you read things this way, you can claim that anything ever written is wise and correct.

    I also find him deeply religious. He isn’t christian and he is not too devoted to the Roman gods, but he is a stoic, and believes in logos, some grand plan the universe has. The problem here is that even though nature has its laws, they are not written around humans and are not benevolent to us. The whole stoicism is built on an unfounded, religious assumption.

    Reply

    1. It has been about 20, maybe even 25 years since I read this book. With those classic texts, if you do not read them in the original, your experience can vary quite a bit depending on the translation. Also, it can take a while to get used to the writing style. To address your concerns in general, there is the principle of charity when studying a classic text. It can be tempting to apply contemporary points of views, but this is not always helpful. Marcus Aurelius was an aristocrat and he was educated by some the brightest minds of his time.

      To address two of the points you raise: I interpret “harm” in a more general sense, i.e. you can decide if you let words harm you. More interesting is the sentence that nobody does “wrong things” deliberately. This is about personal motivations. You may think that, e.g. stealing or raping is wrong, but a cultural enricher will see this much differently. To him, it is his god-given right to plunder and rape to his heart’s content (in GTA). There is also the aspect that people convince themselves that their unethical actions are actually justified.

      I am not saying that Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations are perfect, but there is a lot more depth in it than you may want to see right now. Maybe take a break and give it another try in a month or so. Sometimes, reading commentary alongside is helpful, too. The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is normally quite okay. It also has an entry on Marcus Aurelius:
      https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcus-aurelius/
      Just from skimming it, I find this article stylistically poor, though.

    2. Interesting. MArcus Aurelius is on my reading list. I even got the book in paperback, , but to be honst, its been languishing in my bookshelf for a few years now, I have had more urgent things to read (plus I am writing a book now). Your comment piqued my curiosity, so I will try to fish it out.

      Since I am a spanish speaker, I obviously got a spanish translation of MArcus Aurelius. I think Greek and Latin translate to spanish very well, at least better than to anglo-saxon languages. Lets check back on this in a few months time.

    1. This made me laugh. On that note, I am sure that people of the entire political spectrum visited Epstein’s pedo-island. We are indeed ruled by a satanic and utterly degenerate elite.

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