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
4hr ago
I want to hear about your comeback!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
Thank you for the contribution. I probably do need to set the saddle higher.
I'm pretty sure it was a cheap bike, and I came into it second hand, but how bad can it really be? I figure it will, you know, roll and stuff, and I don't plan to enter any races any time soon.
What do you mean by putting in more hours compared to other modalities?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I have no idea what advice I'm looking for, so I appreciate you.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
So next on my list of "things I should have picked up twenty years ago, and now are vaguely embarrassing to learn" is bicycling. I found myself in possession of a 21 speed Pacific mountain bike, and I've been riding it a few miles as a warmup before climbing workouts on the moon board. The things is...I suck at bicycling. Like, badly. I can ride a bike, but even just keeping my balance while signaling a turn is a conscious effort, and I regularly get concerned I'm going to just fall over, which is deeply stupid. I feel like I should be more fluent in my motion, but I'm just not.
I learned to ride a bike at an appropriate age, but never really did it much after a few 15-20 mile bike trips in scouts in my early teens. My parents never really let me ride my bike anywhere interesting because I would have to cross "busy roads" and I was the kind of quiet submissive kid that listened to them and didn't push boundaries.
So here I am, 33 years old, and I'm bad at riding a bike. But it seems like something I "should" be able to do, and the novelty is making it a pretty fun workout.
How does one get better at riding a bike as an adult? What should I be doing to bike as a workout program? What should my goals be? I literally have no idea, so far I just ride a mile up the road and turn around and ride back, then climb.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
And then you had to go and fuck it up.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13hr ago
One sees it everywhere, even by those who otherwise denounce HBD.
The basic formula is: [My ingroup's positive attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to imitate; while [ingroup's negative attributes] are the random result of circumstance or interest or are entirely mythical. [My outgroup's positive attributes] are random results of circumstance or interest, or are entirely fake; but [outgroup's negative attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to improve or mitigate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13hr ago
A lot of HBD advocates in spaces like these do want it to just be about IQ, and a lot of people who call themselves pro-HBD will say it is just about IQ. It's one fracture on the DR regarding the Jewish Question, for example.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
When do you hold the rank and file accountable for the policies they voted for, versus blaming elites?
Say what you like about Dubya, Lord knows I have, but he was the most sincerely religious president since at least 1920. He had support from virtually all protestant Christian religious groups and leaders across America. One has to do some of kind of two-step to place him and his actions and their consequences outside the conservative movement or Red Tribe more broadly.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Does your municipality not do dog licenses? I thought they were common everywhere.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
By his description, everybody involved wanted to invade Iraq, but the dynamic that resulted in an invasion seemed to be that of the Abilene Paradox.
This doesn't really square with widely shared testimony from people like Richard Clarke, talking about the Pentagon meetings immediately after 9/11, like literally the next day:
I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.
On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor—Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back.
By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq." Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. "I thought I was missing something here," I vented. "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response Evacuate the White House 31 would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor." Powell shook his head. "It's not over yet." Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.
Any stick will do to beat a dog. Dubya and his team intended to invade Iraq from the beginning, the GWOT and the absurd claims of ties to Bin Laden and the Axis of Evil and the invention of the WMD concept and the "welcome us as liberators" and madman theory and whatever else got thrown around at the time that I've since forgotten about; all that fundamentally didn't matter to the decision makers, they wanted to invade Iraq for mostly unrelated reasons. So for the rational planners further down the food chain, like the air force guys, the whole thing was confusing because the reasons they were getting for what they were doing were unrelated to the actual plan.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It simply doesn't have the strategic depth to handle regular hits on essential targets every single day; to win, total, unconditional and most importantly indefinite American offensive support would be necessary. Though if the Houthis are of any indication, even that might be insufficient.
I think the problem is more that Israel has all these ambitions about being a tech startup hub, and even occasional missile attacks pretty much end that prospect.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Iraq didn't stay a popular war for very long, but was it a genuinely unpopular invasion at the time?
Iraq was wildly popular at the start, though the people that make excuses that no one opposed it are equally wrong. It wasn't underwater until around 2006 or so. It didn't become unpopular until it became clear that the USA was not going to be able to get anything to stick.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It seems weird to say that I am free to punch other people (who don’t want to be punched) any time I like since they can always get their own back by slugging me in return.
But I didn't say that it was ok, just that it was different; sticking with your metaphor, there's a big difference between my punching someone who could realistically punch me back, and me punching someone who realistically could not. If I punch another large adult male who could punch me back, it's categorically less bad than if I punch a woman, child, weakling, etc. Escalating a conflict physically when I have escalation dominance is unacceptable, escalating a conflict physically when I do not may fall under acceptable mischief.
I've actually been thinking about this same kind of thing, and these kinds of social settings tend to have lower restrictions when you blend in, precisely out of a sense that you have as much to offer those around you as they have to offer you.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Just finished Norman Mailer's The Fight
I'm currently in the middle of reading, with three different people, All the Light We Cannot See, Infinite Jest, and Original Sin (the Jake Tapper book about Biden's dementia, not the probably forty seven thousand murder/romance books with the same name).
