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
13hr ago
What's your current take on the ongoing Ukraine diplomatic drama? Are the Trump Talks likely to lead to the Trump Treaty? Or are they just ongoing comedy and flailing? What does a durable peace treaty look like these days?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Because being in the US illegally is in most cases a status offense, there's no exclusionary rule. Agents will claim in arrest reports that everyone "immediately volunteered that they had no papers and were in the country illegally." There's not much point fighting that story, because it doesn't get you anywhere.
So they accuse you of being here illegally you come back and say you're a citizen. At some point you'll need some evidence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
"Our Super Yenta, with a measured IQ of over 9000, has studied over 200,000 successful relationships and over 300,000 unsuccessful relationships, in order to determine what subtle factors in communication can indicate relationship compatibility. Super Yenta has no ulterior motives: she doesn't want to hook you up with her niece, she's a computer without feelings that rates relationships only on objective criteria discerned from training data."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm not entirely sure if it's true or not either over time. There were lots of very destructive wars of succession throughout the middle ages that featured virtually no political disagreement between the factions. Arguably in WWI, the combatant governments were all closer to each other in politics in August 1914 than they were to any of their successor state governments 20 years later, and certainly it impacted the populace.
But at one end you have some platonic ideal, which would be something like an ideologically-identical VP killing the POTUS and assuming the presidency. As long as the violence is limited to the POTUS, it would have no impact on me, and shouldn't end a golden age.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Perhaps. But it certainly indicates that you shouldn't build your country or bet your life on US promises.
Which is what we're asking people to do when we support their opposition movement abroad.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
How does my saying that it is Good, Actually imply that it's terrible? I'm in favor of the dismantling of the foreign policy apparatus.
What I'm pointing at is the only way to do it is to be mean, is to be cruel, is to be reckless.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
That example is probably illustrative for me: I don't really care about celebrities who call themselves Women or call themselves Catholic. I'm concerned with the application of legal and social protections to people based on their self identifications.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
As a side note, the Trump administration seems to REALLY hate US assistance to foreign countries and they're doing their damndest to shut it off.
It's one of the more effective ways to force an isolationist, and therefore marginally more autarkic, policy on the country and on his successors. Breaking promises (whether or not those promises ought to have been made) and mangling relationships is Good, Actually; because it prevents a future Democratic or normie-Republican president from putting the pieces back together.
It's like if I had control of my blackout drunk friend's phone, and I wanted to use the opportunity to force him to dump his girlfriend, I need to do so in a maximally cruel way that he can't patch up when he sobers up. I need to do and say things so horrible that (assuming that both he and his gf will think he was the one who said them) it will be impossible to get past them.
Trump and Co. aren't just trying to change American foreign policy, they're trying to destroy it, mangle it, leave some future Newsom or Buttigieg admin with no credibility to build it up again. They're not just trying to trim the fat from the federal government, they're trying to make working for the federal government seem both pointless and insecure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I disagree, I actually think the reverse is true: we are all less able to contemplate the killing of politicians with equanimity because of political polarization.
JFK's assassination is, even in most conspiracy theories, only ever alleged to be marginally important to the course of US Government policy. JFK might not have gone into Vietnam quite the way LBJ did, but he still would have fought the Cold War. Kill HW and replace him with Dukakis, or Clinton and replace him with Dole, and the changes expected would be mostly marginal.
Kill Trump, and replace him even with another Republican and we're in a very different place right now.
To put it another way: if all politicians are within a few degrees of agreement on every issue, then the question of who is in charge is mostly a matter of personal ambition, and two politicians killing each other over personal ambition doesn't really impact me, even if I find it horrifying. If party politics is fraught, then who is in charge has policy implications, which will impact the average person's life.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
(In this regard it has more in common with a religion than a subculture.)
Nitpicking: Religions, and society, absolutely gatekeep religious affiliation wherever you accrue benefits from that religious affiliation. Traditionally, vaccine exemptions and Conscientious Objector draft status required a showing of genuine religious faith that had been consistently practiced for a period of time. Getting married Catholic requires you to submit your baptismal paperwork and go to pre-Cana classes. I've never particularly sought religious mutual-aid, but if someone were to reach out to me on the basis of our mutual Catholicism or love for early Black Flag or hatred for the Dallas Cowboys or whatever, there would be a certain degree of gatekeeping involved. Gangs use costly signaling procedures to gatekeep membership because both the gangs themselves and MOPs will be expected to treat you differently because of your gang affiliation, and it is important to keep that from being watered down.
What deference or privileges are expected from goth identification? What's the expected social or professional consequence of addressing a self identified goth as a prep or a jock?
The point at which I'm free to roll my eyes at transwomen claiming to be women, the same way I'm free to roll my eyes at a poseur-punk who doesn't know who Minor Threat is, is the point at which I no longer care about Trans issues one way or the other.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm suggesting that the AI will likely pick up on patterns you and I don't, subtleties that predict relationship outcomes more reliably than the participants themselves.
