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
3hr ago
I know many people who would disagree.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
I mean sure, but still written by a boomer and part of a series starting in 1996.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
I don't really see the difference between "Trump is personally bloodthirsty" and "Trump hires and empowers bloodthirsty people and does nothing to stop them." Those are functionally equivalent states.
We can play a bit of "If Only The Czar Knew..." but that only works until the Czar ought to know. If Hegseth and his makeup studio are out of the Pentagon by March, then we can go back to the Donald the Dove bit. At the very least, a scapegoat must be found, for decency's sake.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
If we're doing this I have numerous suggestions in my neck of the woods. There's a lot of tiny cheap old towns where you can buy a home, have a car, and walk to a church and a bar.
The verbal equivalent of an AAQC is the bon mot, the line that everyone remembers and repeats back to each other for years afterward, until it becomes part of speech.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
Now I'm not saying that Shagbark's club would look like Café Central. It probably would look like a bunch of weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails while pontificating loudly on subjects they were not qualified to take a 201 class in.
The vast majority of people at the Cafe Central were weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails and we've never heard of them. For every Freud and Herzl and Stalin and Hitler, there were fifty losers whose manifestos wound up lining a parrot cage. One of the important things you realize when you read the biographies of revolutionaries, is that it's really hard to tell the serious ones from the unserious ones until suddenly it is very obvious. The Bolsheviks embodied every stereotype of the LARPing coffee shop revolutionary, the thugs who use Socialism as a cover for robbing banks, the burnouts who just hate their parents, the grifters trying to avoid getting a real job, etc. Then suddenly they took over Russia. And I don't think it's something you can predict in advance, some people rise to the occasion and others turn out to be failures. Sam Adams was far more important than John before the Revolution, afterward Sam was an afterthought until he became a beer. Jesus may not even have been the most important Messiah running around Judea in 33, he turned out to be the most important man to ever live.
These kinds of environments are important because they support a huge petri dish of ideas and thinkers, and most of them will be unimportant but some will be earth shattering.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
Uh, bitch, prices are high. Time on market is low. There's LOTS of buyers. It's a seller's market. If developers aren't building (and indeed they aren't) it's not a lack of prospective buyers causing it.
This is heart of the problem with the article: if there is indeed a mortgage drought preventing people from buying houses, house prices should be falling, not rising. Basic Econ 101 stuff.
Not necessarily. If more people are buying with cash, you can have both rising prices and people unable to get mortgages. And many, many more people are buying with cash. Either because they are older and have assets in hand, or because they are using OPM to invest in housing, or because they are just wealthier. Cash offers have become very common around here, to the point where even people who are using a mortgage can't put a mortgage contingency in the offer if they want to get the house.
Mortgages are a tool to allow people to afford a home without saving for decades. If they aren't available at a competitive price point, then people can't afford a home unless they save for decades first. This is generally considered Not Good for the economy for a variety of reasons, and certainly precludes widespread homeownership for young people.
You seem to assume that only one thing can be wrong at a time, but this is America in 2025, everything can be wrong at the same time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
Trump might have had very little to do with the double strike while still not being a "Weekend at Biden."
Assuming that this occurred, until he fires the people involved, the buck stops with Trump. I'm fairly willing to believe that Trump might literally either not understand or not go into enough detail to care about the laws of war, but he employs several people whose job it is to keep him from tripping over his own dick. If all those people did not prevent him from doing this, or did this without his knowledge, he can fire them, or he can own their actions as his own.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
the argument being used currently by the Trump admin is one of poor victims who aren't responsible for their own drug additions, and they need to be protected from the "terrorists" who provide the druggies the goods they want.
Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.
There's an interesting strain of Latin American thought that goes something like: America blames us for the drug gangs, when we're stuck with the drug gangs because of American demand for cocaine.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
Adam Unikowsky posted about it, yesterday
Brief note for any aspiring substackers here: please don't insert vaguely related AI slop in between paragraphs. It greatly reduces the odds I'll read your stuff.
The funniest outcome here is that Texas creates a whole pile of slightly-pink districts to try to stretch the Republican butter over as much toast as possible, and a truly bad midterm causes Texas to elect more Democrats than they thought they would. And one day the reverse in California leads the state that gave us Nixon and Reagan back to the Republican fold.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12hr ago
I am not sure what "one thing" do you mean, but it does not matter...
It doesn't matter, it can be anything. Lie about the weather, about inflation, about what is a woman, about crime, about race, about massacring civilians in refugee camps. Whenever you intentionally create a situation where you are obviously wrong and your enemies are obviously right, you lose credibility and they gain credibility. Whenever you lie and your detractors tell the truth, you become seen as less trustworthy and they become seen as more trustworthy.
