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
2hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
12hr 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
12hr 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
1d 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.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I can't speak to Prague in 1885, I can say that the food anywhere outside Philly and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania was significantly less varied and flavorful and lower effort in 2002 than it is today. I know this because I was there the whole time, and because restaurants are still open that haven't changed cooks or recipes in that time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Adding to the chorus: in 1950s suburban Pennsylvania, you had a little can you put out and the Potato Chip Man came and filled it with fresh chips. The Milk Man brought you fresh milk. The butcher came around in a truck, as did the produce guy and the beer man.
Now there were flavors of potato chip that I can get that they couldn't. But I can't just get them fresh every day at my door at a reasonable price.
And this wasn't somebody with $100k in the bank, this was delivered to houses costing under $10k.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Aside from the fitness test, nothing is preventing anyone from starting a troop like this as it is,
The fitness test is more or less the point here. In current rules you can't exclude anyone, which is pretty much the whole point of this hypothetical. Ordinary boy scout troops have to admit weak, fat, uninterested, special needs kids. This obviously limits the outer boundaries of what can be done.
I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.
Absolutely, I'm musing here to push the conversation in a new direction, is it something that would be practical to create or not? And if it won't work, then why are we complaining about the direction the boy scouts have gone in?
Alternatively, the more intense scouting path could be a badge track within the boy scouts. If Eagle has been Goodhart'd, the Department of War could collaborate on designing a new set of qualifications that would deliver those results for the military?
I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.
I'll note in the way of reminiscence that I'm not entirely speaking out of turn here, I wanted my scout troop to do more outdoor events, so I started going on hikes and camping trips with the other troops my friends were in. There were other scouts who similarly wanted more activities, and the paths for achieving that goal within the scouts were limited. So I do think there exists some subset of boys who are interested in more activities. And the world is full of men who want to mentor younger boys in physically intense activity! Guys love to coach baseball and basketball and jiu jitsu etc.
So I'm questioning if part of the problem is the lack of exclusion. Without exclusionary principles, there's no real urge to progression.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I believe the Hitler Youth attended several international scouting events at the time.
But obviously, we should be bringing back Reagan Youth.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Can anyone explain the appeal of the book/play/film Wicked to me? I really, really don't get it. At all. What's the appeal of this plotline? Everything people say it is about, I don't see. I feel like there's zero work put into explaining why characters do what they do, or why I'm supposed to care about them. I don't identify at all with any of the characters.
I'm not inherently opposed to revisionist versions of stories, or to musicals. I can get caught up in either or both. But I just don't get Wicked. Can anyone help me out here?
((Also, Ariana Grande should not be allowed on screen. That might not be helping.))
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
-- Golf. I haven't technically "quit" golf, I still have the clubs and if an opportunity comes up to play I take it, but I've pretty much stopped practicing or thinking I'm going to get much better at it. It's not a bad way to spend a few hours, but I just can't seem to get any good at it. I'm a consistently inconsistent 100.
-- Stand up paddleboarding. I bought a nice inflatable, and it is nice that I can drive it somewhere and go out on the water better than trying to haul a hard sided kayak, but I only use it like once a year. It seemed neat, but ultimately it's kind of a janky way to get around, and only works well in perfect conditions.
-- Realistically, guns. I have a bunch of them, I don't shoot as much as I should. I have a nice target pistol, I have a nice bull barrel .22, both gifts from a champion target shooter friend. I'm embarrassed of my skill level relative to my equipment. And the worst part is, I can shoot in my parents backyard.
-- Every two years or so, I think that I need to actually learn spanish or french. I'm an indictment of the American language education: I took foreign languages in school from ages 10-22, and never learned more than the rudiments of anything. And every few years, I decide I need to fix that. I never make it. Books, duolingo, video courses. Just never happens for me.
-- Outdoor Rock climbing. I got into climbing in the gym, and I bought all the outdoor stuff because that's the cool version. Turns out, I hate spending all damn day fucking around to do two climbs and fail on a third. I'm a gym bunny. I'll probably end up with the same feeling about BJJ tournaments if I ever actually enter one.
-- Video games. Everyone talks about how much they enjoy video games, but I haven't really played one since WoW WotLK. Periodically I will download a well reviewed game, but they never stick, I just can't get stuck in on anything for years now. It's weird because all the autists I hang out with tell me how they all love these things, and I just can't seem to figure them out. At least I haven't been dumb enough to buy a console.
-- It's not exactly something I've started and quit, so much as something I look into every year and then don't start, but every season I look up local Autocross races and what I need to do to enter. Never do it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Which is why I'm saying that it would behoove BSA to create a harder core program within the umbrella.
When I came out of cub scouts, I could have joined any of about four or five equidistant troops in my area. We actually visited them all as part of our Arrow of Light process. The BSA could have a specific program or designation for troops that are less inclusive and more intensive. I don't think it will help the boy scouts program in general to try to become more exclusive, but I think there's room within the program to have a more aggressive program under their aegis.
