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
7hr ago
The paradox of BJJ is that it is effective self defense because you can practice it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power, but once you are practicing it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power you are practicing increasingly esoteric techniques and positions to defeat other BJJ practitioners practicing at full speed and competitively.
Sure, you don't want to roll around on concrete, but if you're training grappling you are in all likelihood going to be the one making that choice for your opponent.
The aspects of BJJ that are effective for self defense against an untrained opponent are going to be the wrestling aspects with a couple super basic easy submissions thrown in. Throw a guy who doesn't train in grappling in there and he's going to be drowning. But those aspects aren't really trained as much in class, because in class we're mostly trying to beat up each other. My BJJ game if I had to fight someone untrained would be to look for throws or standing armlocks, or more likely just fall back on straight counterpunches. But in competitive BJJ, my A-game is built around bottom half guard, which I would essentially never find myself in during a fight at the Linc.
Sometimes our coach wants to talk about the "self defense" implications of how to pass somebody's De La Riva guard in a streetfight, and I joke that if I get into a bar fight and some guy tries to throw a De La Riva guard on me, I'm going to stop and say "Whoa, no way, I do jiu jitsu too, where do you train bro? Do you know Dan? Because Dan is like my best friend! Oh shit no way let's get a drink, why are we fighting anyway?"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14hr ago
Black pill on metoo:
Dershowitz faced an extended lawsuit from an Epstein girl supported by his rival Boies.
Boies in turn worked for Weinstein hiring ex mossad to stalk Ronan farrow.
It's all powerful men targeting their rivals all the way down.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
I feel like we've worked through several technical explanations for why a recession is due since 2021 and each has come and gone, and what it comes down to is that it's due and everyone knows it. The biblical theory of economics that there are seven fat years and seven lean years is in most cases as good as any. The identity of Mrs O Leary's cow or the Austrian crown prince that sets it off is ultimately unimportant, the line can't go up forever without going down.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
That's a really good way to frame the debate. It's a good scissor statement because the answer seems obvious to me.
That's where I disagree, I don't think the people who come here and then lash out are agentic. I think they are slaves to their own passions, incapable of agency because they can't operate within the rules. What amazes me about this place is the people who get banned and come back and get banned again. They clearly want to be here, but the moment a rule offends their delicate sensibilities they lash out and ruin it for themselves. Over and over.
I don't look at such a person and see a wild stallion who can't be tamed, an electric centaur with the true spirit of freedom in their breast. To me such a person is a slave, lacking in agency, they can't do the things they want to do because they are too chained to their own feelings.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
I don't think it's unemployment; unemployment in the late '90s was low, in the early '90s it was high and people were no less cynical. In fact, Office Space was a bit unrealistic when it came out (as I recall noting at the time) because of that; it was a boom time and if you could spell computer (or at least get close) you could get a programming job; nobody at Initech would need to worry about being laid off.
Agreed. Something odd is going on as well, where under Trump financial analysts are talking about "rising unemployment" when unemployment is lower than it literally ever was under Obama. Unemployment has only very rarely been lower than it currently is.
Both Office Space and Dilbert were about tech, and speaking specifically about tech, I think what changed is the rise of the profession. In the early to mid '90s, software was just another white collar job. Then came first the dot-com boom, when people realized you could get stupid rich in software. Then following the dot-com crash, the rise of Google, stock options and much higher salaries in established companies, and a new wave of startups getting people rich. Now software was a prestige job, up there with doctor or lawyer or at least stockbroker. Not the kind of thing associated with the grind. Google, earlier on, made some attempt not to feel like Dilbert's company.
I think this is a big part of this dynamic, and also the dynamic of the American Left as a whole from the Clinton third way era to today. 1990s Gen X anti-establishment thinking was built around rejecting boring mainstream corporate jobs and the evil corporate bosses they served. Enter Google, with its "Don't be Evil" corporate catch phrase, and a thousand start-ups followed the same logic. Infinite PTO, beer carts on Friday, ping pong tables and nap rooms! The tech companies were just as against the soul-sucking corporate bullshit of Halliburton or GE as you were! Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, et al were understood as left-wing Obama-voting humanistic champions against the traditional corporate world.
The development of those tech companies into new kinds of corporate villains, and the failure of the Obama administration to deliver on much of anything beyond reasonably competent middle-of-the-road governance, lead significant portions of the young to turn a lot more radical. Whether it's pseudo-marxist anti corporatism or hard-right tradcath fascist anti-capitalism, the common factor is the disillusionment of realizing that new hip tech companies weren't going to fix everything. No capitalist corporation is going to fix everything.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Qanon was very real in my area. Local town square had weird little protests for a few months with people waving qanon slogans.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.
And it's indicative of something that while law firms bent the knee and universities got on their knees earlier in the year when the accusations were around anti-semitism, we're still seeing issues here.
This is important data about the Vibe Shift. Is the belief that MAGA or MAGA-adjacent leaders will have enough power to punish in the future weaker than expected? Is there an expectation that Dems will be back in office and will punish MAGA prosecutors?
Something I'm curious about is the dynamic within state level governments relative to federal for employees. Historically, AUSA is way better than local ADA or state AG's office. But right now, I'm aware of a lot of good federal lawyers looking for state level work because the federal government is unstable.
The very randomness of the Trump approach is the most effective way to rebalance the government away from the feds and towards the states.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
In our parish adult converts get first communion at Easter, education program starts in fall but you're smarter than the average bear so if you get in touch now you could probably Speedrun it by March.
You'll feel much more connected when you receive the sacraments.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I like the first half of Mass very much - the readings and the sermons are full of intellectual meat to get my teeth into - but the second half is the same litany and prayers every single time followed by fifteen minutes of shuffling people about for the sake of a ceremony I’m not actually allowed to participate in. In theory I register the weight of it, but in practice doing it every week is interminable.
Why haven't you gotten to first communion yet?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
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.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d ago
How many choices does one need to be offered before it is a choice, in your opinion?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d 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
2d 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.
Sorry but what in tarnation are you talking about? What point are you trying to make here? I'm totally lost.
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