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
4hr ago
I don't think it's weird or unusual. Unathletic adult men gathering for sports is like 95% of my social life. But as upper middle class white folks, we have to invent new sports in order to be any good at them, because if we go down to the Y to play pickup basketball we're getting mogged by the inner city. Hence my lifetime devotion to crossfit, rowing, rock climbing, Brazilian jiu jitsu, and other dumb and obscure pastimes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
The debate is impossible.
Soccer fans claim the sport has more action because the ball is constantly in play. Non-soccer fans claim it is boring because there is little danger of anyone doing anything important for the vast majority of that time.
Soccer fans claim that baseball is boring because the ball is in play very little. Baseball fans feel it is exciting because every single pitch can result in a score.
Hockey and fight sports probably have the best balance of constant action with meaningful scoring at any second, but both are somewhat niche and require some degree of specialist knowledge to properly understand.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
This is the strangest statement I've ever heard. Screaming and booing and chanting at games is white culture.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I'm going to double reverse uno you here. NBA "hardcore" fandom is itself performative fandom, the guys getting upset over Celebrity Row at MSG and Taylor Swift are pretending to some kind of fandom that doesn't fundamentally exist in the NBA.
Identity Disclaimer: I am a lifelong Sixers fan, which probably predisposes me to think that basketball is stupid.
Hardcore NBA fans don't really exist. I'm the kind of American kid that grew up catching morning Sportscenter before the bus and has a half dozen podcasts from The Athletic and The Ringer on my phone today. When I think of sports fan groups in America, I can name a dozen groups and chants and traditions off the top of my head easily across every sport, except NBA basketball: the Bleacher Creatures, Roll Tide, The Black Hole, Rock Chalk (Algeria), Skol!, Chiefs Nation, the Cheeseheads, Go Birds, the Seven Line Army, the Green Monster, Citizen's Bank South.
I can't think of a single such tradition in the NBA that I've ever heard of. The equivalent famous moments in NBA fan history are themselves celebrity driven, things like Spike Lee miming the choke at Reggie Miller, or Jack Nicholson courtside in LA.
The NBA has always been a celebrity driven, star focused, front-runner sport. There's no real fan tradition because the team's are fundamentally too malleable and too protean to be the focus of tradition, and nobody cares about the regular season (despite there being numerous obvious fixes for it). This is the result of fundamental aspects of the sport: the ten foot tall hoop means it's so much easier if you're tall, and the five men on the field mean individual players are so much more important than in any other sport. Team building in the NBA is about chasing outliers who happen to be a little athletic while also being freakishly tall. There are never enough of these to go around, so the haves are so far above the have-nots that the have-nots just chase the outlier that will turn them into a have. There's no amount of team tradition, values, or coaching that will bridge the gap.
Most NBA fans have more opinions about the current star players and franchises than they do about their own team. There's not the same degree of bond between the youngster and the backup catcher on his favorite team. There's not the same possibility that your sixth round pick turns into a star, and thus the lack of obsession with those minor players.
So when Knicks fans say that Taylor Swift doing a little dance on the sideline is performative...
Some reason this has been living in my head for a few days as a feeling that’s not how real fans celebrate. Perhaps theatre kids it’s so natural to perform that it’s how they celebrate. Where it’s more an internal joy. Something just doesn’t feel natural to me here.
She's doing it FOR YOU. This is what you like, that's why you're an NBA fan and not a fan of a superior sport. That's why anybody has cared about the Knicks for most of the past thirty years. For the celebrity culture of it. Because it's the sport that most mixes into modern hip-hop oriented celebrity culture, and has since the 90s. It's easiest to produce celebrities, every all-NBA player is famous in a way that every ace pitcher or quarterback fails to be.
Both the performative fandom of the sideline celebrity, and the performative fandom of the "real" Knicks fan who has some weird bullshit about their attachment to a mediocre celebrity driven sports team, are trying to flex their status now that the Knicks lucked into the smarter strategy of bringing in a bunch of guys from Villanova to curry favor with the Bishop of Rome.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I wore Kelly green and my Randall Cunningham hat, got top-ten drunkest I've ever been, and sang the whole fight song stomping on the bleachers to keep time after every score. The Lambeau fans couldn't have been nicer, there was the exact right amount of booing to make it worth it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
*exception - Philadelphia
When I went to Green Bay last year for a game, my friends and family who were used to Eagles games at the Vet and the Linc kept warning me not to wear my Eagles gear at Lambeau, because I might be in physical danger.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
BRING BACK DUELING.
I think it should be legal to punch someone who is filming you without your consent. It's a similar violation of bodily integrity.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I'm now very excited for you to post the results.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Sure if you had an infinite budget and ability to recruit, you could counterfeit Aella.