When you hand your opponents a golden opportunity to be publicly right about something, you are making a mistake. The Democrats saw this with the trannies, allowing the Republicans to be right about something so easy and so obvious increased Republican credibility and reduced Democratic credibility. Republicans saw this during the end of the Bush administration when they were trying to say that Iraq and Afghanistan weren't disasters, they looked into it and they aren't disasters. Lying to the public is dangerous. Don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining.
This is the core idea of Yarvin's Antiversity, a truth machine that will contain only facts, and break the power of the Cathedral by being more credible than the Cathedral.
When Israel lies about civilian casualties in Gaza, and antisemites tell the truth, it increases the credibility of Israel's most insane and deadly detractors. This is more dangerous for Israel than it is for an American political party, because Israel's existence is far more tenuous than the existence of one of the two American political parties. Jewish organizations in America spent decades working to make sure that any mention of Da Joos turned you into a pariah and a laughingstock, Israel has spent the last few years causing nice liberals to give MTG and Candace Owens a hearing on some issues. That's, like, really bad and stuff, for Israel.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12hr ago
Look at Connor McGregor attempt to fight The Mountain from Game of Thrones.
I realize it's my youtube algo, but it's funny because like three videos suggested next to it are "LMAO DUMBASS BODYBUILDER GETS MOGGED BY TINY BJJ BLACKBELT"
For demo purposes, it is hard to override the male instinct to 'play nice' with women so as not to inadvertently hurt them.
I was explaining to one of the girls I train with that we (all the male white belts) are all terrified of rolling with her, because there's no winning. If I win and tap her too quickly, I'm a dick who's trying to stunt on a girl. If I lose and she taps me, I just got beat by a girl. The winning move is to use very little strength and perfect technique string together a really technically compelling flow roll. I'm being called on to do this more by my coaches ("We need someone experienced to roll with Sydney because she's new, roll with FiveHour!") and while I'm getting better at it I kinda hate it. What I've started doing is closing my eyes and rolling by pure feel to try to develop better instincts.
I think part of it is that we just need to acknowledge that for self defense purposes, we are mostly talking about different things.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
Exactly. It wouldn't be surprising to see a mixed up extremist who loved Nick Fuentes and also fucked trannies and loved Luigi and communism or whatever. Another Ernst Roehm or Skorzeny.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
But then on the flip side you have Russia, again, where the frontier was where they sent malefactors for centuries, and things got worse.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
So...1996 or maybe 2005?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
Almost all of the things described in the original essay are not normal! India is poorly described as an honor culture. It is not like Afghanistan, even if we have regions that are closer to those norms. It would be like coming up with some kind of term for the honor culture in the Appalachians, and using that to draw sweeping conclusions about the rest of the States. Or using SF fent zombies as examples of the average American.
There's a weird thing in America where we understand that out of 330mm Americans, there are at least like seven or eight distinct cultures that it would be ridiculous to draw parallels across, and then you take a place like India or China with four times as many people and assume they're all the same.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Portnoy's Complaint, a book I read in November that I loved, did this well, using the particulars of the Jewish experience to really dig into the universal experience of male puberty. Mindy Kaling's Never Have I Ever did a good job with it as well.
It's striking seeing a book about soldiers where nobody is friends and nobody likes each other and everybody is brooding and alienated, compared to stories about war where comrades come together. And something you notice is that Band of Brothers starts out by kicking the Jew out of the company and then everyone gets along, where The Naked and Dead is full of Jews stewing about how everyone hates them and southie guys from Boston complaining about all the Yids.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'd more attribute that meme to three things
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If you're extremely online and your only interaction with young men is through NYT and Slate horror articles about how they're all turning right wing, you get the impression that the gender divide between young men and young women is essentially 100% of men are right wing and 100% of women are left wing. Most alt-right accounts on twitter or substack will give you the same impression, right wing is all men and left wing is all women. So you see a young man, in Utah, with a gun, and you see a right wing extremist. Because both left wing and right wing sources tell you that all young men are right wing.
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He hit his target. Left wingers, inasmuch as they perceive their side as capable of violence at all, perceive it as woefully inadequate at executing violence. Much of the disjunction and misunderstanding between right and left can be attributed to this: the left perceives the right as uniquely capable of violence, and the right perceives the left as uniquely capable of cultural persuasion; while both perceive themselves as incapable. To the Left, Left wing terrorism is the universe of harmless incompetents, right wing terrorism is horrifying and dangerous. To the Right, Right wing indoctrination is gentle prodding that will be ignored by most kids anyway, Left wing indoctrination is permanent psychological damage. The Left can't imagine a left wing assassin actually shooting straight.
