Daniel Balan

@zazen I have a friend that moved to China because he married a girl from China. He met her when he was studying abroad in the US. And he said that the people in China are extremely smart and hard working, he said that the culture is great, he said that everything about China is great except the way how everything is centralized, the censorship, the dictatorship and the one party rule, and the non stop state sponsored propaganda that is displayed non stop everywhere. So according to my friend, China's only downside is exactly the very thing that you seem to be head over heels in love with.

@zazen elections and democracy are the best tool for advancing society because people vote out of office the ones that govern badly and worsen their quality of life. In China and Russia you don't even know what the people actually think about the current governance. Protests and votes of no confidence are a sign that democracy is working. Lack of protests, bruttal crushing of public revolt is what actually sets back a society. In the dictatorships of Russia and China that you so much seem to love, you don't even know what is actually happening there. All you know is what the propaganda machine of Putin and of the communist party in China want you to know. Western democracies have their flaws so obviously displayed because in the west no government has a monopoly on information and no government creates non stop propaganda about how good the country runs. Russia is the worst form of governance that a country can have. I genuinely think that there isn't a single good thing that the west can learn from the form of government that Russia under Putin has. China has a lot of positive aspects that we can integrate in the west, it is a mistake to totally dismiss China's way of governance. Overall China has developed a lot, but so did Taiwan and Japan and South Korea. So to praise centralized economy as the only driving factor for economic improvement is quite a partisan thing to do. The reason I don't want to do rebutalls and to debate you is because you have some unique semi-Duginesque ideology that I am not here to challenge. No ammount of debating and rebuttal can get you to step out of that "4th way" of viewing politics. Nor should you step out of it per se. It is a good thing for this forum to have a pool of diverse unique perspectives. My main issue with you is the bias and the one sidedness of your arguments. If you look at how Leo is approaching geopolitics you would notice that he has like 15 lenses that he uses to see how geopolitics work. If he is doing a blog post critiquing China, he is also keen to praise the positive aspects of China. So when he critiques the west. I've watched a lot of your posts and frankly you sound exactly like the people that appear on the far right propaganda tv outlet in my country. Only shitting on the west and praising China and the authoritarian world. Shitting on Ukraine all day long, wanting Ukraine to surrender to Putin, while they pump their chest saying that they are patriots. How are you patriot if you want another sovereign country to become the vassal of Russia? As I said previously, I will take you seriously when I will see from you that you also criticise the authoritarian world. Right now you only shit all day long on Ukraine and the west, how about you also start shitting on Russia and China and the rest of the "Centralized planned economies". Have a nice day.

To my shame I've never contemplated or grasped or came to the realization of something as deep as the topics Leo is discussing in his videos.

It was just a personal assumption that I made. For some reason during that segment of the video with the new age girl example, for the duration of that part of the video I've had the image of Teal Swan in my head. Every detail and description of the new age girl felt like you were talking about her, at least that was the image I've had while listening to that part of the video.

@Leo Gura I noticed something about you in this video. I notice that in a lot of videos that you shoot on the topic of metaphysics/spirituality/god you burst into tears mid-video. I noticed that this never happened when you shoot videos on politics, practical personal development, psychology, spiral dynamics etc. What is the reason that this happens? Is it because you feel very sad that only you seem to care about such deep topics? Is it because you see that mankind is so asleep to these metaphysical and spiritual matters? Genuinely it feels really saddening for me to see you crying in your videos. It must be really lonely and sad to care about such powerful topics and to have your life's work revolve around these topics when 99.9999% of mankind doesn't care about these topics. Seeing you cry in this video made me aware that the biggest insult someone could give you is that they value and appreciate your work but they are not into your work for spirituality but rather for politics or epistemology, when in fact the topics of metaphysics and God are the cornerstone and the main pillar of your work.

Not to be mean or anything but the new age woman example at the beggining of the video felt like a subtle lowkey jab at Teal Swan! 🤣

I'm not Einstein, But I think that closely regulated capitalism is the best in the 21th century and it will be the best in the 1000th century if humanity survives until then. I don't agree with you that humanity is not yet developed enough for socialism. Living in a state built rat box, owning nothing, having no private property whatsoever, working all your life so the state can benefit from your work while you get only what the state thinks you need is not the hallmark of development and never will be. In my eyes socialism is a step down in development not a step up. There is a reason why at stage purple socialism works wonderfully. Because only utter barbarians need to have a higer authority puppet them and put them to do the work necessary for survival. If one needs a master with a whip in order to function properly that is a sign of low development not high development. I bet that the higher humanity evolves and develops on the spiral, the less and less humanity will need to be regulated and puppeted by the state.

Isn't the economic model of Western Europe the best economic model that mankind has to offer right now? Capitalism with strong regulations and oversight? I think the best economic model is capitalism that is closely regulated by a big government, a government that also owns some key industries like energy, gas and petrol, aviation, road infrastructure etc.

