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
While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible! This is one of those ideas I read and thought... huh, why don't we already do this in politics?
Because the two party FPTP system has produced incumbents who do not benefit from a more engaged voting base. Democracy is fundamentally evolutionary rather than intelligently designed, those currently in power have been produced by the current system, and changing it means undermining their own success. Using an app-style gamified setup would alter the makeup of the electorate, and that would change who gets elected.
Every member of congress won a party primary voted in by people who currently vote in party primaries, then won a general election won by people who currently vote in general elections. Altering the makeup of the electorate will result in fewer incumbent members of congress being reelected.
The makeup of the electorate can be changed only when one or another existing faction within the party seeks to change the rules to benefit themselves, or when an outside force appears that hacks the evolutionary created rules. Trump(ism) was such a force: Trump did not have majority support within the existing Republican electorate when he announced, but he was able to hack the system and stack enough wins to become inevitable before a single competitor could be settled on. The primary had settled in the past into a mix of formal rules and customs where a lineup of evangelical conservatives and a lineup of moderates would run a series of primaries until settling on two champions to duke it out. Trump stepped into this structure, which was not created and negotiated for the purpose of the MAGA faction seizing power, and hacked it by inventing the MAGA faction which transcended these boundaries. It was both radically more socially conservative than the evangelicals on immigration and anti-feminism, and radically less socially conservative on gays and the sexual revolution more generally; he combined an aggressive nationalism which appealed to NatSec neocon moderates, with feigning a libertarian anti-interventionist condemnation of nation building adventures abroad.
Such a solution to political party engagement will exist where and when it benefits the existing power bases, and not otherwise. What allowed the MAGA faction to hijack the existing Republican party and skinsuit it was that it hacked the system in an accidental ambush not by elaborate plan.
Further:
people sign up to an app for their preferred political party, and then the political party gamifies political action. If you sign up, download the app, and pay your dues, you get basic party affiliation. If you go vote in an election or two, you get a badge. If you go and engage in some activism or political volunteering, you get an even doper badge, level up, or whatever.
Is already really close to how things work now if you show up at the local level. You do small things, which gain status, pretty soon you can do bigger things. It just happens in real life, and less legibly to those used to sitting behind screens and getting XP for completing quests.
Where I disagree with Yarvin's essay is that I don't think MAGA has failed, I think that the hard MAGA faction within the Trump administration has specifically come to the realization that they will not have time to build anything before they lose and run out of steam. What they do have time to do is destroy. They can't build a new international order, but they can so undermine the reliability of the United States as a partner that no future neocon administration will be able to find willing patsies and partners. They can't actually build an American manufacturing base, but they can destroy the decades old system of international cooperation such that it cannot easily be rebuilt. They can't rebuild the federal government, but they can make it an unreliable and annoying place to work. I think that DOGE and MAGA have achieved a great deal of destruction in the federal government through weaponized incompetence and chaos, and that it will not be rebuilt in our lifetime.
PS: I don't know if he's lost his fastball or I just lost interest, but I find Yarvin increasingly unreadable lately.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Ongoing list of motte cheat codes and rules of thumb
-- Cite and link throughout to academic articles with titles and abstracts that seem related. Don't worry if the text of the article supports your thesis, very few people will actually read it, or even ctrl-f it. If possible, cite to non English sources, most of us are monolingual self hating Americans who will instantly give it extra cred, but we won't ever try to read it.
-- Accuse your opponents of LARPing their beliefs because they haven't martyred themselves yet. If anyone asks what you do about your coup-complete beliefs in real life, refuse to talk about it and accuse them of being a narc trying to catch you admitting to something illegal.
-- Claim to have vague and unprovable personal experiences that support all your points and discredit your opponents'.
-- Blame everything wrong with your life and the world in general on a mysterious cabal of humans so different from the average mottizen that we can barely understand them, who seem to hold mysterious power over us despite their lack of physical strength: Women.
-- Just keep typing. The longer your post the lower the odds anyone actually reads or argues with most of your points. The haters will reply to the first point, and you can just say that was addressed in paragraph 15. Your fans will also reply praising the first point, and just assume that paragraphs 20-25 support it.
-- If you hate white people or men you're a troll and will catch a ban, if you hate Jews or Asians you have to show receipts or you risk a ban, if you hate blacks or hispanics or arabs you're rounding second ahead of the throw.
