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
6hr ago
The military achieves a high marriage rate by legislating benefits for married servicemen.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
I'll have to pick up a copy next time I take a weekend trip.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
they should kill each other like ants from rival colonies put in a glass jar.
Why? Why would it matter to them?
In my mind what Bannon and Chomsky have in common ideologically is that they are both, by the old Matrix-derived definition, Red Pilled. Both are prone to smugly asking the reader if they think that is air they are breathing.
Their enemies are more in the Blob than in each other, at least until the Blob is defeated.
A couple years back, my patriot news type conspiracy theorist trailer park carpenter helped me take a delivery of a large load of drywall. The delivery driver was a black guy from Chester, who was a black Muslim type conspiracy theorist. They got along famously. Each was telling the other about conspiracy theories they had NEVER HEARD BEFORE. They were loving it. Did you know that they opened the oldest vault and all the saints were black? Did YOU know that Joe Biden is only a fake president, and that really the military took full presidential powers before Trump left office? No shit! Did you know that they're importing immigrants to drive black people, who are the real jews, out of the cities? No way I didn't know that man!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
Weiss' resume isn't that deep, in terms of running a major television news corp. For comparison, the equivalent guy at Fox News started on O'Reilly before Weiss was out of college. She had a roughly ten year career in print journalism, and founded a modestly successful substack. By that standard, she's about as qualified as Scott Alexander to run CBS news. There's a ton of gentiles with resumes that stack up against hers. And frankly if there aren't, that seems to be giving the game away to SS to begin with, doesn't it?
Another point in Weiss's favor is that she courts controversy -- and this being media, that's usually a good thing. Hell, when was the last time anyone talked about CBS this much?
CBS news affiliates mostly cover local news. Becoming purely ideological may or may not be a good approach there.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
If in order to discuss Capitalism I'm going to have to defend the most ignorant thing you've ever seen on Twitter referring to Capitalism, we're already lost.
Capitalism as a system is defined economically by the investment profit motive, by taking investment capital and putting it to work to earn more capital, which will be invested again to earn more capital, and so on and so forth to eternity.
This is distinct from Feudalism, from Mecantilism, etc.
Until we can successfully imagine something beyond Capitalism, there is no way to imagine a worldview that privileges other terminal values than profit.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
Is politics actually just Kabuki theater to the elites?
Yes
But I don't think the shock at this case is based in a good model of who Bannon and Chomsky are. Bannon has always been, or had pretensions of being, a real serious intellectual, who reads widely within academic texts, which means reading a lot of leftists any time since, what, Aquinas? Steve Bannon has definitely read and admires Noam Chomsky's work. Bannon has expressed his admiration and desire to imitate Lenin, you think he'd draw the line at Chomsky?
Chomsky and Bannon share a lot of analytical agreements about the nature of the political establishment, and about American foreign policy over the past hundred years. Their disagreements are actually a lot more minor than the disagreements between either and other Epstein buddies like Larry Summers or Bill Gates. If the guest list at that party was Bannon, Chomsky, Summers, Gates, Clinton, and Epstein; it's pretty obvious that Chomsky and Bannon would get along better together than with anyone else at the party.
Rather I think twitter turbolibs who are surprised about Chomsky and Bannon getting along are shocked because they haven't read Chomsky and just think of him as a harmless mascot of the generic academic left, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is; and they haven't read Bannon and assume he's just a MTG or Boebert style airhead, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
I actually do think there is significant room to blame white stakeholders for pulling up the ladder behind them. The most significant part of the support for affirmative action has always been from existing stakeholders, who want to reduce competition.
