Open Thread

Open Thread #342

Aaron "Sleazy" Elias

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41 thoughts on “Open Thread #342”

  1. What do you guys think about ad hominem? Is it ALWAYS a fallacy? What prompted this was that a woman named Farha Khalidi popped up on my Twitter feed recently, and she’s being hailed someone who is owning the red pill dudes in verbal combat. This woman is an Only Fans content creator who happens to be a virgin. Is it really too much to ask that she simply be excluded from the conversation? Granted, it’s ultimately the fault of red pillers for engaging her. Is there something to be said for having the dignity to simply dismiss someone out of hand?

    Reply

    1. Another aspect of this that just came to me is the lose lose nature of debating someone like this. If you’re a part of a certain sphere, then your loss in a debate may reflect on the others in your sphere to an extent. If you win, then “yeah, but all you did was defeat an only fans virgin”, but if you lose, then you look ridiculous.

    2. I think that it is perfectly legitimate to exclude people from a discussion if they do not argue in good faith. However, our side nonetheless needs to be careful about this because this is typical leftist behavior that we are not supposed to make use of ourselves. One important difference, though, is that the Left tries to exclude people from the conversation if they do not have any good counterarguments. In our case, we sometimes just do not want to bother with people who only want to waste our time. I would recommend to briefly state why you do not want to bother with someone, i.e. explain why their opinion is completely irrelevant, which is more than the left would ever do in the case of any of our guys, and then just shut them out.

    3. I have noticed the level of argumentativeneas is related to maturity and age. When I first came to this blog, I questioned a lot of what being expounded here. Anti-semitism, conspiracy theories, etc. I still don’t believe in some of the narratives proposed here but I don’t bring them up. I find it more congenial by focusing on our commonalities and minimising our differences.

      As you get older, you don’t want to insult people and become calmer as you engage in discussions. You quickly skip out on negative threads and try to find meaningful ones. You tend to gear towards positivity and are more concerned about what you can learn from others.

      Insulting people do not change people or their opinions. It makes them more attached to their views and react more defensively towards you.

    4. @CQV, was this meant to be a standalone post that you accidentally wrote as a reply? It hardly reads as a response to what I asked.

  2. I’m sure it’s well known that during times that there is a high number of unmarried or unpartnered males (regardless of economics) major political disruptions in the form of war, revolution, and radical movements arise. However, it seems that in high testosterone societies, such violent movements occur. On the other hand, in low testosterone societies, the growth of homosexuality, MGTOW, and monasticism occurs with similar men checking out of the system that no longer makes their economic production meaningful.

    Can anyone predict which societies will be winners and losers with this global trend, especially when the possibility or remote work and digital nomadism allow men from woke and socialist societies to not only import women from conservative and capitalistic societies, but even move there themselves, especially with golden visa schemes?

    Reply

    1. There already is an exodus of smart, ambitious high-T men out of our cucked Western societies. Arguably the most striking example is Sweden, which has made life so difficult for men that they have left that country. The big problem is that the tax system completely fucks you over. The marginal tax rate is 57%, and you do not need to be a high-income earner to be in this category. Thus, the system punishes you for trying to get ahead. Germany has also seen quite a brain drain. People often move to Switzerland due to geographic and cultural proximity. Interestingly, there is also a significant number of people who move to Scandinavian countries for their better work/life balance. It is easy to see how this will play out as Western countries import unskilled men by the millions.

      Your comment regarding golden-visa schemes is quite relevant. While there is only a small minority that can make use of them, these are some of the most important people for keeping the economy afloat. As much as our capitalist overlords try to pretend that we are all replaceable cogs, reality is a bit different. I have seen big projects tank after one or two key people left. Of course, there are also diversity horror stories, e.g. that Boeing plane that lost some of its doors in-flight.

    1. Yes, I have. She used to be really big and you can still hear her songs on the radio in Germany. Normally she is referred to only as “Sandra”. Interestingly, it is not uncommon that people mistake her for Madonna. The music certainly has some similarities and the voices are not too dissimilar either.

  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fITsdujS6aE

    At 5:40,Rehab Room (I mentioned him before at least two times here I think) says “Don’t be more polite than you need to be” because strangers/acquaintances will often perceive it as weakness. I do think he’s right. Lately,I’ve sorta coined a saying in my head; “Kindness and Humility is a privilege of the Strong/Powerful”.

