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
1hr ago
In this article, he mentioned a police chief that fought desegregation attempts in his town with clever tactics. As you might have guessed, the only difference in the outcome was that he's not vilified by history textbooks today, he still lost.
Isn't that kind of like condemning every Confederate or Wehrmacht general, or hell condemning Hannibal and Napoleon, in that they ultimately were on the losing side?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
Yeah, I don't think I really see the Waitress Scale existing from what you've said, or I don't agree with you about where things fit on that scale.
When I hear "Billionaire marries waitress" I hear something very different from a schoolteacher.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
Proper Orthodox conversion would work too, but a sham one probably won't - they are not born yesterday and all the tricks that can be tried had been already tried.
Maybe I'm overly confident, but I assume any Mottizen would have the verbal skill to appear sincere and comprehend the necessary information, if sufficiently determined. Leaving aside that a lot of us might be so wildly personally unpleasant that we would be rejected on other grounds.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
He was well known enough for his name and activities to be a punchline in 30 Rock and for his name and appearance and attitudes to be parodied in Entourage which I suppose were higher concept than like, NCIS or Friends but not exactly esoteric knowledge.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
Harvey Weinstein was extremely well known before the accusations themselves.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
You're probably not going to find one without tracing ancestral roots and learning the relevant language. You're not really looking for someone that wants you, nobody does assuming you aren't working and have no assets. You're looking for someone who can't turn you away.
If you have any Jewish ancestors, you might be able to gin up Aliyah to Israel. In some cases I've heard stories of people pulling it off despite not being halachically Jewish, just having a Jewish grandfather or something like that. I'm not sure you have enough runway to convert convincingly in that time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Before engaging in this, can we get a clear definition for what you consider "waitress" jobs versus what you consider "girlboss" jobs? Or what attributes we are putting in each category? What are we actually talking about here? I just feel like everyone is going in circles about what "waitress" and "girlboss" and "prefer" even means.
I think the original tweet makes some sense without reference to marriage, if an elite man might choose to fuck a waitress without marrying her, she is still competing for his attention. She's like a spoiler in a playoff race: she's not gonna win the championship, but she might keep you from winning it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Why wouldn't it be? Notes to oneself aren't privileged. If I keep a notebook it isn't privileged. If I ask you a question it isn't privileged. My lawyer, my priest, and my wife are privileged; we do so to protect those certain relationships. Why do we want to extend this to LLMs?
What you're looking for, I guess, is something like why would it be probative to talk about someone's LLM history? Would it be more prejudicial than probative to admit them as evidence? But that's very different from privilege.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm starting The Stand next (I watched the old miniseries in pieces a dozen times on SciFi cable growing up), and my exposure to King's writing is limited to IT, Salem's Lot, The Shining, and some short stories. So I might change my mind on that front, and I'm open to being convinced otherwise on any count.
But IT is probably his most iconic work, which is most emblematic of his overall output, and his contribution to culture more broadly. Pennywise was well known to me even before reading the book or seeing the films, where I don't feel like I could reference Trashcan Man or Randall Flagg or Mother Abigail in a conversation. I could definitely expect everyone to get a joke about the sewer clown, even if they haven't actually consumed IT. If you ask a room full of people about IT they'll tell you it's that clown in the sewers that eats children, if you ask about The Stand you'll get less.
Stephen King is mostly famous as a horror writer, though he pumps out a lot of other material as well, and IT is a monster book. Where The Stand might not even be top-5 in apocalypse books off the top of my head, IT is near the top of monster books and influenced every monster that came after. IT is closer thematically to Carrie and The Shining than The Stand is, in my mind.
Also I just looked it up, just by book sales, IT is King's best selling novel, with twice as many copies as The Stand. I've seen copies of IT being read by people in real life, but never copies of The Stand.
So yeah, the clown stands alone, IT is it, the magnum opus.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
You WILL be blinded by the glare of my 10mm gold Cuban chain
I love the term because whenever I see one, I just picture it on an old Miami Cuban dude in a straw fedora and a linen shirt.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Why do we want to extend privilege, which is a situation where we all pretend that what we know ain't so, to LLM queries?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I just read IT on my tour of King’s great works. Spoilers below, kinda, but more just don’t bother reading it if you aren’t familiar with the book.
-- Add IT to the list of "Great Boomer literature that's ultimately about relitigating the 60s. Technically the 60s happen mostly off camera in the book, but the cultural conflicts of the period form the moral core of the book and the Boomer protagonists catharsis over their childhood demons. The villains poisoned by Pennywise are vile racists who spout nigger at any passing black, they are homophobes who bash queers just for existing, they are child abusers and bullies and bigots. The Losers' Club protagonists rebel against the eternal forces of evil, overcome it as children, then return and kill the ancient symbolic manifestation of all racism and bigotry and evil. The symbols of Reagan-Era greed and excess, the shopping malls and greedy developers, sink into the pit created when IT is killed. It's a fundamentally optimistic view of history that is very of its era. ((Contrast: on my King tour I just got to Salem's Lot, a decade earlier, post-Watergate era, same "horror author goes back to his long abandoned Maine home town which is being stalked by a demon representing socio-economic and cultural decline" plot, and the ending is much more ambiguous with the protagonist killing the big bad, but his life is ruined in the process, everyone else in town dies including most of the Scooby gang, it's not even clear that they will ultimately clear the town of all the vampires))
You can actually look at the historical cycle, the famed “every twenty-seven years,” and it lines up perfectly to make each occurrence in the work (1985, 1958, 1930, 1903) line up with a Republican president, so maybe IT is just Republicans in the White House according to King. King talked about IT in terms of Reagan’s nostalgia for the 50s, with the story meant to be illustrative of the ways that Americans in the 80s had repressed the sins of 1958. King misses
-- IT is ultimately a book about Noticing. Ben says about the bullying the kids face from other children:
“This alarmed Ben more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sight-line. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like “Why don’t you quit that?” and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner . . . and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.”