A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harvard Law, like the Manson family, believes so firmly and mystically in his own superiority that no white loss in a racial conflict can rattle him. He believes in his superiority as a talented white kid as firmly as he believes in gravity. He is one of the Great and the Good, his talent got him here, giving tithes to those inferior to him will only enhance his stature. After all, if I'm a white kid with a 165 LSAT who can't get into a T14, every 160 LSAT Black kid who gets in is a spot that could have been mine, I coulda been a contenda if only things were different. But if I already got in, if I'm confident that my 179 LSAT is such that I always will get in to whatever I want, then I'd rather a less qualified kid got in than a more qualified one. If you're trying to get into a class of 800, ever non-merit spot is a spot you lose, I go from having 800 chances to get in to 600 chances to get in. If I'm already in a class of 800, every non-merit spot is a kid who isn't competing with me anymore for the top spot, I go from competing to be 1/800 to competing to be 1/600. Let the Blacks push out the whites and the Asians, the Blacks won't be able to compete with me anyway. If we're all at a firm together, my pedigree and my talent are worth more the fewer people exist with my pedigree and my talent. Affirmative action at top schools is a way to narrow the field of actual competitors from that school.
Imagine as a model an elite selective law school where 800 new students are admitted every year. First 400 students are admitted on "pure merit" for LSAT scores, the top scorers are brought in automatically. Then those 400 students vote on the rules used to choose the other 400 students. The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit. The kid with a 179 LSAT doesn't benefit from making sure that the kid with a 172 LSAT makes it in. The kid with a 172 is quite likely to compete with him in class for the top spots, the gap in ability isn't that large. But if he votes to admit kids on affirmative action grounds with a 160 LSAT, those kids aren't likely to compete with him. The same applies for any situation where incumbents are choosing the rules for those coming after him.
For a young white man applying to school, trying to get a job, trying to make partner, affirmative action harms him. For an old white man who already made partner, affirmative action helps him maintain his power, no young up-and-comers are coming for his crown because he makes sure that the lower levels are full of undeserving sycophantic incompetents. As corrupt leaders choose unqualified lackeys and promote them above their competence level, knowing that the lackeys will be forced to remain loyal to the leader because they can't survive on their own, so incumbents elevate diversity picks knowing that they won't threaten the current leadership, and will remain loyal to the institutions, because they owe their success to those leaders and institutions and values.
We saw this dynamic play out in the Democratic party over the past ten years. An emphasis on affirmative action in their choice of candidates left them with a thin bench, and allowed Joe Biden to become President. Joe Biden was always incompetent, but he had tenure, and by supporting minority candidates he protected himself against the rise of anyone ambitious and competent enough to supplant him. We didn't see ambitious young whites rising in the Democratic party, we saw affirmative action picks everywhere, and as a result in 2020 we wound up with the only half-competent white guy in the race winning, despite his being older than cable television. Nor would Joe have lasted as long as he did in the presidency with a competent vice president breathing down his neck.
Stunting the rise of competent competitors benefits boomer incumbents, protects them from being pushed out on an ice floe when they should be.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14hr ago
It's amazing how bad humans are at understanding probabilities. The existence of some successful white men doesn't mean there is no widespread discrimination against white men, any more than the existence of successful black women tells us that racism against blacks is fake.
Affirmative action's impact is by its nature stochastic, but as the old Democratic campaign line goes when you are out of work the unemployment rate is 100% for you. It's not that every white man makes 20% less, it's that some percentage of white men will be unable to get a job or a promotion or a project completed, while the rest move through their lives normally. If I'm at a law firm that commits itself to diversity in the partner ranks, it's not that I'll be paid less because I'm white when I'm an associate, or paid less if I make partner, it's that when I come up for partner I might draw the short straw and be up as the same time as a black guy or an Asian girl and get shafted.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Ellison was going to pick someone with pro-Israel credentials, and almost certainly someone Jewish.
Why is this almost certain? There's no shortage of Christians with pro-Israel credentials.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
We'll see how I look by 40. I've tried buzzing it down to a 2 a few times, and I have an odd shaped head, I feel like I look like a baby, and also like I shouldn't hang out too close to a synagogue.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I have family abroad in a country with iffy relations with the United States, so I've always joked that if I had to do a runner I'd show up at my uncle's doorstep, and hopefully have squirreled enough money away from whatever white collar crime has caused me to flee the country that I'll be able to open an American theme hamburger restaurant.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
What will come after post-modernity?
