FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5hr ago
It serves numerous purposes, and the divorce one is probably low on the list.
The primary justification given to family is vague "tax advantages;" which I'm not sure ultimately pay off in every case. Maneuvering who makes what money and who or what has title to which asset can be useful, but when it always comes up "daddy controls everything and you get what little he wants to give you;" well then I doubt that it's all about the tax advantages.
Knowing the family dynamics, the biggest reason was that the patriarch wanted to keep everyone enslaved to himself, totally dependent on him for their livelihoods. This extended through other family dynamics: he had numerous children, and none of them went to college, and he managed their work lives such that none of them ever built easily transferable experience. You worked for the family business until he died or you died, and as long as you worked for the family business you lived in luxury, but if you left you were out in the cold with no assets and no easy transition to another job that would pay anything like the same total compensation. He underpaid his kids for the work they did, but made up the difference by paying for their housing and cars, their vacations to family properties, company employees doing domestic labor at their homes, etc. But this in turn means being a 40 year old man with kids, and living where daddy tells you and driving the car your daddy agrees on and never going against his will.
The break up daddy was worried about was between him and his kids, not his kids and their spouses. That's just a side benefit of the arrangement.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5hr ago
I want to register that I find call to violence posts generally boring. It inevitably leads to internet tough guy, "my team/tribe/sensei/dad could beat up yours" nonsense posting, and generally just represents a total breakdown of interesting conversation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
Let's take a closer to home example of self-organized play then: is the poster on theMotte who lashes out at the moderators and refuses to play by the rules more or less agentic than the poster who abides by the rules and advocates for their position?
TheMotte is actually a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, when I think about it. We respect those who demonstrate their worth, their skill and charisma, often if they are interested they end up as mods, they're in a position to change some of the rules if they want to enough. Those who lash out and can't handle the rules, they flame out, they don't have any impact.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
That article immediately veering from introducing the identity borrower into 'wah wah wah red tribe making it harder for immigrants' is kinda hilarious tonally. Then the guy kills somebody in a traffic accident after being deported 3 times.
Reading that article Sunday, I thought it was pretty solid "vibe shift" evidence that the Sunday Times was willing to make its front page about an illegal immigrant doing actual, understandable harm to a very sympathetic American citizen. The article was largely about the harm done, the bureaucratic nightmare committed against the citizen, with comparatively less effort put into the alien.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...
I don't see why it would. We haven't had a national conversation about fraud in the Orthodox Jewish community and there are still hebrew signs in the Hudson valley; or any conversation at all about fraud among Baptist churches.
Here's a bonus case with a pastor who stole someone's identity, defrauded the military through fake education funds, and then abused a minor girl at the church.
The problem is really that any high trust group can defraud the government pretty easily.
In general, trusting your family is a pretty major hack against the American legal system. The entire system is built around not trusting your family. Being high trust enough to put income, properties, or businesses in the name of your family members can get you out of taxes, into subsidies, and boy does it make for a fun divorce to untangle. Immigrants of all kinds are notorious for this, as are small family businesses. Combine the two and there goes your week.
A Russian with a small business is a nightmare in a divorce case. The house is half in his name and half in his mother's, but the down payment was supposedly lent to him by his brother, but no one has any documentation of that money ever being transferred. The business is a partnership with an uncle, and no one knows where the money came from or where it goes.
A local family, our local feudal lords around here, when one of the sons got divorced, his wife was surprised to find out that while she was under the impression they'd been living a normal upper middle class life with a house and two cars, actually they had almost no assets, that the house and the cars belonged to his father and they had effectively no equity in anything.
Another local family filed tax returns for family members who never worked for the business, for income that the family members in question never actually received, in order to distribute income taxes around in some way or other.
Anyone who looks around will have similar stories. If you can trust each other enough to count on getting what's yours later, then the government has a lot of trouble pinning you down.
