FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
I've got nothing in my head, got a floor for a bed My future's at the bottom of a teacup I've got a half a pair of shoes, and no time to lose I'm wondering when I'm going to wise up So fortune shine your light on me and my nose 'Cause we need some security You get a little bad luck and it grows and it grows I'm the black sheep of the family I've got half a pound of rice, a beard full of lice A mission called retrogression I've got a pocket full of dust, and eating is a must If you want to make a good impression
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
2d ago
This study makes a ton of intuitive sense.
Glancing over it, did anyone pick up on how exactly they're measuring mental health? I couldn't quite place it but I didn't dig super deep.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
3d ago
While I think the addition was facetious, Brady also totally would be in the league this year if he had a better supporting cast. He wasn't horrible last year, he could probably put up a winning record on any of the Jets, Niners, Broncos. He just wasn't the guy who would carry the team any more.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
3d ago
I think we're looking at two divergent versions of the word Smart. For an analogy, consider NFL quarterbacks. A frequent contrast is drawn between the Hyper-Athlete QB (Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen) who combines arm strength, running speed, strength, creativity to make crazy plays out of structure; and the System QB (Kirk Cousins, Brock Purdy), a savvy game manager who follows the playbook, makes the right passes at the right times, takes what the defense gives him, but rarely makes extraordinary plays. The former uses extraordinary ability to do great things, the other follows good rules from his coach to put him in a position to do great things.
That's the contrast I'm drawing in Smart, we're talking about both at the same time. Smart = intellectual horsepower, IQ, ability to process quickly and examine and analyze. Smart = making good decisions using good heuristics, never being in the position of needing to process quicker than you are capable of. Just as Josh Allen puts himself in terrible positions then pulls a rabbit out of his hat because he's such an outlier athlete, the smart guy will put himself in a position where he needs to process a lot because he ignores the rules. "How does a smart guy act so dumb?"
A lot of these comments in trying to steelman "Kissinger is Evil" are focusing on the question "Should Kissinger be hated?" I'm going to focus on what I think is your real question, the much more circumstantial "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?" To answer this I'm going to tell a couple of personal stories, passed down to me by my elders, because hatred of Kissinger among people under 50 is largely a meme passed down to us by leftist elders.
My father was raised in a deeply conservative christian community that was religiously anti-war. So while he was far from a hippy, he was against the war in Vietnam and avoided the draft. His best friend from high school joined the marines, went to Vietnam, served for years in multiple tours in combat, received a pile of medals. His friend was back in town on leave and crashed at my dad's place, he had changed from high school, told my dad that he just liked killing at this point, that he and his squadmates would shoot children and try to stand them up with machine gun fire, that they had burned villages full of women and children, that if they ended the war there was no chance he'd come back to the USA and get a factory job he'd go fight wherever anyone would hire him. He went back to Vietnam, and was one of the very last US soldiers killed, in the last months before US forces were pulled out.
What I think examining Kissinger's record on the merits ignores is a lot of context:
-- Kissinger had an outsized personality, known to cavort with blondes and flirt with women, he appeared in the news constantly, was a "public intellectual." He had much more of a public presence than, say, Blinken or Kerry. He was identified with the era's policies in a way that other SoS's weren't. His book Diplomacy is magisterial, a masterwork, but it is also massively self-glorifying, he ranks himself next to Metternich and Bismarck, and this self-perception oozes from every speech he ever gave.
-- The war in Vietnam was the defining trauma for a generation. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed, crippled, or traumatized and their families' lives were derailed by the war. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested, prosecuted, fled the country, or restructured their lives to oppose the war or to avoid the draft. Cultural conflict over the war was brutal, so much more brutal than anything we see today. There really were thousands of Americans, marching in the streets, chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!" And then, worse, it turned out the obnoxious unpatriotic faggots chanting for the VC were right, Ho Chi Minh did win. It tore America apart from 1965-1975.
