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
1d ago
Jay-Z and Nas are still alive. Kanye is still alive, if crazy. Rakim is still alive. Big Daddy Kane is still alive. When I glance at Billboard's Top 100 rappers I only count three or four dead in the top 30.
Like OK boomer bias is a big thing, but why is Taylor so high then?
I could equally point to an anti-country bias on the list, but that's a bit different and outside my current thoughts.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I get that. That's exactly how I felt at 17-18, then all of a sudden everything "clicked" with girls and I went from being dateless from roughly 2004-2010, to rotating through four different girls the summer of 2010 before going to college. For me, the inciting event wasn't actually going to college, but primarily when I got into a horrible car accident on my way to a college visit. T boned by an f350 at an intersection, essentially unconscious for a week, out of school for the better part of a month. I'd been texting with four different girls beforehand, all of them were likely to friendzone me later on based on history, but then I just disappeared. And that was the trick, reappearing weeks later with some scars ultimately closed the deal with all four of them. That was the sudden change of perspective that changed my luck.
For a lot of Americans that is college, because you're suddenly in a whole new social ecosystem and your old status isn't important anymore. I remember in high school we had one buddy, Jerry, who was kind of the butt monkey of the group. The dre of the group. We were friends, but we all kind of made fun of or denigrated him, he was a dork, a naif, a loser, nebbish, unable to seize the initiative in any situation. At the poker table, he was the fish. At basketball, he was bait despite being 6'2". He wasn't dumb, but he wasn't top of the class either.
Then we went to college and a year later he was a frat star. Because he made new friends who didn't treat him like shit, and met new girls who didn't see him get treated that way. There he was just a 6'2" blond beast of a man, and he asserted his rights like anyone else.
So, take heart, have hope, It Gets Better.
FWIW if we're doing male-lifetime-hotness, your absolute hotness will probably peak around 22-26, when you have a lot of potential but you won't be expected to have done too much yet, and your body is in its prime. Your relative hotness might peak later, but your true prime is right in front of you.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I feel as if all my dating prospects are behind a glass wall that I just can't shatter.
Yes it's called being a teenage boy. Dan Savage used to have a stock response to teenage boys who wrote in complaining they couldn't get a date, which was to say yeah you probably can't get a date at 15-16-17 and there's nothing you can realistically do to get yourself laid at that age because teenage boys are inherently malformed and disgusting; but what you can do is build yourself up now to set the foundation to be the kind of guy who gets laid alot later, be more interesting and in better shape and going somewhere etc.
Most young men go through this kind of transition at some point in their lives. It's not comforting now, but it really is just something you have to wait out. I certainly did.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm using it in my comment as an intentional anachronism to fit the period of Million Dollar Quartet and the period when music made by black people became culturally dominant across the United States and thus the world, and to signal a degree of irreverence can be maintained while still acknowledging the absurdity of having Taylor Swift ten spots ahead of any representative of the dominant cultural mode of popular music for the past twenty years.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Kirk having niche popularity with a subset of the population, but not mainstream notoriety of the type I would be aware of, still creates the cognitive dissonance and room for a punchline I'm talking about, among the subset of the population that wasn't really familiar with him.
If Jalyx Hunt were suddenly in every Gatorade advertisement on TV, and "who the hell is Jalyx Hunt?" became a punchline online, that every serious Eagles fan knows who he is (a beloved local event planner for the city) or that he's actually a pretty underrated edge rusher doesn't alter the situation for people who have no idea who he is beforehand.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Evidence of the Vibe Shift is surfacing.
I'm a reflexive contrarian. I'm a libtard when I'm at a megachurch picnic, and a superfascist at a liberal arts college. When I watch a biopic, I tend to try to critique and read-between-the-lines so much that I walk away with the exact opposite of whatever opinions the filmmaker was trying to impart about the subject.
And lately, I'm running into stuff and feeling wokeness rising like bile in my stomach.
I took my father and mother to see Million Dollar Quartet for Father's Day. Which was good for them, it's boomer-candy, barely a play and more of a cover-band night with four performers and an mc all pretending to be from 1950 or whatever. My parents had a good time, which is what matters for filial piety. But the whole plot, such as it is, the conflict revolves around who gets "credit" for songs. Carl Perkins wrote Blue Suede Shoes but Elvis got it on TV first so now it's an Elvis song and Perkins gets told he's a cover artist! But throughout the play the artists play covers from black artists of the time, Long Tall Sally and Who Do Ya Love? among others, and don't acknowledge it; the play isn't clever enough to be doing that intentionally. Black people, who still owned Rock and Roll at the time of the setting, and they're just erased from the story here! RnB was still considered "race music" at the time! Most of the great artists were negroes! There's no way that they hung out and discussed what rock and roll music was and didn't talk about that! And I'm not asking for some woke-confession speech where they talk about stealing rock and roll, but the play would be 1000% more interesting if they did a little bit of Mad Men where they used period accurate attitudes to race to make the viewer think about the issue.
