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
14hr ago
I was talking of rather higher ambitions.
And what, pray tell, might those be? Unless it's something utterly esoteric, or so rarefied as to constitute such a tiny number of people that statistical analysis becomes impossible, I posit that you'll find more athletes than you expect among their number.
That's not the way I heard it. He did it because his father suggested it. (I will look this up when I can).
From his autobiography:
Having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess, and having lived much at home, I was at first quite unable to hold my own when thrown into contact with other boys of rougher antecedents. I was nervous and timid. Yet from reading of the people I admired--ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge, and Morgan's riflemen, to the heroes of my favorite stories--and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father, I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them. Until I was nearly fourteen I let this desire take no more definite shape than day-dreams. Then an incident happened that did me real good. Having an attack of asthma, I was sent off by myself to Moosehead Lake.
On the stage-coach ride thither I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age, but very much more competent and also much more mischievous. I have no doubt they were good-hearted boys, but they were boys! They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return. The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me. I made up my mind that I must try to learn so that I would not again be put in such a helpless position; and having become quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the natural prowess to hold my own, I decided that I would try to supply its place by training. Accordingly, with my father's hearty approval, I started to learn to box. I was a painfully slow and awkward pupil, and certainly worked two or three years before I made any perceptible improvement whatever. My first boxing-master was John Long, an ex-prize-fighter. I can see his rooms now, with colored pictures of the fights between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan, and Heenan and Sayers, and other great events in the annals of the squared circle.
Teddy directly states that this formative experience changed his entire life.
you seem to be advocating that the 'natural leaders' of boys and girls should be put in charge of society when they grow up.
Well I didn't really say it, Herodotus did, though he is ultimately right about everything. Science says so as well: Studies show huge percentages of Fortune 500 CEOs were college athletes, though maybe that's too boring for you again, and the really smart kids are outcasts who do super important stuff like write groundbreaking Harry Potter fanfics or something.
But also, it's not really advocating for jocks per se as natural leaders. It would be those with the relevant talent to the task at hand who would assume leadership, whose peers will recognize them as leaders. Kids will recognize a great mathematician if his skill helps him win at cards, or a great prankster who makes everyone laugh, or a great singer if they're trying to form a band. All aspects of human endeavor naturally lend charisma to their practitioners. I'm advocating for letting kids pursue their goals on their own, how they organize is up to them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
If anything, the children who do well in later life seem to be the misfits who had to learn because nobody else was there to lean on.
Cope. There is no positive correlation for misfits and genius or success, we just tell ourselves there is because it's a comfortable story to tell to losers. Some teenage misfits are smart, others are dumb. Some jocks are very successful. All studies on the topic show that varsity athletes do better than non-athletes across most life metrics.
Even in earlier times, much British and American greatness (e.g. Teddy Roosevelt) came from aristocrats who were educated at home and did not go to school.
Young Teddy was asthmatic and sickly as a child, but at 14 he got bullied by some older kids and he decided to do something about it. He took up exercise and boxing, and made himself better. He dedicated himself to The Strenuous Life to advance himself. His entire life is the proof of the character building thesis: the bullies who attacked him triggered the rise of the Rough Rider. If he had never met those bullies, he might never have become the man he was destined to be.
That's not to say that the optimal level of bullying and hurtful comments is 0%, but leaving boys to self-organise society does not produce [a] good society.
I'm not advocating for boys organizing the whole of society, I'm advocating for boys (and girls) being allowed to organize themselves in a limited setting.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
To steel-man the idea that "knowing the cost" is always possible, I'm not sure it'd be reasonable to expect my (car) mechanic to define payment terms for a fix before even popping the hood. There are enough potential complications in complex procedures (emergency cesarean sections in childbirth, for example) that probably can't be trivially bundled up front.
The question isn't really do we know the cost, it is who carries the risk that the cost turns out to be higher (or lower) than expected. There are lots of situations where we are unsure about the cost going into a transaction, and the risk has to be distributed. Right now we operate on the system that the Hospital takes on only the risk that they don't get paid, while an "honest" patient takes on all the risk. We could quite easily choose to distribute that risk differently.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
What if it does both? What if you can't get one without the other? What if you can't have character building without risking some kids getting bullied?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
I hope that your son's immense noble characteristics are soon recognized.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
He was asking Epstein for advice on girls. Which is probably a pretty good choice of mentor, but in spectacularly poor taste, and undermines any "I didn't know" or "I held my nose and did what was necessary for the University" arguments.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
I think the problem with the sequel trilogy is that it ignores the basic rule of collaborative storytelling: never say No, say Yes And.