-- Following the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration was dragged into the public view in Congress. Every aspect of the operation of the administration was questioned on the news. Conveniently, Nixon had hidden voice-activated microphones in the oval office, and hours upon hours of recordings were made public. People heard how Kissinger really talked, how sanguine he was about what he was doing. The people heard how the sausage was made, and the very worst grinder was Kissinger. Neither Kissinger, nor Nixon, believed the war was winnable when they took office in 1969. Kissinger, and Nixon, were publicly exposed as absolutely believing that every bombing and every troop surge and every expansion of the war to a neighboring neutral country was not for the purpose of "saving" South Vietnam but for the purpose of putting on a diplomatic front, of showing "the world" that the USA was tough. Every kid that died in Vietnam after Nixon and Kissinger took office, like my dad's best friend, died for his country only in the most attenuated sense. Kissinger was the reason that thousands of American boys died, or were crippled, or had their souls ripped apart killing innocent Cambodians, for nothing. It was one thing to suspect that the American government was throwing lives away over nothing, or to think that they were extremist but mistaken true believers, it was quite another to hear Kissinger state frankly that Americans were dying for some vague concept of "Credibility."
-- This loss of innocence was part of the Vietnam experience for America, and that was pinned on Nixon and Kissinger. After Watergate, Nixon was in permanent exile, removed from public office, public intellectual life, public view. Kissinger hung around, advising, teaching, lecturing, consulting. So Nixon-Kissinger's mutual crimes were easy to pin on the still-present Kissinger. He never got any comeuppance, never got any public shaming. He was never punished, and the rage only grew.
TLDR: It's the combination of his crimes and his public visibility that made him a villain, and the very clear evidence of those crimes convicted him. That villainy is compounded to make him the primary bad guy behind everything the CIA every did between 1950 and last week.
One of my scoutmasters was an old timer, a Vietnam veteran who came home and became a hippie and bought a VW Minibus and lived out of it. Whenever we did the classic skit "A politician, a priest, and a boyscout are on a crashing plane," he would have us change the "politician" to "Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." The kids didn't get it, but the old scoutmasters laughed and laughed. For those unfamiliar the skit goes like this:
There's a small plane, represented by four dining hall chairs in a row. The pilot and three passengers, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an elderly priest, and a boy scout. The pilot turns to the passengers and says "We've lost our engine. There's only three parachutes. Well, I've got a family, and I need to fill out the paperwork with the FAA, so I'm taking one parachute, good luck!" He takes a parachute, and jumps out of the plane. The remaining passengers look at each other. Henry Kissinger stands up and says "I'm the smartest man in the world, I'm vital to the operation of international diplomacy, I'm important to history, I'm taking one parachute." He takes a parachute and jumps. The priest turns to the boy scout and says, "Young man, I've lived a good life, a long life, you take the last parachute, I'll pray a rosary as I go down." The boy scout says "Don't worry padre, there's two parachutes left. Henry Kissinger took my backpack."
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
4d ago
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE?
Sure, a great example is to look at people who hear of the DKE once on Reddit, and never shut up about how they see it everywhere.
I suspect that the average dumb (human) person does know they're a bit dim, so it confuses me how this finding can even arise.
I think something we don't think about enough is how dumb people use heuristics to help them navigate a world where they are vaguely-aware that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to participate.
My wife and I argued for a whole drive to Philly about a tweet she saw that went something like: If you're more intelligent than your partner and better at arguing logically, winning every argument with them by arguing logically is abusive. She thought it was retarded, I said that while the use of the term "abusive" was rather florid, the point has some validity. Picture a couple, one a well-educated motte-ian wordcel able to deconstruct and reconstruct a logical argument about anything at any time, the other a nice and well intentioned imbecile who can't string two sentences together. If they agree on logical argument as the way to settle things, the motte-izen will win every time, and the imbecile will never get what he wants, even if the imbecile happens to be right. One side getting what they want every time is bad for the relationship in the long term, even if the imbecile agrees that they lost the argument, they will notice not getting what they wanted later, and they will resent it. They may resent it incoherently, unable to logically explain why the outcome is unjust, but they will resent it nonetheless. This will be deleterious to the relationship.