Which is a metaphor for the entire 27-year child murder monster cycle thing. Mike explains earlier in reference to the murder cycle:
“If I were an insurance man instead of a librarian, I’d draw you a graph, maybe. It would show an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault...Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years—although the cycle has never been perfectly exact—that violence has escalated to a furious peak . . . and it has never been national news.”
"How many?" Bill repeated. “Nine. So far.” “It can’t be!” Beverly cried. “I would have read about it in the paper . . . seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine . . . and those children that were murdered in Atlanta . . .” “Yes, that,” Mike said. “I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s really the closest correlative to what’s going on here, and Bev’s right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children . . . But we all know that doesn’t really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn’t. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn’t want it to.”
The information about the murders is available, each murder and disappearance is reported in local news, and if anyone from outside asked about the murders people would tell them. There's some indication that IT has the ability to prevent people from noticing, or to convince people to turn away, and that might be true in certain cases in the book. But at a larger, town-wide level over decades, the story is one of selection. There's no force field that prevents people from leaving Derry, and some people do. It's noted that during the summer of murder in 1958, a lot of families send their kids off to summer camps. The people who live in Derry and choose to remain are simply those who do not Notice, who are not concerned about it. They don't recognize the pattern, or trust their unease, they just get through it and keep living their lives and accept that certain things happen.
Derry is noted as thriving despite the murders, and leaving aside the blessing of the eldritch blood god living in the sewers, it seems that the blood letting makes the city healthier rather than weaker? The population selected for acceptance of child death is a fully functional city. Maybe the people who are just willing to accept the risk of gruesome death is actually better at living in the modern world than the rest of us, and the cowards who flee from it are the idiots?
-- I'd heard tell of the child-orgy-gangbang thing, and honestly I think people who get politically correct about it are cowards. It's weird to draw a line between what's ok to portray in a horror book and what's not, and put child mutilation murder on one side of the line and sex on the other. It’s a horrifying scene, and that’s the point it’s a horror book. A lot of woke reviews of the book complain about using terms like Rape too much in the novel, because it’s “traumatizing,” and it’s just so weird to me because traumatizing you is kind of the point of the book.
The novel is famously massive, early reviews note its 4lb weight, but weird thing is that when a book is that long is that it nearly always was supposed to be longer. IT was just about at the physical limits of bookbinding. Any longer and it becomes a series, and turning a single story into a series changes the rhythm. It reduces the number of readers who will actually consume the whole story, and how they consume it. Reading one long book is different from reading three shorter books. King clearly wanted to tell this story in one novel, and you can see the remnants of other plot directions that King considered and possibly started but then abandoned or edited out to make the story fit into a single book. Which leads me to my fan theory about the Child Orgy: there was meant to be a second orgy.
The Child Orgy is a symbolic passage into adulthood. Grady Hendrix writing about revisiting IT after thirty years says:
It draws a hard border between childhood and adulthood and the people on either side of that fence may as well be two separate species. The passage of that border is usually sex, and losing your virginity is the stamp in your passport that lets you know that you are no longer a child (sexual maturity, in most cultures, occurs around 12 or 13 years old). Beverly is the one in the book who helps her friends go from being magical, simple children to complicated, real adults. If there’s any doubt that this is the heart of the book then check out the title. After all “It” is what we call sex before we have it. “Did you do it? Did he want to do it? Are they doing it?”
But this isn’t, really, a one way passage. Sinatra sings: “You make me feel so young, you make me feel so spring has sprung.” When adults fall in love, we say we feel like a little kid again. When a grown woman has a crush we say she is “giggling like a schoolgirl.” The climax of IT is built around the adults, on return to Derry, having to regain their childhood memories and beliefs, regain the feelings and gestalt of youth. I think King originally intended the group to have another Orgy, which would bring them back together, reunify them, and take them back to youth. This ties into the other theory I have about abandoned pathways in the novel: there was supposed to be a new seventh loser.
Throughout the 1985 portions of the book, we’re reminded over and over again that with Stan’s death they are one short. Six, can we do it without seven? Seven was powerful, six isn’t enough. Then they lose Mike too and have to do it with five. At the same time, the three non-Loser’s Club characters Originally, I think, Bill’s wife Audra is meant to link up with the Losers’ Club and become the seventh loser, and then participate in a Losers’ Club orgy with the other six to “get back” to childhood belief in things like open relationships.