But I think the (5) on your list that is being underemphasized in most discussions of prostitution is: Able to mentally and physically endure and survive the ordeal of sex work while maintaining (2) and (3). Most strippers, porn stars, prostitutes flame out on drugs or alcohol or other self destructive behaviors; both because that kind of impulsivity is what lead them to the trade, and because of the pressures and traumas thereof. They have a short shelf life because of that.
I don't think it's moddable, but I do think that mottizens should avoid using the "we" word, unless we're talking about weirdoes who frequent internet discussion boards.
FWIW I think the average normie laborer would find the idea of $10k/night hooker more intelligible than the idea of a $1000/hr lawyer or a $1,000,000,000 CEO or a $200k/yr HR director.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I think acting is a good example of what I'm talking about, where from an audience perspective utility is produced by marketing efforts. Wine and other Veblen goods function similarly.
Tom Cruise's fame and value is not produced purely or even primarily by Tom Cruise's talent, but by the combined effort of an industry, by agents and publicists and studios, and by Tom Cruise's own decisions to manage his image and fame to produce his stardom. He is a product of that system. ((Though Cruise is also a really good actor, in a lot of great films)) That used to be more true in old Hollywood than it is today, Tab Hunter is a good example, there's a great documentary on his career; Tab was made famous by the studio system that both made him big and protected him from the public consequences of his homosexuality, realized that the studio was making a lot of money off of him and tried to break out of the studio system, and his career immediately tanked because he no longer had the studio to make him big.
The audience watching Tom Cruise in a mediocre movie, say Jack Reacher, gets more utils out of watching the movie than they would watching the same movie with a no-name actor, because they like Tom Cruise. The person drinking a fancy rare bottle of wine from a fancy French vineyard is experiencing more utils in that moment than I get drinking two buck chuck, because of the marketing that convinces them that this is a great and rare bottle of wine. That kind of marketing genius is the talent and the labor and commitment that produces the utility for the customer.
A good example, more common to most experiences, is that fight fans get more out of watching the Heavyweight Championship of the world and pay more to watch it, than they do out of watching a smoker bout on the undercard of a local brawl, even if the latter is the more exciting fight. Most people get more out of watching the NBA finals than a great high school game. This is not the result of the players on the court, it is the result of the whole infrastructure of the league and the understanding that this is an important high level game. Donc...
Any vintner deciding to make fifty millions by just producing 100 bottles of a wine which is worth 500k$ a bottle will fail miserably, because the very fact that there are 100 bottles on the market will cap the price.
Any random vintner can't just decide to do that. They need to work through decades of building industry credibility, making contacts, getting good reviews, building audience goodwill, and building a story of exclusivity that makes people think the bottles are worth a lot of money. It's not just a decision to charge more, it's a conscious project that takes a great deal of time and effort and talent. Most who set off down that path fail.
We can say that the customer is being defrauded because the literal product is the same, but that is to decide that the vast majority of people and huge portion of the economy is fake, and we should have strong priors that when we decide that everyone is an idiot we're engaging in an act of arrogance.
If Aella was stupid and lacked the cunning to build herself up, she wouldn't be a usable byword on this website, Tommy would have brought her up in the OP and we would have collectively gone "who?"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Not really. "We" here is a reference to the kind of blue-collar worker @Goodguy was talking about (i.e. someone who puts a lot of their identity into being the kind of person who works hard in a physically demanding job), a demographic which is underrepresented here. If @hydroacetylene's "we" is accurate and he is indeed a regular blue-collar guy, he is providing the Motte with useful information we wouldn't otherwise have access to.
I mean, I think the objection holds because speaking for a hundred million people, of whom my learned friend @hydroacetylene is an atypical example, is pretty rich.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
If they outright said they feel jealous that I do X with another woman (provided it wasn’t an overt demand as a way to control my behavior in general), then I would simply stop doing it to preserve their feelings; and likewise I would expect the same with them.
An exception big enough to park a Mack truck. The list of irrational and impossible demands a woman, or a man, can put on you because it makes them jealous rapidly limits your life in ways that are incompatible with modernity. The harem and the chador are stable equilibria, everything else requires that someone eat some jealousy on occasion.
My point isn't that polyamory is built on jealousy, it's that the polyamorous (and I include in this category those pursuing a lifestyle of serial monogamy) are trading off the possibility of feeling jealous for things that they want.
The executive's wife who accepts her philandering husband is trading off her jealousy against having a stable marriage, husband who provides for her, her kids having a father. The husband in an open relationship is trading off his jealousy of his wife for his own opportunity to sleep with other women.