Then I saw the NYT list of greatest living American songwriters, and sweet suffering Jesus, where is the melanin at the top? Are you kidding me? Taylor Swift makes the list just even with the first negro? The highest ranked rapper is Kendrick at 17, and that just seem so wrong when hip hop has been the artistically dominant pop music form for at least twenty years. Kanye at 72 while Dolly Parton is in the top ten? I realize this is mostly boomer bias here again, but to deny the unique cultural contribution of American blacks to modern popular music is just...odd.
And I don't feel like I ever had room to think something like that a few years ago. So the vibes are shifting.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
All I can tell you is that I read two newspapers a day, see probably three or four hours of varied cable news a week thanks to boomer parents, I'm politically active in the local R party, and I'm active on Twitter and here, and I barely knew he existed. It's possible he was this niche icon in my blind spot. But that would still create that contrast I'm pointing to.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I wasn't entirely sure Charlie Kirk was a real person or what he really looked like before he died. I was vaguely aware of someone named Charlie Kirk and something called Turning Points, but I had knew nothing about him and had no real opinions on him or his organization.
Then he got shot, and suddenly he was everywhere. Conservatives were passing around hadiths of things Charlie had told them before he died as authoritative statements on any given topic. His name and his face were all over. He was the leader of the future. People were on here saying that his assassination was an effective strike against the Red Tribe because he was irreplaceable.
The whole phenomenon reminds me of nothing so much as when a singer with three top-40 hits in the 80s dies, and suddenly everyone is telling us how they were "the voice of a generation" and "meant so much to so many people." And every radio station is playing her two hits over and over. And it's like, nah bro she was pretty good, but there were a dozen other singers in the 80s on her level, and she was mogged by Madonna throughout her career.
The result of the Charlie mythos being so rapidly built and so thoroughly overshot was that the gap between the myth and the reality created opportunities for humor. This can occur even with a really serious tragedy (9/11, the Holocaust, the Soviet purges), but it's even easier when the gap between the publicity and the tragedy is bigger.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
"Destroyed" is... a tremendously strong word. It's not like FORD went full BONHOMME RICHARD.
Reports have varied, but we're looking at a return to service in 2027 on the optimistic government timeline. While "destroyed" is perhaps aggressive, "damaged sufficiently to be removed from operation" is infelicitous, and anyway we're being weirdo skeptics so we're rounding up and assuming the damage is worse than we were told.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Real weight bearing "almost" in that last sentence.
People voted for Platner despite/because of all of the above, and now he's being driven out by unresolvable accusations from his ex gf. That looks less like "straw that broke the camel's back" and more like "trap card activated."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
So select for people with exes with moderately bad things to say about him.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Sure, you're correct, I don't think it's good to pin anyone's suicide on anything in particular. Suicide seems to be caused mostly by some kind of outside-factor separate from life-story, probably genetic in some way.
But if mental health factors impact the decision to commit suicide, then they impact the whole work of the person. Mental health isn't well-modeled as a debuff in a video game that comes in and changes them, especially when we're talking genetics.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I haven't followed this story closely enough to assess the facts or Platner as a person.
But I worry that a system of "Your ex-lover says bad things about you and now you are toxic waste" is basically a system that bans normal people from running for office.
The vast majority of exes have bad things to say about their former partners. Crazy, bipolar, abusive, violent, lying, cheating, scumbags all of them.
And the only way to be sure you never have a crazy ex is to never date. Crazy ex girlfriends might seem sane when you meet them, or they might be sane when you meet them and suffer a mental break later*.
Per a quick Grok, 90-95% of ever-married Americans have premarital sex. The median partner count is about six for a 42 year old man. That's six rolls of the dice, and if you roll under 5 on a d20 you can't ever run for office. And you can't really know how you rolled until you've already staked your whole life and fortune and reputation on the run.
That's not really any way for a country to function. Normal people have to be able to run for office. Otherwise our only politicians will be freaks, people who have lived their whole lives in a kind of asceticism designed to protect their future political careers.
Sex and romance are a full contact sport, and we want to issue lifetime bans to anyone who commits a foul.