It's hard not to be horrified of all that goes on. The government tax incentives and welfare schemes that slosh around are insane.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
I'll see which one the state store stocks! I could probably use a bottle for when the in laws come over.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
Cheers. What I enjoy about this place is when criticism causes me to learn more about my own hot-takes, I knew Teddy's history in my head but talking to you caused me to look up the passage in his autobiography, and it turned out the story was far more on-point than I realized. My opinion on the topic is deeper as a result.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
Agency is as much having the ability to do what you're told as having the ability to not do what you're told. An individual who can't follow instructions, who can't cooperate with others, who chafes under any guidance, who rebels against any authority, lacks any agency just as much as someone who can never act against the crowd.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I think the connection between the two setups is that the lazy and annoying kid who refuses to play right field or be in the band if he isn't lead singer or play DnD if he isn't DM, he will always insult the other kids by saying that they are
not showing agency, persistence, or drilling and practice. [They are] just being a submissive bootlicker.
This is the universal cry of the burnout too lazy to study calculus, the kid who doesn't want to be on the football team if he has to do two-a-days, the guy who never makes progress in the gym because he doesn't want to stick to a program, the unemployed loser insulting his brother who just made VP at the bank. There's a balance between the two, Agency as a virtue means a moderation of willfulness and submission, having the strength to endure unpleasant things to get what you want, and the strength to choose what it is you want.
I guess we're both projecting our own version of what the setup and rules for ancient Persian and Mede kids playing "Palace" would be, and determining the outcome based on our vision.
But surely you can see my point here, that refusing to play isn't inherently more agentic than choosing to play, and that in many cases the individual who "takes his ball and goes home" is in fact less agentic than one who endures discomfort or a less than ideal situation to keep up with something they want to do?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Scotch, for me, is a product category where the cheap is pretty bad and shouldn't even be bothered with (by comparison to something like bourbon) but the best is exquisite. At first I thought I just didn't like scotch at all, until a neighbor started giving my dad really nice scotch (by which I mean, fourteen years ago in my life, a $50 bottle of single malt) that I came to understand it. Now I'll buy a $40-50 bottle every year or two if I see one on sale at the state store, and I'm finally working through some of the gift scotch from years past. I don't drink enough for the cost to really matter to me, though as more of my friends get divorced and hang out with me drinking I'll need to budget better.
What bottles would you recommend as great expressions of the art?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
How many choices does one need to be offered before it is a choice, in your opinion?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It's a little more complicated than that. There are single sex troops, but that also alters a lot of events where both male and female troops will be necessary. The troop level is only relevant for the weekly meeting and for troop-only events. If scout summer camp or high adventure camps admit both male and female troops, then that event is co-ed. If the local church has a boys and a girls troop and they hold camping trips together, if the local council jamboree or civil war reenactment event has both boys and girls, local Order of the Arrow, etc. Then each of those events becomes co-ed, and advanced adult supervision becomes necessary, and kid independence becomes lessened.
Venture scouts have existed for a long time, but there's a reason they start at 14 instead of 11.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Not to mention that choosing to rebel is also a choice. Better to reign in hell, etc etc.
The most agentic angel in Milton isn't Satan, it is Abdiel, the one angel who is present when Satan incites rebellion in heaven but chooses to be loyal.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It was one sentence in a comment, so obviously I'm condensing the complexities of a relationship that was told in movies and books so long and boring that people gave them to me as gifts because they know I love long boring books.
But I do think there is some truth to it. Wozniak is arguably more responsible for the existence of Apple than Jobs in terms of technical innovation, in the same way that Agrippa is arguably more responsible than Augustus for winning the wars that put Augustus into power. Woz was the brains, but Jobs was always the public leader and visionary out of the two, even back to the days when they were selling Blue Boxes to scam telephone companies. Woz' decision to follow Jobs in his vision is the difference between Woz' likely outcome of a modestly wealthy tech worker bee in California, and being worth hundreds of millions of dollars and having a name I know. Agrippa would have been a talented Roman general regardless of who he chose to follow, but I wouldn't know his name if he hadn't followed Augustus.