We first have to answer what comes after Capitalism. Capitalism is universal solvent, it slowly melted through every ethnic or ideological or traditional or religious barrier that tried to hold it back. It ate ethnicity, it ate religion, it ate nationalism, it ate gender, it ate the narrative of progress itself.
It will not be possible for a new narrative to assert itself until it first slays Capitalism.
And even within our science fiction, we can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of Capitalism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Thought of our discussion of this recurring trope reading Eig's Ali:
By the time he was seven or eight, Cassius was the leader of a pack of boys ever on the lookout for action. Odessa would look through the screen door and see her eldest son standing on the concrete porch, like a politician on a platform, addressing his youthful followers about what he had planned for them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The problem here would be that alimony is based on the income of the partners, not any expected inheritance. Assume for this hypothetical that I am "Worth" $200k/yr after taxes.
Scenario A) I work for a law firm where I am payed $200k/yr after taxes, I live on $100k and save the rest.
Scenario B) I work for the family business, I receive a salary of $100k/yr after taxes, I save nothing, the rest remains within the family and either benefits me indirectly or will come to me as inheritance eventually.
If Mrs. FiveHour left me, alimony and property settlement would be calculated based on my income and assets. Under Scenario A, that would be based on $200k/yr in income plus splitting the savings. Under Scenario B, it would be based on $100k/yr and there are no savings to split. A divorcing spouse can't reach speculative inheritance.
The "trick" is in trusting my folks to manage the money for me for decades before I see it.
Child support is a little different, as it ought to be.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Wow, that's a solid stat pull. I'm genuinely surprised by it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig headed fool.
I notice, you are prejudiced, he is acting out his insecurities through violent bigotry.
I'm going to register that I think this is a troll post, the quality is so low that I have trouble believing in it. Numbers pop up only for one side, ethnicity and religion are conflated in different ways for different groups, hatreds are elided at random.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
@RenOS seems to A) Want to go to this game and hang out for social reasons, B) Prioritize not losing money over making money C) in front of people. Playing tight will maximize the odds that you stick around for most of the night, getting the social benefits of playing poker, and minimize the odds that you'll bust early and need to rebuy and/or look like an idiot.
We can't know the level of the table, so we can't reliably increase the odds of winning by advocating for aggressive play. We can reliably increase the odds of hanging around all night by advocating tight play.
It's pretty similar to what I'd tell someone prepping for a boxing match in two weeks: practice movement, keeping your hands up, throwing straight punches quickly, backing away. That might not be the best strategy for winning a boxing match, but it's got decent odds against an untrained opponent, and it's got very good odds of avoiding getting knocked out quickly and looking like a fool against a similarly skilled opponent.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them.
I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.
The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.
I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.
And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.
Huh. That's an interesting angle. I was thinking about that earlier today shoveling snow, how reading a novel like that is inherently selfish in some ways, but then I only managed to finish it through a book club, so it was inherently social and connection based for me.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
*Thereby excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I started reading last December and which probably would have made my top 5 for fiction had it been included.
Interesting, in my accounting I put books in the year I finished them. Probably because the point of the exercise for me is actually finishing books, rather than being in the middle of so many books that Mrs. FiveHour yells at me because they're all over the place in our bedroom.
I really do need to read the Outsiders at some point.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I look forward to them when I get out of town in the spring then!
They just feel like spring books for me. Maybe February if I drive south a few miles.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I guess I'll do the same even though nobody asked:
I asked!
I've been hesitating to tackle Nixonland by Perlstein so maybe that's what's next.
I was underwhelmed, I didn't really get much of a thesis out of it. There's better books on the same topic.
I took a page out of an the ACX review of it from last(?) year and made my wife read it to me while I was high. Had a similar experience to the reviewer in that I found the descriptions too intense at one point and made her stop. Second favorite book this year.