*Growing up my father got letters from a woman he dated some time in the 70s before meeting my mother. She went through a mental health crisis after moving to a foreign country and marrying a man there, and sent FiveHour the elder hundreds of letters making up dozens of stories to...idk maybe get him back or something? She actually died at one point, at which time her "sister" started sending the letters, then she came back and sent the letters herself again. I suppose this experience informs my views.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I need someone to list all the Looney Toons accidents that happened in Iraq I & II, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc. Because I'm starting to turn Schizo from the fact that the USA is claiming all these losses of men and material from ridiculous mishaps ("A clothes dryer caught fire and destroyed a carrier" "we landed the planes in a mud puddle on a rescue mission that just happened to be right next to the nuclear supplies we were planning to Mission Impossible" "Plane crashed in the middle of nowhere"). I'm even looking at the two recent civilian skydiving accidents a little crossways, and they happened in Missouri and France.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
"This is Water" has good practical value for organizing your thoughts against the tedious chore that is grocery shopping. It's worth reading for that reason, at least.
Does it though? What does "good practical value" mean here? It seems to mean something like, don't be angry and hate other people or reduce them to nothing. But isn't the practical value of philosophy living a good life, and at some level a happy life? Is one's life happier if one tries to imagine the internal narratives that make everyone act like the way they do?
I'd contend that no, in many cases it doesn't. That the human brain and spirit cannot contend with this kind of massive self-abnegation. That pursuing this ideal to extremes leaves human nature nowhere to go. To quote the great philosopher Sennett
(Cognitive behavioral therapy enjoyer I just cut off in traffic) Think positively. He is probably in a rush for a reason. Maybe he’s late for a job interview. Maybe his wife is giving birth
Me: I’m da king of da highway
Sometimes the world is better when you just dismiss people as NPCs or Chuds or whatever.
For me, my outlet for this is team sports. Fuck Dallas. I can tell you rationalizations for why I hate the Cowboys (and the Redskins and the Falcons and the Patriots, who are ontologically evil, and the Rams...no one likes us we don't care). But I can recognize that they are just rationalizations and there is no substantive difference between me and a Cowboys fan, my joy in an Eagles' victory is not of a higher moral order or priority than his in a Cowboys victory in any utilitarian sense. But I root for the birds anyway, and wear my Dallas Sucks t shirt to the stadium and boo. Because it feels good, it's an outlet for the atavistic tribalism that the human mind craves. There are few activities I look forward to more than lifting weights after a devastating Dallas Cowboys loss, and listening to the seethe on post-game Cowboys podcasts, hearing the pain in the fans voices when Dak Prescott bottles it. That's my pressure valve.
Hugo had it right, purity must end with Inspector Javert or with the Archdeacon Claude Frollo.
In my view, Infinite Jest is maybe the last great work of the Western Canon of Literature, but it is also in many ways the world's longest suicide note. DFW tried to understand everyone and sympathize with everyone and overlook no one, and he couldn't live with it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Exactly. One can enjoy the philosopher and find the philosophy interesting, but one must grapple with the death.
Another good illustrative example of a writer/philosopher who offed himself: Hemingway. There's so much to admire in the Hemingway Hero, but then you have to ask about the shotgun waiting at the end of the line. Honest conversations about Hemingway's vision of masculinity and life cannot ignore the suicide. I love Hemingway, but his life philosophy must be considered in that context.
Foucault is undoubtedly one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work on sexuality is seminal and must be grappled with. Ignoring him as a crank, dismissing him, is impossible if one is a philosopher. But one can't admire his work without asking questions about his death.
Lindyman actually posted on the same topic today:
This is the David foster Wallace mental trick of just coming up with fake narratives to attach on people so you don't get frustrated waiting in line in the grocery store[.] How[']d that work out for him?
DFW emphasizes the need to consciously reframe one's perspective to find meaning and avoid despair in mundane, everyday life, essentially treating the world as a projection of individual thought patterns. This approach reinforces an isolated view of the world, where meaning is constructed purely in the mind, rather than found through engagement with shared, objective and external realities Leads to being stuck in your own head. Rumination. And eventually despair.
I think Bourdain's work presents an interesting and coherent set of questions and attitudes about modern life and meaning. There's a reason his work is so good! But, you have to consider his life as a whole.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Should we judge a book purely by its final page, a song by its last verse?
Point out where I said we should judge philosophers only by their deaths.
I admire both Bourdain's and DFW's works, and would say I admire their life philosophies and think there is something to be drawn from them. I would also say that it's relevant, if not dispositive, to consider how they died when considering their advice on how to live.
Also I just have to add that I find this a bizarre line of thought, imagining someone finding a man's hanging body, shaking their head sadly as they mutter to themselves "If only he'd berated more cashiers".