The idiot moves through life thinking that salesmen are evil, because he knows that a good salesman can talk him into something he'll regret, it's happened before. I will never forget a waitress at my parents' favorite restaurant, telling them about how she needed a new car, and she went to the dealer intending to buy a used Jeep Liberty (a bad car, but a small and economical one) and wound up getting talked into buying a brand new Jeep Commander (a $50k seven passenger monstrosity that FCA's CEO would later call "not fit for human consumption" and state should never have been sold). She had no kids, she had no outdoor hobbies, she had zero need for a seven passenger SUV, but she got talked into it. On a seven year loan at a crazy interest rate.
The dimwit chooses tribalism, because the black skin good white skin bad is an easy meme to keep track of. He'll only benefit modestly, if at all, by his tribal champions being elevated, but it's easier than figuring out actual policy questions, and it avoids the salesman problem again.
The moron assumes that everyone is out to get him, because he has precious little ability to defend himself if they are. Everyone has an angle, he intones sagely, because he has been fooled so many times. Paranoia is adaptive, like a skittish rabbit.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
4d ago
This is the truth, both open homosexuality and high income/status occupations correlate strongly with "attended a good college."
Going to a good college, outside of a tiny handful of evangelical schools that aren't total shite, means being exposed heavily to leftist worldviews. Being exposed to leftist worldviews makes it much more likely that if you have the spark of homosexual attraction in you that you will explore it, cultivate it, identify with it.
I expect if we used one of those weirdo-erection-porn-tests to measure arousal at gay stuff, you'd find a lower correlation between income and homosexuality. But using open homosexuality as your standard, you're going to find a higher correlation, because at this point it's basically impossible to find associates at a V50 law firm (for example) who haven't gone to a school where they were told repeatedly that being gay was a-ok.
I'd also theorize that that high income correlates well with not-depending on family/social circle in which you were born/church community etc. A rich guy can live how he pleases, and if his family doesn't like it they can go to hell; a poor man might be frightened to lose his social support network.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
5d ago
The parties have no formal chain-of-succession to the candidacy, to my knowledge. If there is one, I've never heard it discussed, which would be odd as this would be a matter of significant public interest/importance.
If they died before the convention, the convention would select a candidate using the existing procedures for dealing with a candidate who had pledged delegates dropping out/being removed/dying.
If they died after the convention, the VP candidate would be the strong presumptive choice in most people's minds. Insiders might "know" that everyone hates Kamala Harris, but actually admitting that everyone hates Kamala Harris and running someone else is probably a losing choice for the Democrats. Backing down publicly from your previously chosen candidate is a death-wish kind of move on the part of a political party, so there would be a significant cost to picking someone else. Especially for an incumbent, as Kamala would be the actual president at that time.
Past the VP, I'm not sure what happens after the convention.
Trump's death would be highly idiosyncratic, as he has no natural heir to his ideological positions. There simply isn't anyone similar to him, in terms of ideology and in terms of having the trust of "his" people. The RNC might have a real pickle trying to find a candidate who doesn't alienate most Trump superfans after his death.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
7d ago
Depends on your style. For casual and athletic wear, The Arc'teryx Atom is great for that light temperature range, adaptable and good looking in the non-hoodie version.
For preppy/dressier, a Barbour waxed cotton is a classic for a reason, expensive but can last. Strong responsible provider vibe.
If you're edgier at your date, hunt for a used schott perfecto. No jacket I've owned has gone over better on more dates than that one. It really does look that good.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
7d ago
Conservatives/rightists loving Bonaparte is the centuries long version of the left wing Twitter gag about how MSNBC rehabilitated Dubya and made Liz Cheney a hero for opposing Trump, that inevitably in 2036 they'll rehab Trump and say we should vote for Don Jr to keep Matt Gaetz out of office.
The great conservatives of the time were all opposed to Bonaparte, the great liberals all favored him at least a little. So the question does become, is trad unchanging, or does anything become trad with sufficient time? A lot of Napoleonic borders either created nationalisms, or became future flashpoints for competing nationalisms.