At core, all fantasy is cooperative storytelling between the author and the audience. Even the most encyclopedic fantasy worlds can never be fully fleshed out, the author always needs the audience to imagine the rest of the world as existing, and much of the joy comes from that kind of space for imagination. Boys love having that space for imagination to expand. Middle-Earth offers you vast vistas hinting at a world where the audience can imagine many other things happenings. 40k is the logical conclusion of this method: the whole galaxy is nothing but Yes And: yes there are Orcs and yes there are Elves and yes there are evil robots and yes there are terrifying psychic chaos demons and yes there is a giant bio-engineered fleet of bugs that are more dangerous than all the rest put together and yes there are vaguely anime inflected communist aliens and yes there are genetically perfect superhumans who can dual wield artillery.
Star Wars at first did the same in the OT and PT. ANH sets things in motion, and with each movie things just get bigger. The PT takes every idea in the OT and expands it.
The sequels are all No. They are No, not at all. Every question a viewer might have from prior movies is answered with "No, not really." No, the Republic wasn't refounded, not really, and it wasn't any good anyway. No, the Jedi order wasn't reformed, not for long, and it fell apart again instantly. No, the Empire wasn't defeated, not really. Even down to no, Han and Leia didn't stay in love.
The whole worldview of the movie is fundamentally negative and hopeless. It leaves no room for the viewer to imagine, and it leaves no room for collaborative storytelling to keep the universe growing.
So I guess I agree with you in concept, but I don't think it's any great feat. Anyone could have made garbage.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Speeding has substantial benefits alongside the risks - you waste significantly less of your life travelling and thus get more done.
Probably not. Very rarely will speeding significantly change travel times, you have to be doing a Cannonball Run to see a real difference in your life once you factor in things like getting into and out of the car and stop signs/lights (which I don't think anyone can recommend ignoring in most cases).
Rather, the benefit of speeding is that it is fun, and once you remove the idea of aesthetic enjoyment from your cost benefit you are lost as a human being. But I'm not interested in having the argument about my speeding habits here again.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Some people will tell you nothing is interesting about Epstein because they've formed that pre-existing conclusion on the topic and nothing will dissuade them. They've assumed an attitude of maximal cynicism to appear suave, and all the elites must be pedophiles is a way to avoid ever being disappointed.
I think there's some interesting stuff in there:
-- Epstein was much closer with his brother than previously thought. Generally people reported that he wasn't close with his brother, but they're in constant communication here, and his brother was clearly aware of just about all the inner workings of Epstein-world. Why hasn't his brother been brought before Congress? Here are millions of Republicans and Democrats alternately all talking about investigating every little conspiracy theory about Epstein, and we never bothered to just ask his brother under oath? The guy needs to either spill or be in prison, right?
-- Epstein was much closer with a lot of major Democrats, and much more of a #ResistanceLib than previously reported. He was kind of a really classic university blue tribe guy.
-- Epstein had significant ties with the upper reaches of Israeli politics
They also paint a broader picture of Epstein in general. Reading more about him in the emails, like reading the book list, makes me think that when this all settles down in another ten years or so Epstein is going to be revived as an online hero cult. Here's a guy, with no college degree and no family connections to speak of, who made himself a billionaire and put himself in the highest circles on what appears to have been sheer personal charm and charisma. Whether he was an Israeli spy or a master sexpot seducer of men and women or just a world-class bullshit artist, the guy was a fucking genius. There's going to be weird online communities of young men and women that worship him once we settle on who he was.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
How do we make kids have more agency?
Self organized play. It is the sine qua non of childhood agency. Kids will, left to their own devices, self organize to achieve their goals, with those goals mostly being or rhyming with "fun." We know this from Herodotus, who tells us how to identify a high agency child who might become the Great King of Persia, and who is right about everything in the end:
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.