This is an exceedingly common line of thought that goes back to at least Victor Hugo, that of the man so obsessed with moral purity with no outlet for his human vices and desires, who eventually snaps and does something evil or self destructive. This is just applying the same standard we apply to a puritan Christian to a liberal icon.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
You frequently see his quotes on life thrown around as deepities, to the point that copypasta of them is a meme on twitter. Both Kitchen Confidential and No Reservations have a strong element of lifestyle-porn to them, imagine living that way like this fun interesting guy!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I do think that a philosopher ought righty to be judged by his death. As Solon tells us, judge no man happy until his death. Similarly, we ought to judge no man wise unless we approve of his death. It seems relevant when discussing Foucault, and especially his work on human sexuality, that he dies of AIDS. The question of what one thinks of Socrates is mostly a question of what one thinks of the Hemlock, and of course there's Empedocles. Similarly, I admire David Foster Wallace's writing, but when people cite his philosophical insights from This is Water
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
I think it's relevant to note that DFW hanged himself. Is that kind of radical empathy perhaps beautiful and perhaps true and perhaps admirable? Sure. But can you live with it? DFW couldn't, could he? Does this imply that this kind of effort to constantly consider the circumstances of everyone around you might be overwhelming, that in fact we need to degrade others to meaningless NPCs in order to survive the world we live in? Sure it would be nice to live in a world where we consider the circumstances of everyone in traffic with us and have empathy for them, but does that make living in a world with traffic impossible?
I think it's relevant to note that Bourdain hanged himself when considering his lifestyle and his life advice. I loved Kitchen Confidential, it's an upper-end beach read, and No Reservations was a great cable content show, a little higher brow than your typical cooking show but ultimately within the same format and the same relaxing emotional range.
But when one assesses the philosophical depth of his malattributed and oft-memed deepities, we should consider that Anthony Bourdain hanged himself, and that maybe that way of living doesn't actually work if it's most famous adherent wound up tying that knot. Willful suicide*, the negation of life, seems to undermine any idea of one knowing the way to the Good Life. And clearly there are a lot of people who still admire and seek to imitate Bourdain, when you consider that there's an active subreddit for him years after his autopsy. So it's relevant to talk about why he shouldn't be uncritically admired.
There's a flip side to this where people want to hate on Bourdain and say he wasn't that talented or that interesting, I've even seen accusations that he was a bad cook and a nepo baby in publishing, but I think that goes too far. He was a pretty good media celebrity, as they go. And I think there's something to enjoying oysters fresh off the beach. But we have to consider where it all ends up.
*I should note that the word "willful" is necessary, instrumental suicide like Socrates or other ancients choosing suicide as a particular form of death sentence, or the proverbial secret agent biting down on a cyanide molar to avoid torture, or a soldier jumping on a grenade, may meet the technical definition of self-killing, but they're rather different implications philosophically.
((As an aside, while I think it's valid to question someone's moral fiber or entire life philosophy as a result of their suicide, I don't think we should over-attribute someone's suicide to particular circumstances or the actions of other individuals. For every bad thing that happens to anyone that kills themselves, there are a dozen people who had the same thing happen and are still here. It's hardly common for an unfaithful model/actress gf to drive men to suicide. I knew people who killed themselves after divorce, but I know more people who didn't. I don't think you can really drive someone to suicide, some people kill themselves and some people don't in any given circumstance.))
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
You could look at mixed marriage statistics.
Which would show you that foreign born Indians marry non-Indian Americans at about a 15% rate, weighted towards more men marrying-out than women.
Contemporary surveys from 1910 of Italian American immigrants at the beginning of the last century show about an 8:1 frequency of Italians marrying other Italians versus marrying out.
I'm looking but so far I can't find rates of Catholic out-marriage at the time, which would be a closer mirror really, as the vast majority of Indian/Pakistani friends of mine dated white in high school and college, but married brown for religious/cultural reasons. Similar to Jews, though I doubt that's a comforting comparison to many ethno-rightists.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Belgium is big mad.
Have there been statements by the Belgian team that they don't care and they'll win anyway? Maybe it's just not being reported, but playing under protest because Balogun is on the pitch is big loser energy.
The result here might be irregular, but it isn't unfair because it shouldn't have a serious impact on the outcome of the game.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I think it gets less censure because of the helmets. I just don't see the same degree of facial acting during NFL games, so it's less distasteful.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Agreed that it's an issue. My bete noire is the Mahomes style fake going out of bounds so they defender has to stop his momentum to avoid a RTP, then sneak back in for more yards. Or the late slide to pick up an extra yard. It'll need to be regulated at some point.
I just don't think it's nearly as common or nearly as distasteful as the display you see in soccer, or in the NBA at this point.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I think I can judge who is an American and who isn't through years of interaction. Intermarriage as a test is just delegating that same judgment to the cast of 90 Day Fiance. I trust myself more.
Plenty of women will reject you, that doesn't matter. Nobody cares about efficiency metrics in picking-up-girls, least of all Mormons. Your true-shooting-percentage doesn't matter. Just the number of points you score.
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