Leo Gura

@Daniel Balan Lenin was extremly pig-headed and combative, which was the clear red flag with him. His obnoxious, angry, and dogmatic attitude even towards his fellow socialist intellectual commrades revealed his true character. Lenin was a nasty, power-hungry, Machiavellian character. Nothing good can come from a character like that even if all his criticisms of capitalism were theoretically sound. At the end of the day you just have to be a good judge of human character. It should be obvious that guys like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Trump have rotten, devilish character, which overrides any ideology or theory.

1) Yes. That's why I'm very careful not to start any kind of social movement. 2) Trump and MAGA have done enormous epistemic damage. More than someone of my small scale ever could, no matter how evil I desired to be. I just don't have anywhere near that kind of wide appeal or reach. Even if I wanted to be as evil as I could, my niche-ness would limit my influence. I'm not a mainstream kind of guy and I couldn't fake having mainstream appeal. Yes, I expect that kind of distortion. It's obvious to you. But to most people it is not obvious and it is appealing. Deeply intelligent evil will never spread far and wide because most people need a foolish form of evil to suit their intellectual level. Foolishness is exactly what spreads far and wide and gains mass popularity.

The mystical aspects of Whatifalthist's worldview are the least problematic parts. The problematic parts are his butchery and distortion of history and his right-wing, pro-Trump, quasi-racist and sexist political conclusions.

First principles is always ideal. The only problem is that it is hard and takes a long time. Study is used as a shortcut and gives your mind grist for the contemplation mill. Epistemology is such a pivotal, foundational topic that you can't really outsource it to anyone else. There are no good books on epistemology. And even if there were, you still need to dervive it for yourself for it to be powerful. Some areas are worth outsourcing to experts and some are too foundational for that. The problem with study is that it limits your mind to think along those lines. It creates conformity. Ideally you want your contemplation to be original and independent of mainstream thinking.

There are strengths and weaknesses to the feminine and the masculine. Pretty basic truth. The downside of flowing with life is that it easily becomes passivity and door-mat-ism.

Those young male audiences are already heavily biased. Kamala is not going to go on Rogan or Theo Von and convince those audiences that Trump is a monster.

Of course culture is always shifting, like sand dunes. It oscillates, reacts, swings around. And social media exerbates it by the algorithm maximizing profit and clicks. The culture wars are a tug of war between which way culture will shift next.

Dude, online male culture has always been immature, sexist, racist, and homophobic. This isn't some new thing Trump invented. You don't need to brainwash horny immature fools. They naturally brainwash themselves.

Imagine honestly believing that racists are caused by those who denounce racism. That's right-wing logic. Lolz Sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and domination are such primodial forces, they have existed caveman days.

Every major city has nightlife. That's where you meet girls. You have been talking about this same issue dozens of times now for years. It's time to move on. I can't keep answering the same question year after year. You are asking the same question and not taking action on the answer.

They don't need to brainwash them. Stage Blue & Orange group-think just naturally works that way in immature young men. And there's a new immature kid born every day. Maturity is like a leaky ship.

Yes, it's comically blind.

Look, every atom in the universe reacts to every other. Culture wars are like a pinball bouncing around the machine. There's reactionary behavior all around. The right-wing is always reacting to progress. That's been happening since the beginning of humankind. 500,000 years ago there was some right-wing caveman reacting against not being allowed to rape his own mother.

It's like focusing on the weight of a car. Not a very important factor for car performance.

Philosophy is about depth of questioning. The depth of your questioning directly determines the power of your mind. If you don't question deeply you will never have a buff mind. Memory is the wrong thing to focus on when it comes to mental development. The point is not to build memory, it's to build understanding. What do you understand? That's the pivotal issue. Deep understanding requires decades of mental exercise. You could memorize all the world's books and your mind would still be weak.

The most important thing is to sit down and actual do inquiry into epistemology. You just sit down and reason it out from scratch using first principles, not books or anything you heard or believe. Derive epistemology from scratch. That's the actual work. Just reason through how epistemology works. How is anything known? What is knowing? All the best topics naturally follow from that line of questioning. This will lead you to contemplate self-deception, what is belief?, ideology, openmindedness, what is truth?, bias, relativity, construct-awareness, assumptions, egoic mental attachments, not-knowing, skepticism, what is science?, etc.

@Natasha Tori Maru There's a lot of amazing stuff on that list besides UFO books.

High dose mushrooms are very challenging because they get very chaotic and uncontrollable. It's like entering a twisted dream world. You have know idea where it's going to go. At a high enough dose everything becomes problematic. Moderate doses are key. 700ug of LSD is like 5x the normal dose. 125mg of 5-MeO would be 5x the normal dose. Either of those is likely to end badly. You're petting a wild bear at that point.

And philosophy is the squat of the mental activity. Mind who don't do philosophy are like weightlifters who never squat. This is why scientists are cognitively weak. Scientists don't squat. Science is like the guy who only does bicep curls, thinking it will make him strong. You can't get strong doing bicep curls.

"Knowing" is a very loaded and tricky word. It can be defined in various ways. In my worldview knowing means knowledge. Knowledge is quite a limited and shallow thing in many cases. You want some way to differentiate intellectual knowledge from the more deeper kinds of "knowing" like knowing how to walk. Because those are quite different things. They function differently in the mind/brain. This is why you can't just read a book about surfing and then go out and confidently surf. Confidence in surfing can only come from tons of training/experience. You are free to define terms however you want, but be careful with conflating ideas because it can lead to wrong conclusions and expectations. In my view, knowledge is lesser than understanding and experience.

His teaching are pretty valid though.

I haven't taken it already?

It's a bad take. This is where developmental psychology is so useful. The Blue & Orange stages of development are not the result of stage Green's existence. This is backwards. Stage Green exists as a response to the limitations of Blue & Orange. Reactionaries are too busy reacting to bother to do some deeper research into the developmental causes of all this woke vs anti-woke culture wars nonsense. Green's talk about toxic masculinity because it's a real issue. Andrew Tate is the poster boy of toxic masculinity. It's just that people in stage Blue & Orange are not mature enough to see it. The right-wing wants to portray criticism of itself as being groundless. But it isn't. There is legit grounds to criticize people like Tate, Trump, Musk, etc. Saying that Green demonizes men is, ironically, a demonization of Green. Green doesn't demonize masculinity, it simply criticizes the toxic parts of masculinity, but those who embody toxic masculinity take that as a personal attack. Toxic masculinity should be demonized. Right-wingers deliberately conflate toxic masculinity as all masculinity, which is a flagrant strawman of Green's position. Remember, equality is offensive to those who benefit from inequality. Telling men to treat women better is literally offensive to some immature men. Equality itself is a frontal assault on the likes of a selfish ego-maniac like Cobra Tate.

@Natasha Tori Maru I wouldn't call it knowing. It goes beyond knowing. You don't just know walking or tying shoe laces. It is wired into your brain without massive training and experience. It has become trained to the point of instinct. Knowing is far too theoretical. You can know things intellectually but still be insecure about them. Knowing alone doesn't resolve insecurity. Training does.