Wow you have no idea how much you just annoyed my wife in three weeks.
Less Than Zero by Ellis - Quite a read, really dark. I whipped through it though, it's kind of gripping. It felt very 80s so no surprise it was released in 1985. I would recommend this book to skinny women age 18-25 with an occasional coke habit.
Lucky Jim by Amis Kingsley - Pretty funny and possibly the most British thing I've ever read. It's about an early career English history professor in a provincial university and his struggles. It might have done lasting psychic damage to me when I was a freshman in college and a massive misanthrope with a superiority complex. I'd recommend it to grad students and adjunct professors who can't seem to get a tenure track.
I'm adding both these to my tbr pile.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Anna Karenina: A book like this is hard to even review, but it's certainly worth your while.
I read it for the first time in high school, and barely understood it. I read it again a couple years back, and enjoyed it greatly and got a lot out of it, but felt like I got bored of it near the end. Then that same week I was reading some interview in the NYT Sunday Book Review, and the author said he didn't really get Anna Karenina until he turned 40, and I sat there like fuuuuuck I gotta wait another seven years?
Two Years Before the Mast: an absolutely incredible story of seamanship, camaraderie, and the old west. Reading this book in the California summer was an unforgettable experience. It is on the very knife's edge of exponential growth taking root in California that has lasted through today. Be sure to read the author's postscript on his return visit 24 years after and his son's postscript 72 years after. An unspeakable sense of nostalgia and yet also a sense of what stays the same.
Somehow I'm both not sure what this book is about, and sure I want to read it, from this little review.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it
I just downloaded Forest Passage so maybe it will reveal more. I find Junger fascinating.
On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity.
I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?
Plutarch's Lives: Perhaps the greatest historical work ever written? But also, not a true history - it's fundamentally a philosophical book about human character, human greatness, and human folly. Plutarch is concerned with what it is to be human, and what types of men make their mark on history, and his Lives are deeply-painted portraits of character.
This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek. Everything you said too, and Plutarch was a genius writer, but the underlying political project was one of the biggest things that stuck with me. Plutarch used his literary and philosophical genius to forward his goals and ideas.
Contemporary alt-lit
If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
How is it structured, is it set buy in and then play cash and buy in again if you bust, or single buy in then tournament and pay out by rank, or variable buy in?
For the most part if your concern isn't making money (which depends more on the people you are playing with than on any skill you might build in a couple days) but just in not losing it: then your goal is to play tight, fold most of your hands pre-flop, and don't worry too much about bluffing or calling bluffs just play when you have a high percentage hand. This is where you start pre-flop:
Try to memorize the basic shape of the odds for the good hands, and give yourself basic rules of thumb for which to play through. Don't get obsessive with position or anything like that, if everyone else is playing at that level you're probably screwed anyway. If you're playing with ignorant normies, just playing tight and knowing which are the good hands will make you pretty solid. If you're playing against obsessives, it's going to take more than a week to get good enough at strategy for it to matter.
Personally, I'll add that as you play you can learn more about your own issues with certain hands, and either focus on learning to play them properly, or just learning to avoid them. For a long time I consistently lost money playing pockets, I'd take it to the flop because the odds were worth it, then fold immediately under pressure because I wasn't confident that the other guy didn't have a higher pair. So I started just deciding pre-flop that if I felt good I'd go all-in pre-flop and if I didn't I'd fold pre-flop for anything under JJ or QQ.
I'm not sure that's true. I don't think soldiers have a higher rate of being paired off than guys the same age that work at Wal Mart, but Walmart doesn't instantly pay their young male workers thousands of dollars extra for getting married.
Soldiers also have higher divorce rates than civilians.
If we made it a national policy to pay everyone thousands extra for getting married, instantly, we'd raise the marriage rate. I'm not sure that's increasing the status of young men, exactly, just paying people to get married.
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