I've no intention of seeing the movie, but I don't understand how you try to make a movie called Napoleon? Napoleon and Josephine, great movie idea. Napoleon in Egypt, great movie idea. The rise of Napoleon, great movie idea. The grande armee, great movie idea. Waterloo, great movie idea. You can even sneak in a thoughtful slow paced Elba movie! And bitches love franchises, you find the right actors you can do a Napoleon movie a year for five or six years! Which gives you an opportunity to introduce "our guys;" fictional side characters whose arc is contained within each film, with maybe a later callback.
Trying to fit his entire career, an entire era, into one film? You might as well make a movie called America and try to cram the civil war, the world wars, and the sixties into fifteen minutes each.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
7d ago
I've been whistling Good King Wenceslaus to myself since Friday. Don't know why I started but... Can't stop...
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
8d ago
Yeah it was just super freaky. Doesn't seem to be a big deal or anything.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
8d ago
Love it. The hoagie theory of morality fully fleshed out.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
8d ago
What climate do you live in and what are your primary use cases?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
8d ago
I have yet to get a satisfying explanation. He says he was watching a movie on his phone, half fell asleep, and scared himself when something happened on screen + being in a different place than he expected. This seems unlikely. His father thinks he got into my liquor after everyone went to bed and had some kind of alcoholic fugue, and strongly implied no more drinking this week. This would fit but nothing is missing, and he's not the kind of guy who hides the evidence. His sister, my wife, just thought it was some kind of nightmare/terror thing. Which makes sense but, dude, it was a LOT, if that happened regularly you'd know about it. From what I remember hearing I kind of felt like what he was screaming seemed like a coherent sentence moreso than hallucination, "I DON'T EVEN WANT TO FUCKING BE HERE" etc, so it seemed immediately like he was talking to a person and snapped, maybe late night facetime with a girlfriend who really pissed him off? But he has no current gf he's talking about openly.
None of these possibilities are really very explanatory.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
8d ago
Or possibly, our perception of "zero trust" is a very weird zero point, a very weird social construct, where the vast majority of individuals are in fact law abiding citizens who will basically follow the rules in all situations, despite the perception of low social trust and a total lack of effort towards enforcement.
This is exactly my point, we first worlders walk through life acting like the sky is falling because something-something social fabric is fraying, but if we look around at mundane stuff we ignore every single day, we see evidence of people acting for the common good.
I'm not particularly saying that my Wawa is special, or that Wawa is special, I'm saying that when we feel the need to not just leave food out for anyone to take at any time, that will be a significant indication of something bad.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
9d ago
My honesty index for where I live: the Wawa app order pick up rack. I go to my local Wawa locations an inordinate amount, and very frequently I order a latte, matcha, or some other fancy drink. If you order on the app, at almost every location I've been to and every location I go to regularly, they just put your order on a big rack of takeout orders identified only by the three digit number on the receipt taped to it. Customers come in, take their order, and walk out. Most frequently, if I've ordered on the app, I don't speak to anyone in the store unless it's to say thank you to someone for holding the door; I walk in, take my coffee off the rack, walk out.
They put absolutely zero effort into making sure that you take your order, or even that you have an order at all. Naively, assuming perfect honesty on the part of all customers, I would guess an error rate around 1-2% of people taking the wrong order, just because they misread the receipt. My experience across hundreds of wawa app orders is actually below that, I can't think of a single time my order has been missing (though I can think of several times it's been wrong). Nor, in all the time I've spent in Wawas, do I ever recall witnessing someone complain that their order was missing.
Every day, thousands of times a day, each Wawa location takes $5-25 worth of food and drink, puts it out for anyone to take, and by and large only the people who paid for it take it. That's, when you really think about it, a ridiculous record of honest and law-abiding citizenry. Nor is it purely the small town local yokels I live amongst, my Wawa is only two minutes from a major interstate, nothing stops anyone driving by from pulling in, grabbing a coffee, and being halfway to Jersey before anyone even notices.
My Wawa index for honesty is my theoretical bellwether for when I'll get concerned about society. It indicates that either our society is so honest that no one steals, or that our society is so rich that it is cheaper to simply let a few lattes get stolen every day than it is to take any effort to prevent them from being stolen.