A partnership naturally involves some degree of submission of one's own will to the partner, whether in a marriage or a corporation. But forming a partnership is a greater act of agency than going it alone and never making anything great.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
to call refusing to go along with the crowd a lack of agency is quite a weird argument. Yes, you gotta serve someone (in some sense), but refusing to serve a particular person is a choice.
I define Agency, inasmuch as we are describing a virtue, as something a little nobler than a deadbeat dad. Agency isn't just lack of discipline, it isn't just doing what you want when you want to, it isn't just "if it feels good, do it." A person who starts something but can't finish it is clearly lower agency than someone who finishes what they start. Giving in to the temptation to quit easily over every unpleasantness is a lack of agency.
Two kids join a baseball team. One does the bare minimum of showing up to practices, goes through the motions of the drills, then refuses to play the outfield and tells the coach that he refuses to play any position except shortstop or pitcher. The other shows up early to practice and stays late because he wants to do his best in every drill, practices as hard as he can, and goes wherever the coach tells him whether it is second base or right field or shortstop because he just loves baseball and wants to get into the game.
Which, in your view, is a higher agency kid?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I loved Shogun, but I understood it completely differently after reading King Rat, Clavell's first and largely autobiographical novel. Viewing Shogun as the work of a man who lived through imprisonment by the Japanese, I think it's asking much more interesting literary questions. The book is about forgiveness,
Viewed as Clavell working through those questions psychologically, I think the book is much more interesting.
What's always disappointed me about Clavell is that I read Shogun first, and all his other books are only half as good by comparison.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
This may sound shallow, but I value most that my church is mine. I was baptized there, took first communion. I disliked the architecture as too modern when I was young, now I admire it as an artifact of its time and fight to preserve it from those who want to make it more modern.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
You may be a construction worker workin' on a home Might be livin' in a mansion, you might live in a dome You may own guns and you may even own tanks You may be somebody's landlord, you may even own banks But you're gonna have to serve somebody (serve somebody) Yes, you're gonna have to serve somebody (serve somebody) Well, it may be the Devil or it might be the Lord But you're gonna have to serve somebody (serve somebody)
TLDR: The most important choice you make in life is who you will choose to follow. Obedience is agency.
Earlier this week, there was a long conversation about agency and its apparent reduction, leading to my reply on the topic of how we build agency in kids. Particularly this example passage from Herodotus sparked a lot of discussion from the crowd:
When the boy was in his tenth year, an accident which I will now relate, caused it to be discovered who he was. He was at play one day in the village where the folds of the cattle were, along with the boys of his own age, in the street. The other boys who were playing with him chose the cowherd's son, as he was called, to be their king. He then proceeded to order them about some he set to build him houses, others he made his guards, one of them was to be the king's eye, another had the office of carrying his messages; all had some task or other. Among the boys there was one, the son of Artembares, a Mede of distinction, who refused to do what Cyrus had set him. Cyrus told the other boys to take him into custody, and when his orders were obeyed, he chastised him most severely with the whip. The son of Artembares, as soon as he was let go, full of rage at treatment so little befitting his rank, hastened to the city and complained bitterly to his father of what had been done to him by Cyrus. He did not, of course, say "Cyrus," by which name the boy was not yet known, but called him the son of the king's cowherd. Artembares, in the heat of his passion, went to Astyages, accompanied by his son, and made complaint of the gross injury which had been done him. Pointing to the boy's shoulders, he exclaimed, "Thus, oh! king, has thy slave, the son of a cowherd, heaped insult upon us."
At this sight and these words Astyages, wishing to avenge the son of Artembares for his father's sake, sent for the cowherd and his boy. When they came together into his presence, fixing his eyes on Cyrus, Astyages said, "Hast thou then, the son of so mean a fellow as that, dared to behave thus rudely to the son of yonder noble, one of the first in my court?" "My lord," replied the boy, "I only treated him as he deserved. I was chosen king in play by the boys of our village, because they thought me the best for it. He himself was one of the boys who chose me. All the others did according to my orders; but he refused, and made light of them, until at last he got his due reward. If for this I deserve to suffer punishment, here I am ready to submit to it." [116] While the boy was yet speaking Astyages was struck with a suspicion who he was. He thought he saw something in the character of his face like his own, and there was a nobleness about the answer he had made; besides which his age seemed to tally with the time when his grandchild was exposed.