And most men and women, post sexual revolution in an environment of serial monogamy, trade the jealousy of knowing that their partner had lovers before marriage, for the opportunity to take their own lovers before marriage. Premarital sex is exactly this kind of tradeoff, it's merely temporal separation rather than physical.
Where polyamorous relationships typically fail is that it's really hard for people to get enough out of them to balance against their jealousy.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Death, Taxes, @HereAndGone2 hopping in to tell us that it's totally inexplicable that people value things she doesn't personally like. Said with all love and affection.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
The funny thing about those bottles of wine is I believe there have been a few cases of counterfeiter just mixing cheap stuff and labeling it different.
In the actual case you're probably thinking of it was a fairly elaborate mixing operation, utilizing bottles of very good wine mixed with a variety of wines to match the flavor profile, and based on an experienced oenophile's knowledge of the expensive wines. Most of the cheap mixing wines were still wines I would consider very expensive to drink at my own table!
But regardless, marketing is part of the good from a supply and demand perspective, for both the wine and the gash. Sure, it all feels the same in the dark, but actually making the sale for that kind of money requires a sales effort. And if the kind of marketing in the pornography/escort space that Aella achieves were easy for many thousands of women in the pornography space to do, we wouldn't know who Aella was and be discussing and referencing her constantly on this website.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Those bottles of wine are in short supply. If you can't comprehend of being in the market for those bottles of wine or those escorts, then you probably just don't understand the market in question. "Weird things happen when people engage in bidding wars" isn't an explanation, why is there a bidding war if there is infinite supply?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Huh, interesting, guess I've been wrong all this time.
IMHO it even works well with unrequited love; other than the "alibis" bit the lyrics could be about someone realizing he probably missed his chance with a girl he never had the guts to make a move on.
I always took that as a girl saying so and so was "just a friend." Which works regardless.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Compare Before He Cheats. Excellent cheating song, but no man is really going to sing it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
((I don't think jealousy is strictly universal, but its absence is closer to a form of damage than a strength; even in poly relationships, people like the underlying relationship claim that it represents. The extent cuckolding as a kink tends to be a marmite -- normal people either absolutely hate it or really like it -- suggests at least the fear of infidelity is extremely common.))
The great myth of polyamory (broadly defined) is that it is the lack of jealousy, rather than the negotiation of jealousy against other goods and utilities.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Typically in old melodrama, which is light on intellectual depth if not on topic, the uniting factor was the evil back alley abortionist. This was the skeleton key to the story, the poor innocent girl who got into trouble was understandable, but look at the results! Dirty Dancing is a good reference point here. The net result can be either pro or anti abortion: either we need to legalize it to make it safe, or we need to keep girls chaste so they don't end up here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
And I think the market situation tells us, clearly, that women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I am going to assume the very best girls don’t even become whores. Steve Jobs wife would never become a whore because Stanford MBA and attractive makes it trivially easy for her to marry well. So I feel the supply side of the whore market can’t be power law because the far right tail just does marriage. Depending on your taste the far right tail of females are Tom Brady or Steve Jobs wives.
And then you have Miami. Where the strip clubs are basically brothels and like $500 gets you a girl hotter than these SF escorts. The price in Miami really is 5-10% of San Francisco. If you believe these girls and their $4k/hour claims.
So my guess is this is much more a story of market inefficiency. Some girls probably did find a magic marketing technique and location. And few hot girls want to live in San Francisco. So the high price is a lack of knowledge by other whores on marketing and a huge premium for having to live in San Francisco.
I believe a lot of this is just search costs. Whores don’t know how to market to tech nerds. Tech nerds don’t know how to find whores. The ones that know how to connect the two make a lot.
Listen I get all this, this all makes sense to me. What I'm saying is that the subset of women who are likely to become escorts don't get this and it doesn't make sense to them. Start talking to them about arbitrage and they'll fall asleep before you finish, in either sense.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money.
If it were an easy niche to fill, the price would be driven down. Aella is genuinely a uniquely talented person in her ability to occupy the two different niches involved at the same time. That's obvious when I listen to her on podcast appearances.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I don't think it's hard data to universalize to gen-pop, but I'm curious because I'm curious about my own community.
It was meant to be addressed to
I apologize if that was unclear. I take no position on your personal fandom, just on the question of whether it is legitimate to complain about celebrities sitting on celebrity row.
For what it's worth, the Knicks themselves seem to have no problem with Timmy and were chanting Lisan Al Ghaib at him while spraying him with champagne after the game.
That is for the most part what NBA fandom is. The regular season is increasingly pointless and ignored, the playoffs make up a whole second season, and there are just too many games to pay attention to. I probably watched the end of a dozen Sixers games this season after my wife went to bed, and most of their playoff games. Compare: I watch essentially every Eagles game, I watch or listen to dozens of Yankees and Phillies games during the season.
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