-- When in doubt, throw up your hands and say the AI-Singularity-Revelation-Rapture-End Times are nigh.
-- Personal selfishness is iffy, selfishness on behalf of your children is always welcome.
-- Not only is it permissible not to read the source material, it's nearly always advisable to avoid it.
-- Can't write beautiful sentences? Steal someone else's! Block quotes turn into AAQCs quite easily. Take a great article or a chapter of a book, chop it up into digestible pieces, summarize at the beginning, offer commentary in between.
-- Hit 'em where they ain't. We all love the classics, and we all know the canon, but then there's the stuff just to one side. We know Homer, but you can get a lot of mileage out of the Oresteia. We know Arthur, but we've only heard of Roland.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I've been motoring through books lately.
Read Eig's biography of Muhammed Ali. Brilliant work, Eig is really the platonic ideal of a serious mainstream biographer. He does a perfect job of writing a well sourced well researched book that is neither hagiography nor hit piece, that shows the controversies and conflicts of Ali's life while also showing the heroism. Ali himself is such an important figure in American history, part Forrest Gump and part Martin Luther King. I enjoyed it so much I immediately started Eig's biography of MLK Jr. Both are fascinating. I never realized just how much Ali's management stole from him, nor just how evil the Nation of Islam really was. We remember them today as quirky dudes in bow ties, but they were both so much more ignorant and so much more evil than that.
Read Hemingway's A Movable Feast. I love Hemingway, and the book was great. So many things in it that we typically think started much later.
Started Stoner on audiobook from its wide reputation. It's well written, but I can't manage to get into it. Idk, it's short, so no harm done to grind through it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Assuming you are American, you want to go foreign or old. American liberals have an innate respect for European writers, even more for third world writers, which will allow them much more leeway to get away with being "problematic" than they would grant a white American. And most people who think of themselves as "serious readers" know that at some point they need to tackle Austen and Tolstoy.
For recent American novels, I'd recommend The Sympathizer by Nguyen.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm still holding out that we're going to find out that an NFL team used AI significantly to call plays this season.
If it's the Eagles offense, then we're decades from AGI. If it's the Eagles defense, skynet has arrived.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I would do it if I were you, IF AND ONLY IF I were ok with ending up with the kid at the end of the game.
Leave aside the fact that I might not be able to completely avoid child support obligations legally. Morally, that is at some level my child, even if my expected social relationship to him is spuncle rather than father. I think I would be ok with a functional, happy lesbian couple raising my child. But in the event of their death or disability, maybe even in the event of their divorce, I would want and expect the kid to come live with me. Legally, this would be a matter of making succession plans clear with the mothers: I am first in line to receive the kid, not your mother or your sister, if you both die or become unable to care for the child he comes to the FiveHour farmstead. Morally, this would be a matter of talking to Mrs. FiveHour. Functionally: do I think my kids with the woman in question would be good kids? I couldn't imagine having kids with a dumb woman, whether tab A and slot B are involved directly or not.
So while on net I agree with @Tintin that it's a mitzvah to do this, I don't think you should unless you're ready to be a bit of a Durov or Musk. How will your existing wife and kids feel about you getting a spare bastard back unexpectedly? How would inheritance work among your kids?
FWIW, Mrs FiveHour and I had the reverse conversation recently: I joked that her lesbian best friend would be my first pick to take our kids in the event of our deaths, as she is a) responsible and well off, b) childless, c) hopelessly unrequitedly in love with Mrs FiveHour since college and would love the children maternally as the remnant of her friend, d) likely to try to Love in the Time of Cholera vulture my wife at my funeral if I die first anyway.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
What's a ring necklace?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Married Christmas Celebrating Mottizens: what did you and your spouse get each other for Christmas?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman both do good work on interviews, and it's looooooooong with deep archives. I've never kept up with either podcast, but occasionally I'm in the mood and dig one up.
Welcome to Nightvale is fun and mindless if you like supernatural-lovecraft-comedy
Everyday Driver and Consumer Reports Talking Cars car podcasts are my favorite car podcasts when I'm in the mood, because they review real actual cars a human might actually drive.
The History of Rome is old but amazing, I've listened to it all the way through three times and I'll probably listen to it again this summer. It's so much detail. Hardcore History is a little 2edgy4me sometimes, but it is a classic for a reason.