I offered it mainly as a fun little example of boys being boys throughout human history, whether it is ten year old Persian boys playing palace, or 12 year old boomer boys playing sandlot baseball, or 14 year olds in 2002 playing D&D late into the night at scout camp; how the best and brightest rise naturally to be leaders in any of those endeavors, and this teaches boys to find their role in the group and seek to raise their status by getting better at things according to their ability. But some of our friends saw something a little darker in it:
@Bombadi said:
I would think that the latter kid shows far more agency than the first, who simply follows the rules. Now, what did the kids not named Cyrus learn from this game? Did the game make them more agentic or less? After electing the king, didn't they simply follow his commands? I would suggest that in your example you are not teaching agency to the kids. You are teaching them to fall in line and follow a strict hierarchy that once set cannot be broken. You are creating one king and a legion of servants.
@Corvos among other things said:
I'm probably being a little belligerent. It's not even that I disagree with you completely, it's just the stunning levels of naivete and smugness in that story from Herodotus (on which my own schooling was at least partially based) irritate me. Oh, you didn't kiss the boot when the big kid told you to, and then he had his mates beat you up? Clearly you aren't high-agency and are doomed to a life of sad mediocrity while we reorder our society into bronze age Persia. Let the kids treat each other however they like, all things are for the best in this the best of all possible worlds...
And my reply to first one, then both of them spiraled outward until it became entirely too large to be a reply to one small comment, so I’m branching it out.
You gotta serve somebody. Obedience and submission is the ultimate act of human agency and will. Who you choose to obey and what you choose to submit to is what decides who you are and how you live your life, for good and for ill. An effort to avoid serving anyone, to be totally free of obligation or obedience, is a life thwarted, stunted, never to grow to its possible power.
Cyrus was not the only one displaying agency here, all the boys were displaying their agency, except the son of Artembares who was displaying cowardice and weakness. The boys got together, decided on a set of rules, elected a leader, and followed the orders of their chosen leader. They all used their will collectively to imbue their chosen leader with power, to make their chosen rules the rules, and make that will a reality. That is the essence of agency: organizing amongst themselves to work together, and choosing a leader who will work most effectively towards those goals.
And they could not have chosen better. We hear nothing of these boys in the future, to my recollection. But if they maintained their relationship with Cyrus after he became Great King, if he remembered their loyal service in their youth, then they were set for life. The spoils of Cyrus’ empire would have flowed into their coffers, they would have been Satraps and Generals, lords over peoples and estates. They would have pillaged Babylon, Lydia, Egypt, Ionia, Phoenicia. They would have had rich and beautiful wives of noble family, their sons would have been great princes and nobles.
Those who were cruel to the young Cyrus were luckier if he forgot them. The son of Artembares, he displayed not agency but weakness. He chose the game to start, he chose Cyrus, then he hesitated, he lacked the courage to commit, he tried to change horses midstream and wound up all wet. Rather than abide by the rules that he and his peers had organized together, rather than live in the world conjured by their own collective will, he tried to run to his daddy and get bailed out. He’s lucky if he was simply forgotten when Cyrus was Great King.
The choice of who to follow determine our lives. Man is at core a political animal, “apes together strong,” how we choose to organize ourselves determines our power and our ability, and who we choose to align ourselves with determines how far we rise. Whether we are ancient Persians choosing to follow a king, Romans choosing a Consul, Israelites choosing a Rabbi who claims to be the Messiah, soldiers choosing how to follow orders from an officer, citizens choosing sides in a civil war, students choosing which professor to try to seek mentorship from*, choosing a boss to follow or a business partner to work with or a company to dedicate our efforts to building, a young athlete determining to listen to everything the coach or the team captain says, a woman choosing a husband, an investor choosing a startup to go all-in with, a man picking a religion or a political party. We all gotta serve somebody.