    If you are powerful,then you can afford to be kind (and even then,still with boundaries). People will even see it as Charisma/Magnanimity on your part. (Alek I believe even talked about it here in the past) But if you do so as somebody who isn’t quite on that level,you will be perceived as a pushover,and attract folks who will just want to take advantage of you.

    Even without that aspect though,I see how it disadvantages my mom. She’s struggling with work and keeping up with the bills,yet she is still giving quite a bit to charity. Mind you,I don’t want this to come off as me saying that kindness/generosity is inherently a bad thing,but that in her particular position,she should probably be more focused on building herself up BEFORE she starts giving to others. In work,she puts up with unreasonable bosses,so perhaps that aspect of her personality is negatively flowing over into her work as well.

    You think I’m on point,Aaron? This is something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. Generosity/Kindness is admirable,but there’s a time and place for it. When you are weak and struggling is probably not the best time for it.

    Reply

    1. I think there are big cultural differences at play here. First of all, it is a good default response to be polite. It does not cost you anything, so why antagonize anyone? Obviously, this does not mean that you should be anyone’s butt-boy. You can certainly politely decline a request you consider unreasonable.

      The aspect of others taking advantage also has a cultural component. You may have an unproductive local underclass that wants to milk the welfare system as much as it can, just as there are foreign rocket scientists and brain surgeons who come to Europe to live high on taxpayer money. This is, unfortunately, a “glitch” as Western societies are built on the principle of cooperation and trust. Of course, we also have the problem of governmental subversion by a hostile elite that wants to completely wreck our countries. A Christian principle is that if you do not work you do not get to eat, so it is unclear how a system of welfare was even established that allows people who are perfectly capable to work to live off it permanently.

      In the case of your mother, I would consider this a money management or budgeting issue. Of course, you need to take care of your own needs first. There is also the very valid aspect, which you can find in the bible as well, to not help people if your help enables them to remain idle. I can understand why such parasites would look down on the people they feed off.

    1. Most girls do some form of this. It’s only slightly more than what the average chick does, and even then, it might only seem more than average because it’s all compressed into one tweet. Most girls do this.

    2. I think there is a big difference between the actions of the average chick and the systematic approach of Cluster Bitches.

    3. This guy should dump this woman on the spot. Clearly, he has no experience with this kind of behavior. His allegedly perfect girlfriend will slowly reveal a much different side. In the worst case, she will destroy this guy’s life. She will most definitely try to once she realizes that he is not as perfect as she imagined, and she will blame him and only him for wasting her time, money, and energy because, clearly, if she had known this from the get-go, she could have banged some big-dick millionaire instead.

    4. “Clearly, he has no experience with this kind of behavior.”

      Neither most of the guys replying to the tweet, from what I see.

      My real-life experience with Cluster-B women comes mostly from a close family member, not a love interest, so it’s not exactly exhaustive. I was on the fence reading this story.

  8. I just finished my playthrough of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II (PS2). This is a really solid action RPG. The locales are varied and the pacing is pretty good. The major downsides are the weak story and a lack of enemy variety, and that the boss fights are somewhat uneventful. Most can be cheesed by simply button mashing and consuming health potions. Only the supposedly ultra difficult if not allegedly impossible-to-beat final boss stood out. If you want to cheese it via using a distance weapon or pummeling it, you are going to lose quickly, but by responding to each phase correctly, the boss goes down quickly. Once I had figured out the approach, I beat it on my first try.

    Disappointingly, the game ends, just like the prequel, on a cliffhanger, and like the last time, an entirely new antagonist gets pulled out of a hat. This is incredibly poor story-telling. Thankfully, the story is quite irrelevant so this is only a minor issue.

    This game gets an easy 8/10 from me.

    Reply

  9. Good morning! I will have an interview with Google (a Polish subsidiary) soon. I started to think about one thing. I don’t hear well in my left ear. Technically, I am a disabled person. I am curious if I would explicitly say that to HR it increases my chances of employment. I heard multiple times it’s easier for such people to get hired at Google. What do you think about it? I have a strong feeling it won’t make things worse, at worst.

    Reply

    1. And yeah. I know this company is looked down here. I also don’t like their politics at all. I am only attracted to their salary they can provide.

