An Answer to a Stupid Question

From a recent Darkstream, a response to a man wondering how to go about approaching a woman in whom he is interested.

How should I approach a desk girl at the gym?

Directly. Don’t try to be particularly smooth or anything. What I would do is just ask her if she has a boyfriend. That’s the first thing. If she says yes, then she actually has one or she is not interested in you. Either way, no problem. And if she says no, then ask “would you like to go out to dinner on Friday?” It’s really not that hard.

All the stuff about how girls are different today, it’s so much harder, we can’t do that. You know, the same sort of guys were all saying that 30 years ago too. “It’s so different, it’s so hard.” It’s not hard. And it’s not difficult. Men have been dealing with the same issue since forever, and all it is is fear of rejection. All the ideas about how “oh, this can’t be done, or that can’t be done, or it’s not like that now.” That’s all nonsense.

Yes, there are some differences in terms of how texting has its own rules and so forth. But it’s still the same thing. And all of the little tactical stuff is like two percent of it. All the cute lines and the various things – I mean, the thing that’s so stupid about it is that if a girl is attracted to you, she’s not going to care what you say! The point is that you indicated interest. So you did your part. That’s the male part. That’s the male role: indicate interest. And then the girl decides (snaps fingers) very, very quickly, whether she’s interested or not.

All you’re trying to do with all the different tactics and all the different this, that, and the other thing is attempting to convert a “maybe” into a “yes”. But frankly, the more that you work at it, and the more that you think about it and obsess about it, the more likely you are to convert a “yes” into a “no”.

F says “I tend to overthink really.” No kidding. Every low-status male overthinks. If you tend to overthink, then you are low-status, or average at best. As a former high-status male, I can tell you right now that I spent zero time thinking about that sort of thing. The high-status male has no fear of rejection. He goes, hmm, there are seven pretty girls here. Those are the three that I like best. Of those three, that one looks like a handful. That one looks like she’s probably out of my league. Number three, she’s the one to talk to. Then he goes up to her and says, “hey what’s up?” That’s literally all it takes to get the ball rolling.

Continue reading “An Answer to a Stupid Question”

He Can Shoot Any Booster

If you watched the Darkstream, then you know what this is all about. By request:

You know that any vaxx is capable of boosting
Scotty got it right and he’s capable of proving
He can be what he wants to be
Shoot a one shoot a two then he boosts a three
Whatever kind, he’ll max the vaxx
And if he gets it wrong he walks it back
Amphiboly proves he could never be a loser
That’s why he can shoot any booster

DISCUSS ON SG


The journey sans ticket

A number of people have commented upon something I said in a recent Darkstream concerning what I perceive as the intrinsic advantage of understanding and accepting that you have no chance at being allowed the opportunities that are routinely offered to those who are less talented and less intelligent, but more morally flexible than you. Whether you find this comforting or depressing is entirely up to you.

YOU HAVE NO CHANCE

If you are a good person, if you are a moral person, if you are a Christian, you are not going to be allowed to succeed in the system past a certain level. It’s just not going to happen. But it’s very, very freeing to know this. You’re not going to get the scholarship. You’re probably not going to get the acceptance letter. You’re not going to get the interview. So, this means you have the imperative to go out and make things happen on your own. 

Because here’s the magical thing about it. They can’t create. They cannot create things that are good, beautiful and true. They’re predators and parasites. And so, there’s always going to be a certain amount of room that is granted to people that just do their own thing, or for people who just work outside the system, because that’s where the positive change – the necessary positive change – is going to happen.

What we’re dealing with here is a society that is run by the wicked and is run by the hedonists…and so, you can save a lot of time. The beauty of this is that by knowing that you have no chance to succeed within the system, you can give yourself the opportunity to succeed without it. And the fact that you are never going to be given that handout, the fact that you’re never going to be given that fake, easy, pseudo-success, means the success that you achieve will be real. You’ll never have that impostor syndrome that they’re always talking about.

And so, you have no chance to succeed in the realm of the wicked, but that knowledge frees you to pursue genuine, meaningful and lasting success by pursuing the good, the beautiful and the true.


A message from YouTube

The friendly folks at YouTube Trust & Safety sent me a cheerful little message:

Hi Darkstream,

Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our hate speech policy. We’ve removed the following content from YouTube:

Video: Darkstream 607: The decline of the US empire

Warning

We know that this might be disappointing, but it’s important to us that YouTube is a safe place for all. If content breaks our rules, we remove it. If you think we’ve made a mistake, you can appeal and we’ll take another look. Keep reading for more details.