Agrippa was the childhood friend of Augustus, he chose to follow Augustus at a time when it was not an easy choice to remain loyal and his loyalty made him a great man whose name and story I remember off the dome. The Apostles of Jesus and the Companions of the Prophet and the Sravakas of the early Sangha all became great men, great religious leaders, saints, because they saw a man worthy of loyalty and remained loyal. Lafayette and Hamilton submitted themselves to Washington when they joined the Continental Army. Ringo and George became gods following John and Paul around.
Every Billionaire makes many millionaires, some make other billionaires! Wozniak would never have been a household name if he had refused to follow Jobs. Ballmer would never have bought the Clippers (and gotten into trouble for breaking the salary cap rules) without the money he earned working with Bill Gates. Musk, Thiel, Bezos, and Huang have all made many of their friends and compatriots and early employees rich. The great coaches across sports spawn sprawling family trees: Bellichek and Saban famously demanded total dedication and loyalty from their assistants and players, but dozens of their assistants and former players have become great head coaches in their own right today. You’re much more likely to get rich by choosing the right guy to partner with or to work for than you are to get rich by founding the company yourself.
And you can choose wrong, with dire consequences. Think of those who chose to follow Benedict Arnold instead of George Washington. Think of those who backed Pompei over Caesar. Think of those zealots who aligned with Judas Iscariot over Jesus Christ. Think of those who backed and dedicated their lives to the vision at WeWork or at Theranos, instead of Tesla or OpenAI. You gotta serve somebody.
For most people, most of the time, agency is in choosing who to follow, who to take orders from, what orders to take. Choosing who to submit to in marriage is the most important decision most people make in their personal lives, and choosing to punt the decision and never marry is an equally important and life-deciding choice. Whose treatises and manifestos do you read? What political party do you sign up for? What candidate do you vote for? Who do you work for? Who do you give your money to? This is what agency looks like.
Coming off @Thoroughlygruntled ’s reply from the prior thread bringing up the Boy Scouts as a vehicle for boys to “go into the woods and throw rocks at each other” and thus build agency, and returning to kids for a moment. What I see as the truly great aspect of Boy Scouts is that if an average boy remains in the scouts from 11 to 17, he will go through every phase of the troop. He will join as an 11 year old, working to make Tenderfoot, and he will be in the bottom group of 11-12 year olds who are basically useless to the troop, who need to be shown how to do anything, who can’t keep up on hikes and their backpacks are taken up by the stronger older boys, who need to be protected from others and from themselves, who will need to be closely supervised when doing any task. The 11-12 year old looks to the older boys for help and guidance with everything, for leadership and mentorship, and they learn to listen to the older boys. Then they’ll grow up, get their First Class badges, and they’ll be in the middle group of kids, 13-15, who are basically self-sufficient and competent, who can be trusted with basic tasks like building a fire or pitching the kitchen tarp. They’ll become responsible members of the troop, trusted to handle themselves and expected to do what the 16-17 year olds tell them, and to instruct the 11-12 year olds. Then they’ll grow a few years older, and the older boys they grew up with will graduate and leave the troop, and they will become the older boys, the troop leaders, the 16-17 year olds. They’ll become the Senior Patrol Leaders and ASPLs and Quartermasters that the younger boys rely on for guidance and support. They’ll become the older kids guiding the younger boys. Boy Scouts is one of the few remaining organizations that delivers that kind of clear life advancement over time for kids.
Or at least it was. I had this argument many times with people about admitting girls to the Boy Scouts. It’s not that I think girls can’t enjoy or benefit from mostly the same program and activities that Boy Scouts runs, it’s that the moment you insert 12-17 year old girls into the group, it can no longer be self governing. Nobody wants to see a 17 year old senior patrol leader “guiding” a 13 year old girl without close adult supervision, and once you add close adult supervision the entire vision is destroyed. Who knows if my sons will be able to benefit from scouting, if they’ll ever get Eagle or get voted into the Order of the Arrow like their old man.