That goes for me too!

@zazen Just to make things clear, I don't hate on you, I have no interest in debating and rebuttal. It is good that this forum has different opinions and perspectives, which is a healthy thing for both me and you and everybody on the forum. I just made a constructive critique because I am really irked when people use AI for sense making. AI should be used for descovery of information not sense making, because if you use AI for sense making it is just another echo chamber. AI validates and reinforces all your pre-existing beliefs. AI can be good for sense making if you ask it to play devil's advocate and challenge you on pre existing beliefs. But you need to ask it everytime to do this otherwise it has the same echo chamber effect as the social media algorithms. Sorry if my tone seemed harsh or confrontational. I didn't mean that. I just wanted to give you constructive feedback. I want people to make sense of the world using their very own brain, I hate when people delegate sense making to a machine or to Chinese/Russian revisionist history altering propaganda.

@zazen The west needs and deserves criticism for a lot of things, but China, Russia and the entire authoritarian world deserves the same if not even more criticism. Until you start criticising the authoritarian world, until you start and criticise the governance of China and Russia the same way you criticise the governance of the west, you are just a propaganda vehicle to me.

Bro yesterday I put my critique of you in claude ai and I asked it to give a rebuttal to it, and your response today is almost the same as the rebbutal that Claude made. This is hilarious. I am not intending to do rebuttals to your posts, I'm not the west's guard dog. I don't advocate for the push of western ideals on China. My sole position is that I don't want bullshit authoritarian governance models pushed onto the west. Which is what you subtly advocate.

Bro this is some insane levels of bullshit. Comparing the Munchen agreement with the Molotov-Ribentrop pact is some of the most insane levels of bullshit and self deception I've ever withnessed. Britain and France wanted to avoid war and gave Hitler permission to annex the suddetten land of Czechia in exchange for him not invading any other territories. That was it! The Muchen agreement didn't contain sectet protocols that devided Europe upon spheres of influence and the redrawing all the borders of Eastern Europe. The soviets were the main contributors to the outbreak of WW2. Hitler wouldn't have dared to invade Poland if he knew that the USSR would have allied with the west. He would have been defeated then and there on a 2 war front. That was the main reason Hitler wanted to have a non aggression pact with Stalin to make sure that he doesn't have to fight both the soviets and the west once he attacks Poland. The soviets captured half of eastern Europe when they allied with Hitler. They even offered themselves to join the axis in late 1940, but Hitler denied them because he was already set on invading them. Bro please, be less Russia and China biased. Please. Your understanding of history is as if you were taught history in Russia.

The more some politician goes above and beyond saying and doing anything that will get him closer to taking power, thats who you should never vote for. The more power hungry a politician is, the more dangerous and corrupt he is going to be once he is in power. Another principle I deducted from the video.

I deducted a principle for politics from the video: How to decide who to vote for? Ask yourself, which of these politicians or political parties are valuing truth the most and have their life and policies guided by the pursuit of truth the most? Thats who you should vote for!

I agree, but by successful I meant a life of integrity and personal fulfilment. I mean even though I have 2 dollars in my bank account, I view myself as successful because I live a life full of integrity. To me success means living a life of integrity. In my romantic relationship I've always been truthful towards my girlfriend and I feel very happy with my relationship, I never lied towards my girl and I am really pleased with my relationship. I think success is a bad word I used, I should replace the word success with the words fulfilling life and spiritually rich life. A philosophically successful life.

I'm 30 minutes into the video, this is what I took away from it thus far: The only way to experience and live a succesful life is to have your life led by a mind that is run by an engine of truth. The only way to experience a fine life is to have a mind that is powered by an engine of truth. The engine that runs your life must be truth, otherwise if your engine is anything but truth the vehicle that runs your life will stray to corrupt and self deceptive paths that will lead to suffering and pain. A correct interpretation of reality can only be achieved by driving through life in a vehicle that has as its engine the valuing of truth. Without truth as your engine you risk having your wheels fall off your car as you drive through life.

I discovered actualized.org when I was 14 in 2014. I got news flash for ya, no teacher ever will help you with success and money. At the end of the day you gotta get off your ass and work to improve your financial situation. Leo gives tremendous financial advice, the problem is that we are too lazy to follow through on his advice. We can't expect Leo to go to work and improve our career for us. That is work each of us individually must do.

I can confidently say that after watching the first 16 minutes of this video I learned more valuable life transforming lessons than I did after 8 years of elementary school, 4 years of highschool and 4 years of university. In total spending 16 minutes learning from Leo yielded a ton more value for me than spending 16 years of my life learning in the state funded schooling system of my country. That useless schooling system didn't even taught me English, Leo was also the one that taught me indirectly all the English that I know today.