How your content violated the policy

Content glorifying or inciting violence against another person or group of people is not allowed on YouTube. We also don’t allow any content that encourages hatred of another person or group of people based on their membership in a protected group. We review educational, documentary, artistic, and scientific content on a case-by-case basis. Limited exceptions are made for content with sufficient and appropriate context and where the purpose of posting is clear.

How this affects your channel

Because it’s the first time, this is just a warning. If it happens again, your channel will get a strike and you won’t be able to do things like upload, post, or live stream for 1 week. 

What’s interesting about this is that the video was only available to silver and gold channel members. Which means that it wasn’t the usual SJWs, but rather, some gamma who paid to join the channel, then rooted around in more than 30 videos to try to find something that would trigger Trust & Safety.

So henceforth, all prerecorded Darkstreams will only be available on Unauthorized. Live Darkstreams will be recorded on YouTube, then removed.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, YouTube has absolutely no problem featuring videos made by actual pedophiles in police custody.


Traffic report 2019

If 2018 was an unusually challenging year, 2019 was a year of almost non-stop crushing by the Evil Legion of Evil and the extended blog community. Like the previous year, it was full of deplatformings and bannings, disruptions and disqualifications. Unlike the previous year, it also saw the Legion striking back with a vengeance, including a resolution of the Indiegogo deplatforming and a multi-pronged replatforming campaign on behalf of the Big Bear and others directed at Patreon that is still in process.

And while 2019 unfortunately did not see the publication of A Sea of Skulls, it was witness to the creation of Castalia Deluxe and a stupendously successful campaign to bring the Junior Classics back into print. The Castalia crew also managed to get the 31+ hour audiobook for A Throne of Bones out, which was unexpectedly successful as more audiobooks were sold in five months than the ebook and print editions combined had sold in five years. And 2019 also saw the long-delayed publication of Corporate Cancer, which despite its short length was two years in the making.

In 2019, Vox Popoli had 32,757,068 Google pageviews. The blog is now running at an average rate of 89,745 daily pageviews, up a modest 1.5 percent from an average 88,384 last year. The running annual pageview totals are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,422,628
2012: 6,098,774
2013: 9,340,663
2014: 11,236,085
2015: 16,211,875
2016: 25,817,343
2017: 31,216,357
2018: 32,260,094
2019: 32,757,068

I mentioned that readers should look for further advances on the video front in 2019, but I had absolutely no inkling of the massive enthusiasm that would greet the establishment of Unauthorized.TV. What started as a backup plan in the event of a possible YouTube deplatforming has somehow been transformed into one of the more significant activities in which we are involved. Unauthorized ended the year with 15,032 registered users while the Darkstream closed out 2019 with 33,484 subscribers and 698 channel members. And then, of course, there is the smashing success of the Rebel’s Run fundraising, about which you will no doubt hear considerably more in 2020, as well as SocialGalactic 2.0.

Thanks to everyone who continues to read VP and to everyone who supports one or more of the various penumbras that have emanated from it. Thanks especially to the Infogalactic Burn Unit, the Alt★Hero backers, the Castalia authors and volunteers, the Brainstorm crew (about which more in 2020), the Unauthorized subscribers, the Reprehensibles, the Replatformers, and the Arkhaven team, all of whom have come together in a spirit of creative cooperation to make these various projects viable. Your participation in these things is invaluable and very much appreciated, regardless of what form it takes. 2019 was a fantastic year. 2020 is going to be epic.

Sadly, due to the capitulation of John Scalzi, who apparently has given up posting no longer posts his blog traffic numbers, the comparison of VP’s annual traffic to that of the Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction is no longer possible. Sometimes victory is bittersweet.

Regardless, the ride never ends.

UPDATE: I am informed me that there were also 625,200 downloads of the podcast derived from the Darkstream in 2019, which was up from 500 downloads in 2018. I am skeptical that we can maintain that rate of growth in 2020, but then, you never know.


24 hours, trolls

I’m giving Davey Crocko, RealOwenBenjamin, ultrafuzzyforeigner, and the rest of the Unauthorized-hating gamma trolls on Reddit and YouTube 24 hours to come clean, declare their real identities, admit their actions, and thereby avoid having the wrath of the VFM and the Legal Legion of Evil crash down upon their heads.

I have never filed a copyright violation before nor had anyone do so on my behalf, but starting next week, the Legal Legion lawyers will begin filing copyright violations against every YouTube attack video that broadcasts content from the Darkstream without permission. And note that I am not only doing this of my own accord, but also at the specific request of some of our technology partners that these individuals have been contacting and with whose contracts they have been attempting to tortiously interfere.