    2. Good luck! Keep in mind that you may find it much more difficult to stay away from politics than you think. You should also keep in mind that the average tenure at this company is quite low. I think most people leave before the two-year mark. So, see if you can get in, enjoy the fat salary, but keep an eye out for a good pivot, working for a smaller company that may offer more interesting work. You would come in at a higher level and probably a comparable salary. This was at least a popular approach about a decade ago. I am not sure how much cachet the Google name still carries, after all their virtue signalling, but as you are a white guy, it will be quite obvious that you did not get in because of some diversity quota.

    3. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that if you are disabled, it can be next to impossible to get fired due to legal constraints. Thus, it is strategically preferable to hide this fact until after you have been hired. In Germany, there is a pretty analogous case that applies to half of the population: if a woman is pregnant, she cannot be fired, and she can also lie about being pregnant. Thus, all she needs to do is get a job offer, sign the contract, and immediately reveal that she is pregnant. There is a special period for the first six months of employment during which you can get fired for no reason at all and afterwards the bar is pretty high for the employer. Thus, via pregnancy, a woman can cheat her way past this period, go on maternity leave, perhaps have another kid, and pretend to have several years of experience in a field she barely has ever worked in. You may think that this is outlandish but I have encountered several such cases. The most egregious case was a woman who claims five years of work experience with a particular employer but who has actually worked there for just about two months.

    4. Thanks for your answer!

      I quickly check and it seems that Polish law doesn’t make firing disabled people any more difficult than not-disabled ones. But internet is full of wrong information and it can be the case this time.
      It still can be worth mentioning it as they may need to fill some quotas for disabled people.

      The best for me would be to find the job with fat salary and with work that can be done quickly, so I can focus on my interesting side-projects. If this will be the case at Google, then I will be super happy.
      The worst would be to have a lot of mundane work that takes a lot of time.

    5. Google has plenty of mundane work. I know from people who worked there that you may end up in a horrible team, doing dull maintenance work, and you may find it very difficult to switch teams as such grunt work will not necessarily make you more attractive for teams working on more interesting projects. This is probably one of the reasons why a lot of people leave before the two-year mark.

  10. And yeah. I know this company is looked down here. I also don’t like their politics at all. I am only attracted to their salary they can provide.

    Reply

  11. I actually wanted to build a new AM5-based PC in the near future, but unfortunately I realized that USB4 is not yet widely available. The only AM5 boards that offer USB4 cost upwards of €400.

    The Promotory 21 chipset doesn’t support USB4.

    But AMD has added 4 additional lanes to Raphael and ASMedia offers an additional chip, the ASM4242, which supports 2 USB4 ports with 4 PCIe lanes: with all the optional features, 40 Gbps, TBT3, and PCIe tunneling…

    Nobody has used the 4 additional lanes with the ASM4242.
    There are 9 boards that provide USB4 with Intel chips.

    Reply

    1. I think that it does not make sense to build cutting-edge systems, even if you have money to burn. Currently, I game on a used laptop, which works wonderfully for basically anything I throw at it, with the exception of triple-A games that do not really interest me anyway. In your particular case, the first question is why you even need USB4. How often do you really transfer huge data volumes from external hard drives, for instance? Please let me know if you have any other use cases as I cannot think of any.

      On a related note, in the late 1990 I once built a PC and wanted to have a USB connector to be future-proof. I do not recall if I got such a main board. Either I bought a main board with USB and did not own any suitable peripherals or I bought a regular main board and thought that USB is really not that necessary. In any case, for years it was not even clear whether USB would succeed as a standard. Well into the 2000s, I had keyboards with a PS/2 connector and by the time those disappeared, a lot of people moved from stationary PCs to using laptops and smartphones.

    2. I have two old systems at home. An old Acer Travelmate notebook with a Sandy Bridge Pentium B970 APU. Also an old AMD Phenom II system. I have two old systems at home. An old Acer Travelmate notebook with a Sandy Bridge Pentium B970 APU. Also an old AMD Phenom II system.

      I’m not sure if I need USB4. But my thought was that if I buy or build a new PC after years, USB4 should be included for the sake of completeness.

      Then the question would be whether a small desktop PC or a laptop. With a laptop, you have the problem of higher noise and heat build-up, but it is mobile. With a desktop PC you are more flexible and have more calculating power with less noise, but it is not mobile.

    3. How often do you move around your house or apartment? Do you have plans of moving to a new place? If the answers are “not much” and “no” then just put a desktop somewhere and forget that it is there. My gaming laptop just sits next to my monitor. A small form-factor PC would have even less of a footprint on my desk.