This is gonna be the most legendary episode to date! I'm only 3 minutes in and I'm already having a philosophical orgasm. Hell yea! I'm so hyped for this episode. This episode sums up the main reasons I follow your work Leo! Man I love your work so much! Thanks so much for your work!

I give an example. Imagine there is a mayoral election for lets say Paris. There are 4 candidates. The nationalist/conservative, the moderate liberal, the progressive and the libertarian. The conservative one is polling 1 week before election at 40% the liberal is at 35% the progressive is at 15% and the libertarian is at 10%. If progressives have a brain, they would vote the moderate liberal thus giving him 50%, winning with 10% difference over the conservative, and now the city of Paris would move slowly towards reform and the diminishing of the corruption. But because progressives are brain dead they vote their progressive candidate that has no chanche of winning , thus the conservative candidate wins the election beating the liberal with the score 40% over 35%. Now the status quo is upheld, the robbery of the public money continues and the progressives as always did their best to regress society.

Progressives and leftists are some of the most immature and dangerous among the political groups. They make the liberals look bad thus giving fascists free fuel to power their political machine. I put progressives in the same pot with libertarians. Utterly immature and dangerously ignorant. The whole political debate should be between which side steals more ( The conservatives) and which side steals less( The liberals) which side is pro status quo( conservatives) and which side is pro government reform and improvement (liberals). But because of those ignorant progessives, we are debating who is preserving culture and who is fighting to change tradition and culture. This allows conservatives to continue to steal and uphold the status quo under the banner that they defend tradition and American culture from those looney progressives. Right now, counter-intuitively progressives actually regress society with their naivety and ignorance. Those fools need to be dropped into a war zone to get in touch with reality. Their dumb political positions are ensuring that they make sure the voters don't vote liberal thus ensuring that the status quo thieves keep on robbing public resources.

If you look at the last election Kamala lost due to the moderates that choose to go with Trump. Those same moderates voted Biden in 2020, but now they went with Trump because of the huge inflation that happened under Biden. I don't say that the inflation is the fault of Biden, but the average voter perceived it that way. Bottom line of what I'm trying to say is that progessives are irrelevant in elections, in the swing states and the popular vote overall, the moderate luck warm voters are those who decide who is gonna win, and those moderates felt that Biden worsened the economy thus this time they voted for Trump. Progressives are litteraly dust in the wind in the grand arithmetic of general elections. I don't think there is a more meaningless demographic than progressives. Sometimes, ironically enough, these progressives are the ones that actually regress society due to their refusal to mobilize and vote the moderate candidate with the higest chanches to win.

Bro the ammount of self deception and authoritarian loving bias from you is off the rails entirely. No offense but your brain is totally fried from the ammounts of authoritarian propaganda you consume. Your AI's are totally poisoned and self biased and their sole purpose is to reinforce your skewed Dughinesque worldview. I've always thought that you are Dughin on this forum, your every post is like it was written by Dughin himself. In every post you shit on the west, while you praise the authoritarian world led by China and Russia. I got bad news from you, but those regimes don't give a flying fuck about the individual. To those regimes the individual is just a slave that has as an only purpose to work like a mad dog to produce goods that the government can then boast with. China has achieved great success economically because of it's people that are very hard working and intelligent, not because of a piece of shit dictatorial system that you seem to praise non stop. Those hard working people would greatly benefit from western style freedoms and human rights that they rightfully deserve. Instead you praise some piece of shit dictators that see their people only as labour force. Another critique I have for you is that you are just a robot, when was your last time that you wrote a post on this forum using your mind alone? All your posts are 90% or more written with AI. Mind developing some independent thinking? Or we are reading the posts that your AI's have generated? Leave the AI chat bots to the side because they are poisoning your brain, the algorithm that your favorite AI's are using is the same algorithm that Facebook or TikTok are using. That AI is just feeding you information that reinforces your worldview, the same echo chamber effect that TikTok and Facebook are using to feed you the same content that you are attracted to over and over again. Using solely AI to make sense of the world is the same as dropping the soap in jail, the AI will fuck your mind if you drop the soap in it's bathroom . Use AI as a substitute for a search engine, not as a source of truth. Try to diversify your information sources because right now you seem like a Russian/Chinese propaganda vehicle on this forum.

This is childish levels of historical revisionism done by the Chinese, and that EU official was spot on calling their bullshit. China helped with shit in the defeat of nazism. Nazism was defeated by 50% the Soviets and 50% by the US and the West combined. China had 0 contributions on the defeat of Nazi Germany. China had great contributions when the US, the Chinese and the Soviets defeated Japan. On the side of the WW2 where Japan was the enemy China had great contributions and it paid with a lot of lifes. But don't come now rewriting history. Nazi Germnay's defeat had nothing to do with China. Saying that China helped with the defeat of the nazis is as stupid as saying that France helped with the defeat of Japan.