The average single has zero training examples of what a text conversation looks like in a relationship that leads to marriage. At best, they may be able to conference with a few friends who may have experience of one text conversation they lead to marriage who may be willing to read a few messages and render an opinion. A hypothetical YentaGPT could trivially review months of messaging and compare it to thousands of examples of successful and unsuccessful relationships.
Just as a great baseball coach can judge a player from how they grip the bat, a great relationship coach could judge from a text conversation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
The problem here being that goths and punks are under no obligation to accept other people. They may choose to do so, or not. Subcultures are the location of constant infighting over who qualifies and who doesn't, and different people disagree on it.
The question of definition takes on a different valence when definitions are legally binding and screwing up the definitions can get you into legal or professional trouble.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Given that a large percentage of relationships now occur in large part via text, ignoring privacy concerns it's easy to feed the texts I sent to my wife in the first six months of our relationship and then assign a value to our marriage, and so on across thousands of examples until they can look at your texts with your gf and determine if you should get married.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I just re-listened to that book on audible. It's very good, but it's very convincing in like seven different directions so it's at least mostly smoke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
It's an interesting question to me: where does violence in transition of power become a concern for individual subjects/citizens?
Provided that law and order doesn't break down, it makes no difference to me if the Bidens or Clintons or a few of their followers get the axe.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Taking another run at Infinite Jest. I've DNF'd it repeatedly, unfortunately. I feel like it might be just the limit of "big challenging book to prove a point." Which has given it its bro-lit reputation. DFW was a really brilliant writer, but it's just sooooooo long.
My wife is going to harass me to read The Kennedy Women, because she's long been a Kennedy fan. Good chance I'll write it up here if I get a chance.
Before bed I'm reading a couple stories from Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, I've never gotten into Doyle and figure it's something I ought to check off my list.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Baridan's Ass IRL
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I would argue that ripples like the oil embargo, the rust belt, Vietnam, 9/11 and the GWOT, the great recession, etc. happened in Ming China or the Pax Romana or Victorian England and we mostly don't remember them, we might not even have the written accounts or data to know about them or how important they felt at the time.
I would define a Golden Age, and this might be a values thing, as peace and prosperity combined with high cultural production that has stood the test of time.
Peace can be defined as lack of invasion or the threat of invasion. Sticky point: what level of violence in the transition of power qualifies as a Civil War? And what constitutes core vs periphery? There were probably prosperous provincial cities in Rome that were safe from much of the political violence in the Capital, and were safe enough from invasion for long enough that they had longer safety than Rome itself.
Prosperity can be defined as lack of poverty, Henry IV's "I want there to be no peasant in my realm so poor that he will not have a chicken in his pot every Sunday." [Sticking Point: defining poverty, and the importance of growth vs stagnation and upward or downward mobility]
Cultural Production includes great architecture, literature, philosophy, religion.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
What's the current bro-science on loading during exercise to manage injuries? Particularly explosive vs slow controlled lifting, etc?
The common wisdom I've seen has always been that explosive lifts are more dangerous and lead to more injuries, and that they should be especially avoided when managing an injury. A lot of people avoid the olympic lifts altogether to avoid injury, or if they do them they them with extreme caution.
But my personal experience has been that I injure myself much more often with slow lifts, like the classic powerlifts, and that when managing an injury explosive lifting (at reasonable intensity/tempo/etc) is much less stressful on injuries than slow controlled tempos.
As I'm adjusting my lifting around knocks picked up in BJJ on a weekly basis, I'm curious what the current consensus is.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
It would be fascinating to compare children from monoracial monocultural relationships, inter-cultural but monoracial relationships, children from inter-racial but monocultural relationships, and children from parents of different races and cultures. So the difference between I marry a white girl from my high school, I marry an Amish girl, I marry a Black girl from my high school, and I marry a Chinese girl from China.
But that's probably too specific to get a good sample data from anywhere.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Why do you remove the years 1969-1985 and 2001+? They were good years for many people, peaceful years for most Americans. Vietnam and GWOT were largely minor, political concerns and individual tragedies. Put another way: for my part of Eastern Pennsylvania the last time an invading army got anywhere near threatening was around the 4th of July 1863. The sending of local boys overseas, while occasionally tragic for individual families, never seriously depopulated the young men.
During the Pax Romana or the Five Good Emperors there were border wars, pirates, provincial revolts, etc. But if you lived in certain parts of the empire, things were good and peaceful. Rome wasn't sacked for a long time in between.
So I guess I'm asking how do you define a golden age?
If it's continuous rule without notable wars, I would guess one of the Chinese dynasties had solid staying power.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Bad take. My dad and I would, and for that matter still do, wander through houses for sale and construction sites all the time. Just for fun.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I was going to say, Hillary was the subject of absurd slander when I was in elementary school. I remember hearing even back then, that Monica was no big deal because you should hear what Hillary does to the men AND THE WOMEN on air force one!
I suspect over thousands of messages with someone who you are hanging out with in person, such subtleties would become apparent in text.
It's perfectly possible to get along with someone via text and not in person, but it would be odd to get along via text, meet up and not get along, then go back to the exact same text dynamic.
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