As for those who say this is a waste of time, rest assured that it is not. Lines – serious criminal lines that consist of state and federal laws – have been crossed and we will no longer look the other way. Instead, we intend to utilize the full force of the techniques and tactics that have been developed and refined by the Rabid Puppies, the VFM, and the LLoE.

And since we don’t know precisely who was responsible for exactly which action against us and we can’t easily distinguish the civil tortfeasors from the felonious criminals, we have no choice but to begin systematically rolling them up and forcing them to admit their deeds, beginning with the most obvious culprits.


Respect should be a given

If you find the comments here to be sub-standard, you really need to read the YouTube comments to put them in perspective:

Owen banned me for saying something was “pretty funny” when I was laughing my ass off in a public library, after being a fan for a year and sharing essentially my life story with him and desperately asking him to buy me a bus ticket from Colorado to Texas. He isn’t a leader, he’s an entertainer, and I’m a free-thinking millennial with a different vernacular, I don’t fit in, and he doesn’t want that kind of responsibility. He used to ban people for saying lol because it looks like a person drowning so I shouldn’t have taken it too personally, but I did. I’m renouncing my American citizenship anyway, this country and its people have done nothing but oppress me and mock me and act like I’m lucky to even be a free man when that’s to be expected. I’m not a criminal. No one needs me. I get it. I just want to be treated like a respectable dishwasher and get off the streets. There’s no reason that I should have such a hard time demanding the smallest amount of respect. Respect shouldn’t have to be earned, it’s called etiquette, and lack of it should certainly lead to loss of respect. Respecting a fellow American, or Bear, or former Bear in this case should be a given, but it isn’t. That’s why I was banned.

To which I responded:

That is so sad and wrong! I will call Owen at once and DEMAND that you be unbanned from his channel at once. I will also ask him to build you a nice little house on his property with his own hands, constructed with wood from trees he has personally cut down, complete with your own goat to provide milk for your morning tea. No, don’t thank me, it’s really the least you deserve! I am so sorry that you had to experience such horror. Thank you for your service. 


Darkstream channel membership

If you’d like to support the Darkstream on YouTube, you can do so now by becoming a member of the channel. Unauthorized subscribers, please note that all of you who want them will also receive notifications of a livestream. Within a week, I will be sending out an email with instructions about signing up for notifications of your favorite stream and/or content creator.

We’re not going to simply send out notifications to all subscribers for everything because that would be incredibly annoying and probably lead to our emails getting spam-trapped in the future, given the way we’re uploading 2-3 videos every day. And if you’re wondering why I have turned on channel memberships when we absolutely prefer for people to subscribe to Unauthorized, well, just watch the video. It’s an obvious question, which I address directly, and, I hope, convincingly.

I’d be interested in hearing any ideas for what channel emojis might be desirable. Since I have literally never intentionally utilized an emoji of any kind, it’s more than a little outside my area. And we will definitely improve the badges in due course.

Current emojis:

  • :like
  • :sad
  • :flag
  • :ask
  • :skl
  • :sdl
Currently we can have five more custom emojis, so feel free to suggest any more ideas. SKL = skull.

DBC: Mere Christianity II

This is the quiz for the Darkstream Book Club: Mere Christianity II.

1. What did the older thinkers really mean by “The Law of Nature”.

  • a) The physical laws of Creation.
  • b) The Law of Human Nature.
  • c) The Law of Tooth and Claw.
  • d) Sir Isaac Newton’s three Laws of Thermodynamics

2. What was the reason for the name being given to the Law of Nature?

  • a) The law dealt with the natural world.
  • b) The law was based on the natural environment.
  • c) The law was imposed by human government.
  • d) No one needed to be taught it.

3. In what way does Lewis suggest that the Nazis cannot be criticized for their actions?

  • a) In the absence of an accepted standard for human behavior.
  • b) In the absence of Christianity.
  • c) On the basis of moral relativity.
  • d) Because Lewis more or less agreed with Nazi principles.

4. Why do some people say the Law of Nature is unsound?

  • a) Because the laws of nature can’t apply to artificial social constructs.
  • b) Because different ages have different moralities.
  • c) Because it contradicts the teachings of Christianity.
  • d) Because the Law of Nature is a social construct.

5. What two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves?

  • a) I think, therefore I am.
  • b) The Law of Nature exists and it is broken.
  • c) Right and wrong are illusions in which we must believe in order to have a civil society.
  • d) Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, love under law.

Mere Christianity I