The Secret History of Western Esotericism is absolutely incredible as a project, the SHWEP goes into so many things that if you're like me and read widely in the classics you have heard of but don't know half as much about as you'd like. I keep meaning to get through the whole thing.
You Must Remember This is a history of old Hollywood podcast, the series on Manson and Hollywood Babylon and Dead Blondes are my favorites, but every one of the series is pretty good, though it's painfully woke at moments. Acquired is a great podcast doing a long form history of famous companies, I find the guys hosting so incredibly cringe and lame that I can only enjoy episodes about companies I actually care about, the number of time these two quarter zip fucks call somebody a "badass" or a "gangsta" or something is too high, but the episodes on Starbucks and Rolex were great.
For stuff that's more to my personal rather than universal interest, The Philly Special podcast with my boys Sheil Kapadia and Shawn Syed is my favorite Eagles podcast I listen to multiple times a week. The BJJ Fanatics podcast does an interview with a great BJJ practitioner every week, and while they don't all hit, when I want that content they do a pretty good job.
I'll also throw in the Shakespeare Network on youtube has audio recordings of every Shakespeare play, and I'm working my way through them. Yale Courses on Youtube has lecture series on a wide range of topic, one of which must interest you at any given time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
How long are we talking? Strategy for a three hour drive is different than a six hour drive.
I like a big pleasant beverage, I'll stop at Wawa and get an extra large diet coke or Dr pepper. Zyns are pleasant and calorie free. Drinking also forces me to stop and piss, which adds the element of looking for a likely empty spot to tap a kidney.
Line up a variety of podcasts/music/audiobooks beforehand so when you get bored of one thing you just change to the next.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I've known him since we were literal children, and frankly in our lives we've done worse things together, so I trust him when he tells me this, if he had cheated he'd tell me knowing I'd do my best to help him and I'd never tell another soul and I'd hold the line to his boss and his wife. I'm skeptical of the "I only had one beer and the bartender slipped me a mickey Finn" part of the story, but not of the "I didn't cheat on my wife" part.
I realize he's not your friend and hence the story lacks that element for you, but I don't really have a way to fix that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
My dream, which I probably just need to spend a small amount of money on, is a system that allows me to switch seamlessly between phones on a whim. I like having the full on phablet for various reasons having to do with work and self control; I would like having an even bigger one if I didn't have to carry it all the time; I'd like having the option to switch to my old flip phone when I'd like ten days of battery life and durability and don't need anything beyond calling; or maybe even just a smaller smart phone that would provide podcasts or Spotify for a long walk but not much else.
There's probably a way to do this that I haven't figured out yet.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
It might have something to do with you living in Japan for however long, where you are the minority, while I sit provincially in Wawa country, confident enough to fly to Japan to see you and say "Wow, look at all these minorities they got around here!"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
-- The vast majority of men throughout European history would disagree with you that drinking is less important than avoiding loose women.
-- Drinking was the problem in this case, but it is far from the only unlikely occurrence that can put you in a bad situation.
-- You say alcohol causes people to act like idiots. I say there are many people who need to act like idiots a little more often.
I don't really know. I think it depends on the person doing it, and why they are doing. Master Morality and Slave Morality are primarily about why you do things and not what you do. Wokeness is largely nebulous and poorly defined, some people like it out a will to power, out of an overflowing sense of self. Others like it as a spite against those they resent.
But the grand irony of Nietzsche has always been this: those who crow about Master Morality are always engaging in Slave Morality. The people who call out the dominant culture as Slave Morality, who imagine a world where they will overthrow all the existing beautiful and good and make themselves kings, are life's losers, their hatred for everything that exists is fueled by resentment of their betters, of those luckier and taller and prettier and richer than they are.
This goes back more or less to Nietzsche, who was a luckless loser. He was no conqueror, no Blond Beast. He got laid once with a prostitute and caught syphilis, which slowly destroyed his career and body and mind. When he railed against the philistines and the slave morality of the majority, he was railing against the actually powerful and successful people liking the things that they like.
Catholicism is essentially the original of Nietzsche's slave morality, but it is also the religion of Charlemagne and the Lionheart and Don John of Austria.