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Pure bad faith deflection, you flood the zone with nonsense alternative theories long enough that people mostly forget about Charlie Kirk by the time it's actually settled what happened. Similar to the Paul Pelosi thing, or the Minnesota state senators that got shot, or the Kavanaugh hearings, or the Epstein files etc. If my opponent has me dead to rights, but I can just keep saying "well we'll see what comes out later" and avoid losing the argument; by the time things actually do come out later, no one cares about the argument anymore.
That said, it's not all that insane a theory. It's pretty common for internecine conflicts to end in murder, especially where the intelligence services meddle. The only Israeli prime minister ever assassinated was killed by an Israeli extremist. Malcolm X was killed by the Nation of Islam. It advantages the Groypers for things to get more, rather than less, extreme.
I highly doubt that there's a Groyper High Command who ordered Kirk's death, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that any online weirdo kid dabbled in some antisemitism in addition to trans-furry whatever leftism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm still on Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead recounting a fictional WWII battle on a fictional pacific atoll, based on Mailer's own experiences in the Philippines during the war. I will say that after reading The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro has me questioning a lot of WWII stories from prominent men, so I question whether Mailer, who was definitely a clerk and a cook at other times in the army, was really volunteering for behind-the-lines Recon patrols as is claimed.
It's a funny parallel to listening to Darryl Cooper's podcast series on Israel-Palestine, because the more I listen to Darryl Cooper the more I realize that even where I disagree with him he is My Guy, we listen to the same music and married similar women and read similar books. Where the more I read Norman Mailer the more I know he would hate me, his petty villains in the book are literally called out as alumni of my school and being from my hometown.
Overall Mailer is a great writer, I decided to try his big classic after reading The Fight about the Rumble in the Jungle, but the Naked and the Dead feels a little all over the place for me. The emphasis of the book is on the internal struggles of the men on the island, the Japs are barely around. I'm halfway through the book, and the Japs have shown up for one night attack across a river, and one has been caught out behind American lines and war-crimed. Parts of the book deal with issues of strategy from the commanding officer's perspective, others with the actual labor involved for the GIs trying to win the war on the island, the drudgery of building supply roads, men being assigned to platoons or reserves being switched between companies, lots of walking and riding around and taking watch, very little action. Which is of course a view of war, but the particular way it is shown in this book is miserable.
The vast majority of the book is about the internal lives of the men, their fears and insecurities and personal sins and petty gossip and hatreds. Nobody seems to like each other in Mailer's army, they're either playing oblique status games within the military hierarchy or they despise each other for racial reasons and they all despise themselves for various insecurities related to courage or luck or wealth or success with women. For a bunch of men on an island, they are constantly thinking about pussy, getting it or not getting it or losing it. Mailer, who was Jewish, writes in two Jewish characters who specifically are outcasts from the rest of the group for their Jewishness, and estranged from each other by their own different degrees of Jewishness, one more modern and assimilationist and one more yiddish. And forget the Japanese American translator, who is a few paragraphs of a stereotype I've seen a lot by now but was probably revolutionary then. Officers scheme as to how to degrade their subordinates and force them to submit totally, subalterns cheat and steal to escape notice from their commanders when they aren't bowing and scraping to show what good dogs they are. HQ never seems to work very hard at anything useful, much time is spent talking about stuff that seems deeply out of place in the book, building a clubhouse for the officers, obtaining liquor for the officers, who put out a cigarette in the General's tent, stealing supplies from a ship offshore, etc. It's not clear where they find time to fight a war, what with all the backbiting and infighting and struggles of will and general dicking around going on. It seems like the Japs could have won the battle with a few well placed letters telling men their wives were cheating on them back home, and informing the general his aides didn't like him.
Mailer, of course, was there, he saw the elephant. So as part of my course of war memoirs this year, I have to fit it in. How does this fit in with American Sniper and Storm of Steel and Band of Brothers, or even Sevastopol Stories or The Things They Carried? Part of me tends to call this the (1944 American) Jewish experience of the war, the outcast's experience of the war: alienated, never fitting in, always being removed from your comrades, never quite one of the guys. The Naked and the Dead paints a whole army of similar outcasts. Where someone like Chris Kyle or Ernst Junger feels himself among friends in the war Mailer never did. In Band of Brothers, the first thing Easy Company does is get rid of the Jew Sobel in favor of Dick Winters, and after that they're a happy family. Antisemitism in the US Army in WWII might really be the underlying story here. Where in Band of Brothers the hijacking of army supplies and the redirection of stuff for fun and profit is a gay romp, in The Naked and the Dead it's a psychologically fraught crime ending in misery.
Overall, still half to go so maybe it justifies itself, and it's a Great Book by a Great Author on a Great Topic so it's never a total waste, but not one I'd really recommend.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The senate can set its own rules, but I have an opinion as to what those rules ought to be.