What do we have here? Boys naturally play, they naturally choose the best and most noble of them as leader, they punish those who don't participate. They're learning to operate within the world according to their abilities, developing their leadership abilities, Cyrus is clearly a future leader. In a nobility based society, that must mean that he has noble blood and is meant for great things, because he has such strong agency.
We still recognize that young leaders will grow into great leaders, but we've Goodharted it into adult-organized school-sponsored clubs that don't really do much of anything but provide "Leadership Positions" for gunners to put in their college applications.
What we need to do instead is encourage entirely self-organized play for young kids, put them in a position where they both have the ability and the desire to self-organize to do things that interest them. To do this we need to do three things: Allow and accept reasonable limitations to abilities, allow and accept reasonable risks to safety, allow and accept reasonable suboptimal outcomes in tradeoff for more agency and creativity. As a toy example take Basketball, and you have three basic paradigms: Sandlot1 archetype of kids playing self-organized pick-up games every day on their own, the organized coached league archetype of youth basketball, and the Bowling Alone archetype of a kid practicing skills by himself in the driveway of his home.
Sandlot is a perfect mid-century American equivalent to the Cyrus story above: the boys self-organize to play out the stories and legends they see adults playing out, the best of them (Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez) is their natural leader and goes on to become a great man.
For the most part we can say for our toy example that a coached team in a league is going to produce the best outcomes in terms of developing basketball talent and minimal risk while giving almost no freedom and developing no agency for the players, pick up games develop agency but give a lower quality in basketball development, practicing skills alone in your driveway gives maximum freedom as to time and style to the kid while developing low quality skills and no organizational agency.
What we want is to develop kids who self-organize spontaneously to achieve their goals. We want kids to Sandlot themselves, to get together and decide to play, figure out the obstacles on their own, and play ball. That's agency. We don't want them to sit at home doing drills by themselves, that doesn't develop agency, and it also doesn't tend to help kids develop any skills. And we don't want to force them to only compete in organized leagues, where they are told what to do and when to do it, as that limits agency: instead of playing basketball as a fun activity they do on their own, they play basketball when mommy takes them to basketball practice and the coach tells them to play basketball.
Limitations are the core of creativity. If every kid has a basketball hoop in their driveway, there is no need to go to each other's houses to play, you can just stay home and play by yourself. Sure, if I have a basketball hoop then I can go out and practice free throws any time I want, but that keeps from doing the far better activity of playing with friends and prevents us all from learning to self-organize. Needing something from others creates the need to self-organize, to create a social grouping and do things together. If the basketball hoop is at Chris' house, then to shoot basketball I need to go to Chris' house and hang out with him. If we both have a basketball hoop in our driveways, then I don't need to cooperate with Chris. But the limitations have to be reasonable, we have to provide enough stuff to allow kids to play, but not so much stuff that they don't need to get creative or work together. I have to be allowed to do some things to get there, which requires accepting...
Risks have to be accepted in this process. I have to get to Chris' house, a couple miles away. That means I have to be allowed and trusted to walk there, ride a bike there, some accident might happen on the trip. I have to be there for some time by myself. I have to have the free time to do it. I have to be out of my parents' sight for that time. Chris and his older brother might beat me up. I might get hurt. My parents have to be willing to accept that, rather than requiring that I only play basketball in a league with coaches that keep me from getting bullied or beat up and have been SAFESPORT certified etc.
Suboptimal Outcomes The best youth athletes come out of coached programs optimized to teach kids skills properly, not out of spontaneous kids playing for fun. The more coaching the better. But that reduces agency. We have to be willing to accept that we're trading some degree of agency development for some degree of basketball skill development.
Now of course, the ideal is probably somewhere in the middle. Kids can be on a school team or in a once-a-week organized league while also playing pick-up after school every day, and a kid that really loves basketball might want to spend hours practicing free throws or dribbling drills on his own even when nobody else wants to. Leagues help to build skill and love for the game, encouraging kids to later move on to self-organizing.
We can apply this model to everything. When one kid had an xbox, everyone wanted to go to his house to play xbox. When every kid has an xbox, they all vegetate at home. When one kid has a car they all go on adventures, when every kid has a car or no one is allowed to drive anywhere, nothing happens. Kids need limitations to overcome, acceptance of risk in overcoming them, and acceptance that it might not be the absolute best use of their time in doing so.
