@SwarmShawarma

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx1XD01s-_0

For more than half a century, Professor Mordechai Kedar has studied Arabic language, Islamic texts and Middle Eastern political culture from the inside. A former Israeli military intelligence officer and one of Israel’s most seasoned experts on Arab society, he has spent decades listening to what the region says in its own words, not through Western translations or assumptions.

In this far reaching conversation with Jonathan Sacerdoti, Kedar argues that the West’s greatest failure is not moral but interpretive. Immigration, Islam and integration, he says, are routinely analysed through liberal democratic frameworks that simply do not apply. Drawing on history, theology and direct engagement with the region, he explains why migration has a radically different meaning inside Islamic thought, why movements like the Muslim Brotherhood see Western societies themselves as occupied space, and why democracy is not a shared universal ideal.

@Durek_The_Bald

Here are a few thoughts:

1. This.

"If you don't have genuinely enjoyable sexual/romantic relationships with women, you are not red pill.?

This is gate keeping. Don’t do that.

1. What Red Pill means can vary by person, but there is no sort of manifestation of it. Saying “red pill is this” or whatever, it like saying “the facts should make you feel like x, y, z”. It just doesn’t work that way.

2. Look at the red pill like a library. it is a curated collection of information. What you get from it will depend on how many books you have read. In terms of Red Pill thinking, it is a matter of content, experience, background, age, life stage, and a bunch of other things.

There is no such thing as “red pill is this” or “that”.

Stop AMOGing, and stop gate keeping. I hated r/theredpill for that very reason. A bunch of (apparently) young men trying to AMOG the sub because they read Roissy/Heartiste .

Finally…

< If I wouldn't want to walk in your shoes, your insights and advice mean nothing.

I don’t know you well, other than your content here. So Why should anyone trust YOU?

Have a good day!

Random Sunday Thought:

One of my biggest fears is that my inner violent “guy” takes over.

More than a few times in my life I was confronted with threats of violence. Let’s say many times.

And past 9th grade, I only lost one of about a dozen fights.

All the other times, I got scared. I felt threatened by another man, and I reacted. But the question is, did “I” react?

The way it felt to me was an almost instantaneous feeling that some other dude inside me pushed “me” aside and said “My turn” and I violently beat that person to the ground in an ugly scary way. When I say it was like being in a trance, or an out of body experience, I mean it.

My regular decent dude self was like, “Ok. I’m going to go to sleep now. Don’t make us pay for this”

And the “other” me showed up.

I had very little control over that switch. I felt scared and the whole “fight or flight” thing hit me. And I hate flight. At least that “other dude” does. He has control of that world.

I know how this can sound. But I am not a badass, a Navy Seal, or anything of the sort. But I am a man who, when confronted with fear, is the sort to kill the threat. For now.

I fear that one day, some man on the street or in a bar will make me feel that way again, and the next time I will not be able to control other dude.

Have a good night!

Don’t forget to tip your waitresses and bartenders.

@SwarmShawarma He's training for meets. Arching the back is allowed and shortens the distance that the bar has to travel. Most competitive lifters use some amount of arch, though the extreme arches are mostly lighter bodyweight lifters and females. If you are focusing on bodybuilding and not absolute strength, training with a flat or relatively flat back is a good idea. In the routine I've been doing, most weeks there'll be a bench day where I do "Larson" bench presses, which just means extending your legs straight out and keeping back flat on the bench. It takes away leg drive and is a bit harder than a regular bench press.

I'm not sure what he was going to do if he had had problems on the squat. He must have been confident he'd get the lift. I don't recall any safety bars but maybe there were. If he had gotten stuck, he wouldn't have needed much help to complete the lift, so the chick behind him likely could have helped enough to get him upright and be able to rack it. When I had a training partner, we'd spot each other from the back and never had issues. If we were going for a new max, we'd get side spotters, but that wasn't frequent.

Wearing the belt up high during deadlifts is new to me. I don't remember any lifters doing that until recently. They believe that wearing the belt high allows them to increase abdominal pressure and thereby get a solid "brace" for the lift. I don't know if it makes a difference or not, but some evidently think it does.