My own journey with religion is very like this. As a child I was raised Catholic. As a teenager and college student, I explored other religions. As an adult, I realized that no other religion is meaningful to me, that I only considered them out of their opposition to Catholicism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
And, also, I’ve been through the wringer with enough young beautiful women who would sidetrack me to realize that Mike Pence was not as far off as some would have it: Any man in the wrong circumstances is capable of cheating.
I've become very strict on the Pence Rule lately. A friend of mine had a business trip, big conference kind of deal, and a bunch of people on the trip made plans to go to a local bar. Well my friend shows up and everyone bailed except him and a girl who was a friend/plus-one of one of the other women on the trip. Well, they disappear, no one can get a hold of them all night, or the next morning, and everyone figures they have hooked up. Which rather upsets his wife, who is also on the trip.
My friend woke up the next morning on a bare mattress on the floor of a flophouse apartment two hours from his hotel, with no memory of anything after the first beer, and no wallet or phone, having to find his way back to the hotel on the kindness of strangers in a bad part of a town he's not from. He thinks he was drugged, while I love him I'm always skeptical of Mickey Finn Cocktail stories as there's almost no confirmed cases and it's typically just too much alcohol. Regardless of how it happened, I don't think it was intentional to get that fucked up. But the circumstances made it all so damaging: he disappeared last seen in the company of a young woman.
I always avoided situations where I was alone with a woman. But I think the utility of the rule stretches way past just what you might do, but to all the strange unlikely occurrences that might happen to you and leave you with a lot of 'splainin to do.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
It is a slur. I treat slurs the same as I treat any other kind of profanity, they spice up a sentence, and are useful to express or portray a particular slant or implication in a story. "Bob and Alice made love" is a rather different image than "Bob fucked Alice;" even though they are mechanically the same act. In the same way, "This store was in a black neighborhood" is different than "This store was full of niggers;" even though they're pretty similar phrases. I could refer to the same friend of mine accurately as white working class, or as a trailer trash redneck; the same person, different implications. A person might refer to me walking into Wawa for a coffee as a white guy, a middle aged white dweeb, or a faggot yuppie fuck getting a whipped cream latte. All would be accurate enough.
In this particular case, I use the word pajeet to refer to motel owners/operators and their cousins they imported to clerk precisely, not as a general article of hatred for Indians. I rather love Indians. By using the word Pajeet, I'm using the connotations of the word to paint a picture in the reader's mind: the motel operation is primarily extractive, with minimal effort put in to things like reputation or avoiding scandal, they don't take a ton of pride in the operation and just want to make as much money with as little effort as possible. Where a native owner might think of themselves as an upstanding member of the community and be suspicious of a married executive they see around, an Indian just doesn't care, there's no connection to care about what the YTs are up to. I use the connotations of the word Pajeet to bring that aspect to the fore, the foreigner, separate from the community.
Perhaps, much like other profanity, I shouldn't use slurs, or at least should use them rarely. But I suppose I'm juvenile enough to still find them both useful and amusing.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
My polish relatives came by for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner and I won't cook again for a week.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
This is brilliant.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Occasionally I'm reminded that so much of the red tribe anthropology on here has the quality of European explorers confidently reporting the customs of Amazon tribes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
And yet here you are... Merry Christmas
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
The fact that it's specious is what makes the whole affair depressing.
This whole thing is depressing. Writing like that should practically get you removed from a liberal arts course. The student admitted in interviews that she never read the article.
None of that matters to any outcomes here and it's depressing. The University can't, in good faith, defend giving a zero to a paper that deserves a "come see me in office hours."
This is the best evidence I've seen so far that the University system needs to be torn down.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
Mine came in painfully when I was 18, and the doc said I should get them out, but it was the middle of spring rowing training for Dad Vail so I put it off and lived off protein shakes. After two months the pain went away and I forgot about it. Since then they've gotten painful about once every two years, but it goes away after a week or so.
I think even publicly available models could do better than that. Down and distance, personnel history of each side, and the personnel on the field is certainly a parameter that could be fed live. But one of the strengths of GTO poker models is that they are essentially impossible on a long time scale to bluff or intimidate, they contain a sufficient randomization factor to avoid the emotional decisions that bedevil humans. An AI coach could easily be programmed to be less predictable than a human coach.
Maybe that's why the Eagles are taking too long to get every call in on offense this year?
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