- Interesting note from the Wikipedia article related to recent discussions:
In 1998, Michael Polydoros sued 20th Century Fox and the producers of the film for defamation. Polydoros, a childhood classmate of David Mickey Evans, the writer and director of The Sandlot, claimed that the character Michael "Squints" Palledorous was derogatory and caused him shame and humiliation. The trial court found in favor of the film-makers, and that finding was affirmed by the California Court of Appeal.
This seems obviously correct to me. Using a kid you knew as inspiration is not defamation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
While I was flying I read Portnoy's Complaint, which was exactly as brilliant as people said it was, better even. But all the recommendations and mentions of it focused on the early scenes of his youth, while ignoring that the majority of the book is actually about his adulthood. Another case I think where a lot of reviewers or "knowers" don't actually read the whole book, they either read the first half and gave up or they just heard other people mention it and mention the same things.
I just started The Naked and the Dead which I'm having a little trouble with the language. Lots of minced oaths.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I mean, why are we scared to say that the bike and ski helmets are inherently unaesthetic, dorky, and weird looking? Riding a bike is already fairly unaesthetic, but riding a bike with a helmet is basically doomed to dorkiness, and the more the helmet is optimized for any functional purpose the worse it tends to look. I do typically wear a helmet when I ride any considerable distance, but I'm under no illusion that I look at all cool doing so.
That said, seatbelts I remain a fan of. The numbers simply are what they are, and I don't think avoiding a seatbelt is really any improvement in comfort in a modern vehicle. I do occasionally drive classics that feature no or minimal seatbelts, and I suppose I'm taking a risk there but there's a corresponding benefit. My favorite tuner car modifications to see young guys drive around with are the addition of aesthetically obvious safety features. The fire extinguisher ostentatiously anchored to the floor in easy reach, the two strap hanging off the bumper, the four point racing harness in the driver's seat.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Whatever Putin is thinking, it's a fair bet that Russian commanders and soldiers on the ground are going to have no problem putting Arab adventurer mercenaries in higher risk roles with worse equipment compared to Russians serving their country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Point number two is even more dire for Ukraine than Russia, especially manpower-wise. There's really no solution for it other than getting Western countries to send troops, and I don't see that happening.
The solution is actually pretty easy, and Russia is already doing it. Based and trad white Russia is importing thousands of Arabs on the promise that they can settle in Russia if they survive the war. Go to various third world shitholes and promise citizenship for service, an EU visa is vastly more valuable than a Russian one. EU/USA visas would of course have to use oblique language regarding "Ukrainian freedom fighters" in credible fear of "Russian atrocities." But as long as one is as brutal as the Russians have been, you don't end up with many of them leftover anyway.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
It gets buried under the general mythology, but WWII was full of war profiteering and corruption within the US Armed Forces and on the homefront.
I'm not sure that individual incidents of corruption are all that strong a signal. We'd need to really have a strong idea of what the base rate of corruption is.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
who takes orders from a badass girlboss captain of course
Trek had that during the good years, Voyager remains my personal favorite in the series as it is the one I grew up with.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
There's an interesting dynamic to this kind of thing in fantasy universes.
The original Star Trek was revolutionarily progressive in having a multiracial crew. There was a presumption of American leadership (Kirk), but it also featured a Japanese crewman twenty years after Hiroshima (Sulu), a Russian during the height of the Cold War (Chekov), and a black woman during the civil rights era. Trek unites all of humanity by creating an alternative "other," the Klingons. The displacement of the kinds of stereotypes that we used for the Other and the Enemy, the Russians/Japanese/Blacks, onto the Klingons inevitably leads those who feel othered to identify with the Klingons. So then we have to reform our views of the Klingons in TNG, and so we need the Borg to be the new absolute villain.
Same thing happened in WoW, the Orcs go from bad guys to misunderstood victims.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Ok do you have any counter examples of arguments? "One time there really was a wolf" just seems like a fully generalizable argument to panic over everything.
If anything the failure of the Sydney Sweeney thing to catch fire strikes me as evidence that we're past peak woke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
No.
It's not really a very good example. Everyone's bubble varies, but I don't know of anyone who really cares about it.