But I hope, whether it is in scouting or elsewhere, that they’re able to learn to obey and to lead. One cannot truly be capable of one without the other. Someone who cannot listen cannot give orders, someone who cannot give orders can’t really listen. We all give orders or take them in greater or lesser degrees as our talents provide in the Great Chain of Being, but we all gotta serve somebody.
*One of the reasons “Mentor” and “Mentorship” have become degenerate buzzwords rather than live concepts is that we do such a bad job of teaching young people how to be proteges. Mentorship isn’t a one way street, wherein your mentor altruistically imparts knowledge and favors onto a young subordinate in exchange for nothing. Rather, the protege must demonstrate his value. This can be that the protege demonstrates his simple talent: one day he will be important, and that will reflect well upon his mentor as well as put him in a position to dispense favors to his mentor in his turn. It may be doing favors or tasks for his mentor. It may be willingness to take the fall, take the blame, take the bullet for his mentor when necessary. But it will certainly involve loyalty and obedience. Choosing a person within an organization to be loyal to is a key part of advancing in any hierarchy, whether it’s a sports team or the Boy Scouts or a corporation or a police department or a courthouse or a military. However meritocratic a bureaucracy may purport to be, who you know is always important. Without the loyalty of the protege, the mentorship is meaningless, just an endless series of networking lunches.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
My apologies, I misunderstood your opinions.
Yes.
While people have pointed towards a racist coalition of "everyone but the Blacks," it's pretty tough to come up with arguments for why every stereotype about blacks is true and unchangingly based in genetics, while all stereotypes about Chinese are either lies or bias or cultural coincidence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It's really tough to make arguments built around "Noticing" patterns which will be able to stop people from holding all kinds of folk prejudices. If evolution doesn't stop at the neck, why does it stop at morality? If my aunt Hilda was absolutely right about the niggers, why was she completely wrong about the kikes?
The argument that IQ is measurable while morality is not, is just a case of looking for your keys under the streetlight. Pay attention to the race of criminals, but ignore Epstein and Weinstein, ignore the ethnicity of the Bolsheviks and the cultural Marxists, etc.
Encouraging race blindness is the best way for Jews who wish to remain distinctive within larger societies to survive.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
You can't unring that bell. Saying "Jews have a disproportionate amount of influence in the halls of power compared to their population" can't be taboo if everyone is running around saying that about the whites. If Con. Inc demands its audience stop noticing, they'll be ignored.
This hits the nail on the head. The post-Holocaust Jews advocating against racial consciousness knew what they were doing. Noticing begets noticing. HBD or idpol based arguments on Right or Left will always lead to anti-Semitism as long as Jews are tracked as a distinct group in any way.
There's no stable HBD argument that rules out antisemitism. You can't build an argument around 13/52, that simultaneously avoids questions about Jewish over-representation.
There's no stable idpol argument that rules out antisemitism. You can't complain that blacks are under represented in XYZ, without protestant whites eventually noticing that there are almost no protestant whites in XYZ.
Chesterton's Fence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
The 911 call isn't something you see a lot of in fetish scenes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Obviously, well executed false flags are not recognized as so.
Not necessarily. Consider that we don't tend to see the intermediate category of false flags that fall apart after long investigations.
For murders, we see murderers that are caught immediately with terrible alibis, we see murderers that are intelligent and nearly perfect but fall apart under long investigation, and we see murderers that have somewhat decent alibis but fall apart under moderate investigation. We can speculate that there exist some very intelligent or lucky murderers whose alibis never fall apart under investigation.
With false flags, we only seem to see those that are caught immediately. There's no intermediate categories of false flaggers whose alibis fall apart after moderate investigation. There's a missing part of the curve.
Sure, I'm not saying the execution is perfect every time or that it's an unbeatable cheat code. But I am saying it's a wildly common situation, and it often allows a high-trust grouping to evade taxes and other legal issues by using informal agreements.
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