Turning this into my Wawa appreciation post: if you live in Eastern PA, a remarkable thing about Wawas is that the customer base cuts across classes completely. Work trucks and vans and beat up Hyundais share the parking lot with brand new Porsche and Tesla electrics. It's universal.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
9d ago
So, for some odd reason, one of the family member's staying with me started screaming in the middle of the night. Hearing an adult male yelling in my house, where I typically am the only adult male sleeping there, I shot upright...and threw out my upper back somehow or other. I'm not sure if I fell asleep in a bad position, or had a pre-existing injury, or what the hell, but right between my shoulder blades is screaming at my every time i turn my head left or right or look down.
Other than the embarrassment of realizing that in a fight-or-flight my body seems to have chosen, not even freeze, but "die." I'm treating it, and hopefully it will get better soon, but I'm kinda not sure what direction to go with working out. Anyone have good recommendations of exercises that won't strain that area of my spine? The stuff I was doing last week is all out of bounds, I'm not going to be doing KBs or Olympic lifts for a while. So I need a new plan, but I'm not sure what it is yet, and I can't think of exercises that won't implicate my upper back in any way. Like in the past, I dealt with a bad lower back strain by doing a Smolov Jr for Bench month, but I'm not sure what to do without my upper back.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
11d ago
Strong agree with all of this.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
11d ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=f2gq66v-hik?si=qPf7eYgMSrUnHAu-
I saw this on Broadway when I was a kid, but I could only find this monologue on YouTube from a high school performance. And while in all honesty I do prefer Broadway, we'll make it to the point with Hunterdon High School. Other than the fact that somehow no one taught this pauvre fille how to say brooch.
I've not been married as long as, and surely not been as good of a husband as, other married Mottizens. But in our lives we've both been on top of the world and been derailed. We've been up and down and over and out and this has taught me that intelligence and talent will win in the end, and that the critical thing is that we've always had each other. We're the constants in each other's lives. Even when you fail professionally your spouse needs to be someone who has faith in your ability to get back on top. We're doing well now, but we could have made it on green glass. And that makes me feel confident and comfortable, because it'll happen again.
Having a job or an education or money will make you more attractive because it is strong evidence of intelligence and dilligence and ambition. But the woman you should marry is a woman who recognizes those things in you and has faith they will express themselves no matter what material circumstances you both face.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
12d ago
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I've always felt like the Jews in the Attic example merely reveals that the person under questioning doesn't place honesty as a terminal value.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
12d ago
POTUS lacks the legal discretion to start a war outside the structure of a previously congressionally approved war. Self defense side steps this, as does defense of Senate approved treaty allies. But he can't just order a nuke lobbed at any country at any time.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
13d ago
For years of experience: one of the major costs of employees is turnover. You don't want to hire someone who is going to quit before they learn where the bathroom is. If you hire someone with 10 years of experience for a super junior role, there's a good chance they'll jump to a better position before you even integrate them into the team.
For salary, consider that because it's typically expressed as a range, if I saw an ad that only offered an "up to" I would assume that number was bullshit and that the average wage for the advertised role was significantly below industry standard. Same as a clearance sale advertising you could save "up to 70%" means the vast majority of items are 15% off and a few random items are 70% off, a position that pays "up to $100k" would be assumed to pay less on average than one that pays "$60-100k."
Now for either you could say, well just negotiate, but that's ignoring all the friction in the system.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
15d ago
Bourbon prices are the one thing that in my lifetime I really, really feel inflation. Bourbon was the thing when I started drinking, because for the quality it was so cheap. Relative to Scotch why was so heavily premiumized, or Canadian whiskey that was so boring.
I feel like the better deal these days is Japanese single malt.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get, anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
15d ago
I'm trying to stay almost entirely local. Like within an hour of my house. That gives me a couple wineries, a half dozen breweries (including Yuengling!) and a couple distilleries. I still have some Scotch around, and some prosecco and Bordeaux, but my daily drivers are all local.
I've been digging this cool absinthe a local distiller makes. I'm not sure why it seems to get me drunker than other stuff.
It actually wound up resolving itself with two days rest, some yoga, and a day standing in the freezing rain at a football game.
Re kb: I was thinking more in terms of kettlebell sport, where it's all overhead lifts.
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