The people who are trying to gin up controversy around it feel like culture war dead-enders who are trying to produce content. The media outlets reporting it are dying clickbait legacy outlets like Rolling Stone or GQ, not even dying but-still-important legacy outlets like the NYT or New Yorker.
All the natural reactions to it I've seen, even online, have been some variety of eye-rolling at the whole thing, or making fun of Sweeney for the movie flopping because she made a feminist movie, it's all meta-commentary that assumes someone else cares about it all. The film itself looks to be Sweeney's Hard to Watch, an overly serious film from a hitherto unserious actor.
So I see where you're coming from, but it ultimately just doesn't have the juice to get anywhere. People don't care. American Eagle isn't a big enough brand, Sydney Sweeney isn't a big enough actor, the whole controversy feels like going through the motions.
Now if the movie were to become a hit, then we'd get something out of it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Writing twelve year old characters for adult readers is a different thing
I don't really think this is true. Natasha in War and Peace is 13.
(particularly if you're using those characters as didactic puppets to get your message across).
Bingo
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Trump can still be a starmaker for three years, he can still endorse and attack, he can still appoint to sinecures and fundraise for. Any Republican would-be titan can be easily placed in a position of power by Trump, and that won't entirely evaporate upon his death, Sauron like.
Plus, somebody is going to get his dying endorsement, and that will count for something. I don't think enough that it can win anyone the presidency, but probably enough that it can keep any other Republican from winning it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
If you want to read about MIT freshmen, then read about MIT freshmen.
What's weird and often disgusting to me is the practice of writing a story about middle schoolers and making them think/talk/act like college freshmen at MIT. You're writing fiction, you can choose what age you want the characters to be!
If you want to write a story with mature, rational, scheming characters who talk frankly about sex; then you ought to place them at an age where it makes sense for them to be mature, rational, scheming, and have frank conversations about sex. If you want them to be eleven, write them as eleven year olds. Game of Thrones is an unfortunate example of this, of course, though I think GRRM is bright enough to have recognized the problems and that's one of many things keeping The Winds of Winter from ever being publishable.
There's no rule saying you go to Wizard school at 11! Wicked has seen plenty of success making magic-school a college level endeavor, with Elphaba beginning school at 17 in the book and 20ish in the play (and played by comically old actors in the unfortunate film)! HPMoR could easily have started by having McGonnagall say "We start wizarding school at 16 here. Starting at 11 would be quite irrational!"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
It seems very unlikely to me that everything works in a sufficiently mechanistic or rules based way that 1) photos exist of Donnie snuggling a teenage girl, 2) they are in the possession of the federal government, run by Donnie for some time now and by his sworn enemies for years before that, 3) We've never seen them before, meaning that his sworn enemies were too principled to leak them, 4) they haven't been destroyed, meaning that Trump is either too principled to have them destroyed or in some kind of power struggle with someone within the federal government.
This all just seems to be way too much "playing by the rules" on all sides to be credible for me. The theoretical FBI agent who is too principled to leak it under Biden, and too principled to destroy it under Trump, while also being too powerful to be fired by either, doesn't strike me as a realistic character in our drama.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Good luck!
Almost everyone I knew in law school had at least one exam that they thought they failed that they actually did really well on. Your feelings coming out rarely have much to do with how you did.
We despise the experiences our ancestors told us would build character in young people, then are shocked that we lack men of character.
Bohr was on the Danish National Football team at the Olympics. Hemingway boxed and played football. Every president between Eisenhower and HW Bush, except LBJ, was a varsity athlete. Robert Moses was a varsity swimmer.
And yet he still became CS Lewis.
Or look at Elon Musk who went through a heck of a character building school experience back in the bad old South Africa:
Which sure sounds like it would be bad for Elon Musk, awkward target of bullies, and not at all like character building. It probably isn't something I would choose to send my kid to as described. But then he turned into Elon Musk. So we shouldn't totally discount that being the victim of bullies is a canon event that builds the character of the outcast who becomes a genius.
What the original comment advocated for was not sports specifically, or for every kid to be forced to hang out with every other kid and play sports. It was for kids to be allowed to self organize to do what they want to do. That can be form a band, that can be D&D, can be a creative circle, can be a WoW raid.
I've all the sympathy in the world for the loser, the outcast, the dork, the nerd, the geek. But I don't think they are any better served, ultimately, by safetyism than is the jock.
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