Next, I'm between continuing with Junger kick with Marble Cliffs, continuing with war stories with Band of Brothers, continuing with Mailer and war with The Naked and the Dead.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.
The difference being that likely at some point the venerable @Rov_Scam will have a wedding or other event, albeit not one as high-end as all this, which someone in turn might crash. Where a bunch of guys turnstile hopping will never, in turn, have their turnstiles hopped.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
As ever, we won't really know the answer until after the question is irrelevant. But we saw the 2024 elections already.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Why do repeats when the whole trail iirc from 20 years ago in boy scouts is around 12 miles?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Most guys with jobs complain about their jobs, it is nonetheless easier to have a job than not to have one.
Leaving aside those who can get all the benefits of a job without one, but those are rare individuals.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Or just keep a copy of the construction/as-built plans!
Redundancy is key! Don't keep just a single copy, and don't keep it in a digital format that might be difficult to access later. Don't count on others to keep them.
Because the house will be up for thirty or fifty years when you have a problem you need to deal with.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Re. 2, how do you recommend planning for it? Do you have an example?
Primarily by placing mechanicals (well pump, expansion tanks, water heater, air handlers, the first drain the septic system will back up into) in places where when they do leak, they won't destroy anything. Waterproof flooring, floor drains, leak protection, don't stack all your valuables and important paperwork right next to it, etc.
Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house? I'd actually prefer not to have to clean, cool, and maintain a huge house.
I've always been a fan, if not always a practitioner, of segmenting the house in ways that let you heat and clean selectively. I just have a ranch house, but the basement is on its own mini-split system, and as such we can keep it at a different temperature than the rest of the house, saving money. We also don't need to keep it as clean as it is primarily used as a hosting space other than the workout room. There's a lot of clever solutions to this. Though anyway, I'd imagine with five kids you shouldn't have problems getting chores done for cleaning the house.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race
Why?
The primary reason Zohran won in the primary is Andrew Cuomo, the secondary reason that he won in the primary is anti-Zionism and the anti-idpol populist backlash that comes when outside forces try to tell local people who to vote for.
Andrew Cuomo was the candidate the establishment and the financial industry rallied behind in the primary, despite the fact he hasn't lived in the city in years, was covered in scandal on his way to resigning from the governor's mansion, and really didn't have a great record as governor to run on to begin with. There was no good reason for Andrew Cuomo to run for mayor of NYC.
Then the campaign begins and they go after Zohran for his supposed anti-Semitism. Twitter was filled with jokes about Israelis speaking out on the NYC mayoral race from their bunkers in Tel Aviv, and Andrew Cuomo swears allegiance to Israel. Zohran's enemies successfully made the most interesting and present aspect of the race the question of supporting or opposing Israel.
What this tells us is that accusations of racism on IdPol lines are not going to be enough, going forward, to decide elections. The antisemitism stick has been wielded so carelessly, that even cowardly urban Democrats are no longer cringing under the whip.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Specific random things, because most things are going to be covered by smarter guys than me:
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Plan one entrance to the house with no steps. Almost nobody does it, because it's difficult to handle the architecture/landscaping to make a ramp look good, but you totally can if you plan it from the start. Elderly people fall on steps all the time, and often hurt themselves. Also convenient for heavy stuff in general. If you plan for it now, you'll have it forever; if you have to rerig it later it will look bad, especially if it's at a time when you yourself are older/less capable.
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Anywhere water comes into your house will eventually leak. Plan for that now.
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That's a big house, think about how you're going to use the rooms. A lot of people end up with a big house with four rooms that are all variations on "couch and we watch TV in here;" or they all started as bedrooms and got adapted.
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Think of the repair guy. Don't put anything in a place where it will be difficult to extract when (not if, when) it needs to be serviced or replaced. Make it easy to reach the air handler, the water heater, the septic system, etc.
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Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements. Store them in multiple places, hard copies, in the home, for the future.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
No Hydro, I'm hearing you, but it's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about Ms. Zito. You can't really choose to live in 1890 in 2025, especially when you're in your mid twenties and your family is liberal and lives in another state. There is no realistic pressure that her family can exert on her erstwhile suitor, nor is she herself obedient to her parents' wishes regarding her dating life to begin with.
In 1890 there was an entire familial, legal, social infrastructure around the shotgun wedding. And all of that is required to produce the shotgun wedding. To start, it requires that your dad and male relatives want that for you and want to threaten force to get it done. It requires that society will look the other way when such violence occurs, and that society will look down on the cad who hits "betray" in such a way that he will have trouble finding life opportunities at all if he doesn't marry her.
Ms. Zito can't just magic all that into existence by wishing it were so. If she gets knocked up her New Jersey parents aren't going to threaten to beat the dude up if he doesn't marry her, and if they did the guy wouldn't take them seriously, and if they tried to beat him up he would call the cops and the cops would take his side, and if everyone at work knew what happened it would impact him minimally in his profession that he "stuck his dick in crazy" and "her parents stalked him" or something like that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Great advice for a man, doesn't make "being crazy" a dominant female strategy.
I still believe in you, progress often comes in chunks.
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