The executive is different, in that the POTUS in this day and age is simply never alone and untracked. There should be multiple, multiple, individuals who can testify under oath that Biden signed those orders or ordered them to be signed. The POTUS is maybe only alone in the bathroom, and at Biden's age maybe not even there. Somebody saw him sign these orders, or if he ordered them signed someone carried out the order, and likely he discussed it with multiple people before doing it. Where are these people and why aren't they providing a clear chain of custody and evidence that it happened?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
And of course we can chicken and egg it as to whether the publishers don't publish books for men so men don't read them, or men don't read so publishers don't publish books for them.
But the fact remains. What's the last really male oriented "it" author or book of the year? It used to be common.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I read around 25-30 books a year, and looking at my notes I've only read a handful of new books this year. Despite a conscious effort to read the NYT book review most weeks, and trying to make a real effort go to local small book shops and buy new books, I just don't end up reading many new books.
So it might be that women read more new books than men. That seems intuitively likely.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Mountain biking is a loss, but road biking is doable; the modern two-derailler (though no indexing) road bike is available. Not sure if it's a max of 8 speeds or 10 in 1959. No Spandex kit for the rich cycling enthusiast, though.
It's a funny question, is your enjoyment of outdoor and fitness hobbies more about a) the competitive ordinal ranking or b) more about the social status or c) more about the raw level of accomplishment or d) more about the adventure of discovery? C will be higher today for nearly every hobbyist across nearly every hobby, A and D will be higher for nearly every hobbyist in nearly every hobby in 1959. B will be higher for most hobbyists in 1959 in that at the same level of talent you will be considered better and more interesting for doing less, but there are also a lot of hobbies that because they are less mainstream will just seem weird.
Road Biking is a good example. It existed back then, in more or less the exact form it does today, but everything was slower. Tour de France winner was about 25% slower in 1959, and we can figure that is mostly equipment and training improvement and population growth since the talent base hasn't changed all that much. The countries that dominated in the 1950s mostly dominate now, as opposed to Soccer or Baseball or Basketball where the talent base has internationalized and expanded significantly. So we can guess that a road biker today, transported back to 1959, would be quite a bit slower and/or commensurately less capable of doing long or difficult rides. But, at the same time, it's likely that your rank (formally or informally) in your town or whatever would be higher because fewer people biked recreationally. People would be more impressed at a party that you biked 100 miles because very few people did that, it would be real freak shit. Where cardio hobbies today are a lot more common, so today you're more likely to find a fellow cyclist at the party, but there's a good chance he's better than you.
Rock Climbing is another one. Today, equipment and access and practice are lightyears ahead of where they were in 1959, but in 1959 you could explore. @Rov_Scam talks about how whitewater access is better today, sure, and the same is true of rock climbing routes, but back then you could pioneer new routes. Getting a first ascent or charting new routes was possible if it was something you were into, where today it would require a lot more travel and/or a whole lot more talent. I climb a lot more today than I could have in 1959, and I climb a lot harder stuff today than I could in 1959, but still it seems like the stuff I could do in 1959 would be a hell of a lot cooler, because no one else would be doing it.
Is it more fun because I'm climbing higher grades or biking faster? Maybe, kinda. Or is it more fun to be the first person ever to climb something easier, or the best bicyclist in town? Which do you get more out of?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
In theory, Biden, or an authorized spokesperson for him, could outright state that all pardons/executive orders were done on his behest; this would immediately stop the specific gambit that Trump is trying to pull. I think Trump is banking on Biden either being in too much cognitive decline, or being extremely bitter about the democratic party abandoning him, to do this in most of the cases (for example, I think if Trump went after Hunter Biden, then Biden would act; I'm not certain if he'd just claim he signed for Hunter (thereby implicated all the other pardons) or if he'd do a universal "yes, I did these all," so I don't know if it would be a good idea to push on this point).
Why is there no paper trail involved, no chain of custody, and no witnesses? Biden himself shouldn't really be necessary for this exercise, any more than a pardon by HW Bush is no longer valid. People were in the room when he signed the pardon or ordered the pardon signed, there's a diary entry in the official records showing where Biden was at the time and who was with him, there are secret service agents and aides who were there. There's a whole lot of people who could prove or disprove this theory even if Joe Biden is dead. The fact that none of them are willing to go under oath on the topic would tend to indicate that there's a big mess being swept under the rug, because this isn't a hard fix.
The impact going forward would tend to be strict chain of custody and multiple witnesses attesting to the signatures.
I don't really understand why the Autopen is remotely accepted in this case. In much the same way that I think fillibusters should require actually talking continuously for as long as they want to hold the Senate up.
Anyone who sticks to requiring some strict set of criteria from a partner wants to die alone. Trying to debate him without addressing his real motivations and goals is a waste of time. Arguing with him about the odds is telling him: your method is going to be very effective at achieving your goals.
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