      I have a friend who is heavily into PC gaming and seems to have taken some pity on me because I am gaming on an old laptop. He sent me a few links to classified ads to make the point that I am unreasonably stingy. To my surprise, he was able to find PCs for 100 euros that would totally smoke my laptop (GTX 1050 GPU, Intel i5 CPU, and 16 GB RAM). This would still be a pretty good setup for gaming at 1080p for a lot of games.

    4. I usually sit at my desk at home in front of a large monitor. The laptop is connected to the docking station. I’m rarely on the move with my laptop. Although sometimes it would be quite practical. I have no plans to move house at the moment. The real estate situation in Germany is too tricky for that.

  12. I mentioned vollufilline on here some months ago when some looksmaxxing dudes were mentioniong it. A dermatologist just made a good video on it:

    Reply

    1. Thanks for sharing, but why do you consider it a good video, exactly? It’s all “trust me, bro” coming from a guy peddling his own product.

    2. Oh I mean good in the sense that it’s a nice video summary of the main information, history and what it does.

      The looksmaxing guys have nothing to sell and they’ve been sharing their results for quite a while. They’re using pure volufilline I think, not a product containing it.

      It’s a pretty exciting development. It was the one missing piece in age reversing skincare. Basically if you want to avoid procedures you can just use skincare and reverse age (I did), but there is one thing that skincare doesn’t reverse and that’s volume. You end up with skin of someone 10-15 years younger, but you still have the hollow shape (lost face fat) of an older person. Volufilline deals with that so you can avoid fillers.

      The company behind it came up with matrixyl (peptides cocktail) so it’s exciting to watch. While it’s been used for several years now by early adopters (check Reddit), it still hasn’t trickled down to regular cosmetics so I’m waiting on that. But it’s a good advance to be watching for. It’s bound to become a staple available in every store within a few years.

    1. I would be careful with net worth estimations. However, I do not disagree that Greta Thunberg is nothing but a grifter.

    1. If you want to go down a dystopian rabbit hole, look into the “Indiafication of Western society” or, better (worse?), go join an international company that has offices in India as well as imported labor from India. You will quickly learn that these people have a mindset that is quite at odds with Western values. Arguably, any company with a significantly high Indian workforce will eventually go down the drain as these people are much more concerned about sucking up to their superiors than delivering work. They can also cause severe problems for projects due to the tendency to never say that they cannot deliver something. On top, there is the aspect of nepotism. For instance, an Indian HR lady may just so happen to filter out all CVs from a different ethnicity.

    2. Indian Americans have made significant contribution to America in natural science fields. The soul crushing high school exams JEE make a large population of Indians literate in Math, Physics and Chemistry-Biology.

      Traditionally, Indian culture also values Logics. You found this in Vedic and Buddhist texts. They have their own tradition of philosophy which shapes the modern world.

      I have worked with Indian customers and come across both pleasant and obnoxious ones. They are definitely ranked above Chinese Mainlands.

    3. Traditionally, Indian culture also values Logics. You found this in Vedic and Buddhist texts.

      That’s the funniest thing you’ve written yet. Even if that was true, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Logic only lets you derive things based from assumptions (axioms), it can’t fix any issues caused by wrong assumptions. Religions, indeed, often assume something, and then proceed to derive the whole cosmology from those axioms, and sometimes the logic can be impeccable. Only, the assumptions in those cases are not validated and most certainly wrong, and therefore so are the conclusions. Take your pick: karma in Indian religions, omnipotent and loving god in christianity, logos which governs everything and is also aware of humans in the stoicism, etc. All bullshit.

      Indian Americans have made significant contribution to America in natural science fields.

      Indian Americans are very different from Indians. They are still not quite American (is what I would’ve said if I were a Nazi, which I can assure you I am not), but definitely not Indian.

      I have worked with Indian customers… They are definitely ranked above Chinese Mainlands.

      I never worked with customers, but I interacted with Chinese and Indian business owners as a customer myself, and also had Chinese managers. I don’t like the culture the Chinese create, but if I had to choose between the two I’d pick Chinese every time. In my experience, Indians are extremely lazy and very treacherous, including outwardly lying to my face. Chinese on the other hand are hard working and more honest (still lie sometimes, but less and not at blatantly). Their problem is usually the hacky approach to work, where they don’t care about maintainability and just build things in whatever way is the fastest. Then they also have strong in-group preference.

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