Don't make it a knockoff, make it a program within the same org. Join troop 80 over at the Lutheran Church and you have the current Boy Scouts experience with one meeting per week and one camping trip or 8-10 mile hike every month; join troop 88 over at the Unitarian Church and you get one meeting per week, one physical training session per week, and a 15-20 mile backpacking trip every month, but you have to pass a fitness test to join. That kind of thing. Similar to how local baseball leagues have both the regular anybody who wants to join league, and the tryout travel league.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
There seems to be a lot of conflation of cub scouts with boy scouts in this thread. The appropriate leadership and activities for six year olds and for seventeen year olds is an unbridgeable gap.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
One of the ideas that I had in mind, that I never got the opportunity to do because orienteering wasn't on the curriculum until Webelos was to bury caches of water balloons and water guns in our main wooded park, and then divide the scouts into teams. Give each team a map, and then let them loose to secure weapons and munitions and then wage war against each other.
I remember, I must have been seventeen or so because all the young Indian kids had joined our troop already, we did a civil war reenactment weekend. Every troop was assigned "randomly" to either the Union or the Confederacy with appropriately colored T shirts (someone had the brains to make sure the majority black troops were mostly like us in the Confederacy), and the end of the day was a water balloon fight between the two sides. As I recall, we won the battle by giving everyone only two water balloons and holding the rest in reserve along with a couple troops, so we were able to draw them in and then finish them off, while the Union wasted all their ammo early driving off our initial attack. Our final charge yelling "FOR SLAVERY" was a ton of fun.
I wonder if they still do things like that.
The Chinese finger trap of post-modernity: when rebellion is the teaching of the mainstream authorities, submission is the radical act of rebellion. But submission to whom?
The obvious answer is religion and a more ethereal concept of the Nation.
Though England isn't exactly doing all that hot these days anyway, I see the wisdom in the philosophical conceit of Hart
The ideal king would rather be like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the most important piece.
Powell said specifically that a Scout was loyal to his King. This captures the concept of submission and nationalism, without making explicit religious or political commitments to actual controversies. A Scout isn't a Tory or a Whig or a Liberal, necessarily, a Scout is Loyal to his King and Country, a more ephemeral concept of the nation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Sure, his being a nut found expression through shooting the National Guard, but the difference is that because he's brown it's assumed to be a trait of his racial identity and/or part of an organized plot.
Compare the Cybertruck bombing, which was similar in involving a US Special Forces soldier who served overseas who drove a long distance to launch a nutty but (in that case explicitly) politically motivated protest attack, involved a white guy so nobody said "THIS IS A NATIONAL CRISIS WE NEED TO INVESTIGATE EVERY SPECIAL FORCES VETERAN." There's some mumbling about overheated political rhetoric and stochastic terrorism, which nobody really takes seriously. Or, for that matter, much speculation about intelligence connections.
An Afghan is assumed to be some mix of congenitally terroristic, part of some organized group, both necessarily related to his origin.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Yeah I think if worrying about being earnest and lame is a problem, Scouts (or the military for that matter) are just not going to be for you. It predates boomer cringe by multiple generation, it's Boer War cringe.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Alternatively: he's a traumatized nutcase and because he's brown the killing is or becomes or must be political.
If he were white we'd just shrug and ultimately say he was nuts.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Fascinating things are going to happen with near dead languages in the age of generative AI. I'm fairly certain I could already choose to have an AI translate the wall street journal every morning into Pennsylvania Dutch. Or AI create music and videos in Pennsylvania Dutch. Once such a choice becomes cost effective, language in media becomes an aesthetic choice.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
How have the martial arts faired over the progressive era in terms of participation and seriousness of effort?
The UFC happened, and all heritage martial arts have either converged on the same core set of practices, or they've retreated completely into dance-moves or esoteric but untested claims of "real" effectiveness. No other trend is even remotely relevant in comparison.
Twenty to thirty years ago, in the average American small city there was a karate gym that taught karate and a taekwondo gym that taught tkd and a judo gym that taught judo and maybe a Kung Fu gym that taught kungfu. Now, if they still think of themselves as fighters, they've all converged on standup built around boxing, and all of them spend effort to teach grappling techniques largely derived from wrestling and BJJ. Or they've gone the other route, removed all pretense of fighting, and converged towards taichi. A lot of the distinctiveness of different arts has been lost to optimization.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I wonder to what extent there is room for RETVRN scouts in the world. There appears to be a mostly moribund Baden-Powell Traditional Scouts thing independent of the BSA. But why not integrate it into the BSA organization as an alternative?
Scouting has long had sub-programs alongside the flagship Boy Scouts. Venture Crews and Sea Scouts have long operated under different rulesets. My mother was in the Venture program in the 1970s.
If there is demand for a return to Scouting's frankly paramilitary roots, then Scouting could develop a troop concept built around a more intensive and classically masculine program. One with real requirements rather than a focus on inclusivity. In areas with numerous troops, like mine, it wouldn't hamstring the mainline Boy Scouts troop to have a Hard Scouts program fifteen minutes away.
Boy scouts have long varied with the troop anyway. Why not formalize it?
What would such a program look like in your mind?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I really would go out of my way to get the chance to roll with a female blackbelt at some point, just so that I could offer first hand experience on this instead of this theoretical opinion situation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Sorry but what in tarnation are you talking about? What point are you trying to make here? I'm totally lost.
I'd more attribute that meme to three things
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.
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.
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.
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