-- Structurally, IT is more of a fantasy-heroic book than a horror book. Thematically and vibes, it's horror. But really you have the Fellowship form, you have the quest, you have the hero stepping up, you have Gandalf/Mike lost before the final confrontation forcing Aragorn/Bill to step up and lead. King was a big Tolkien fan, and I wonder to what extent he consciously wrote his magnum opus in imitation of LOTR.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I don't have much to say on the shady dealings between Epstein and Wexner, could it plausibly theoretically be the case that a creepy pervy bigshot was trafficking underage girls to another creepy pervy bigshot?
It's not really credible, as Coffee nodded to, that Les Wexner owner of Abercrombie and Fitch at the peak of its nudie magazine catalog and bags needed Jeff Epstein to get teenagers to sleep with him.
Nor is it all that credible that Les just handed Epstein a billion dollars for no real reason.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Kid Rock was 20 years younger then, Bad Bunny's current age, he was 30 and actually pretty cool. Kid Rock's last hit was, what, All Summer Long?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
Plus, if you play long enough, you just get bored of seeing male characters and want something different.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
Not a fair comparison. Bad Bunny belongs in the Super Bowl for the Latin conference; Kid Rock wouldn't even make the playoffs in country music.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
The entire incident has convinced me that "cold hearted realism" is as much a fantasy of the speaker as any idealism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
I live in the sticks, even moreso twenty years ago. "Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear, Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen." It would have been highly unusual and mockable to see a professional engineer with hair long enough to bun in our town.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
It won't last forever, but it'll reset the clock for a while. Every empire will fall, every monument crumble, but the next one will last a while, and so on and so forth. Gibbon wrote a long book. If the reborn United States II lasts a hundred more years instead of twenty, is that such a bad thing to fight for because it falls after that? Impermanence is the simple fact of human events.
One of the things people miss in secular society about Gandhi and MLK for example, is their deep and sincere religiosity. They truly believed that non-violence was sacred, that it was more important than worldly success. When Gandhi told the Jews of Europe to offer themselves to the butcher's knives, he wasn't saying it would work he was saying it was required. That religious duty was more important than success. MLK believed earnestly that the ultimate reward of his efforts would be in heaven, not on earth. Process, not results. THere's no other way for humans to behave.
okay, if we take away women’s right to vote, what will be different this time around? We already had that in 1900 and where did it lead us? Here.
I'm starting to see more people push back to universal male suffrage. Which seems obvious: it's impossible to argue coherently that every man is more capable of voting than every woman. Gender is a bad Schelling point. The problem for much of the right is that any actually good Schelling Point is quite likely to doom the right wing electorally.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
That said, if you look the part, probably moving to California and pretending to be illegal immigrant would also work. You may get yourself an entirely new identity eventually, get a bank account and even vote (which ironically wouldn't be illegal if you were a citizen before).
If I claimed to be from South America, the "when exactly did your grandparents leave Germany?" jokes would write themselves.
RE: Debanking
I mean we don't know what debanking will look like when it happens, because it hasn't really happened yet, but it's not all that uncommon to see accounts frozen but not closed or confiscated as the result of lawsuits. Particularly against businesses, in cases involving tax debts, where the funds are frozen and can't be accessed until the lawsuit is concluded. This is where half the traditional folk-wisdom of keeping some money in precious metals comes from in my family: among small business owners it's a sort of common sense theory that if you have some non-banked assets you can cover bills enough to keep in business for a while and stay afloat. The other half comes from the refugee corners of my family, who figure you're better off fleeing with a bit of gold than without it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
I highly doubt this. Gold has always had value, and in any future primitive society would retain that value.
I find de-banking to be a significant enough risk to outweigh the downsides of physical gold. Not enough to build a bunker, or to put my entire net worth in physical gold, but enough to have a few thousand dollars in solid assets that can't be frozen or confiscated with a few keystrokes. The functioning US legal system is the risk that physical gold hedges against, it could be targeted against you for a variety of reasons.
I do find it funny when my father asks how we would prove his stocks belonged to him if Fidelity's "computers crashed." Dude, if Fidelity suddenly and irrecoverably lost all its data, a little stock certificate isn't going to save you, ammunition will be the new currency.
FWIW: I think a big part of this disagreement likely goes back to living situation. If I lived in an apartment and worked in an office building I would probably feel differently.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
I remember when Subway used to call their employees Sandwich Artists.
The cultural impact of Subway restaurants is massively forgotten and underrated. Without Subway there is no Chipotle, no Cava, no Sweetgreen.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
I don't disagree, in the year of our lord 2026. But 20 years ago, everyone would have commented on an engineer with hair like that, and it would have impacted his credibility in that room. 50 or 60 years ago, they might not have even let him talk. Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo. Long hair on men was a serious, serious CW issue for like a good thirty years! It would have been considered wildly strange and unmanly, let alone unprofessional, for a man to have hair long enough to bun in America before the 60s. And until pretty recently, you could with workable accuracy judge that a guy with long hair did not have a good professional job. Now, you can't, that guy might be your traffic engineer. He might even be a good traffic engineer!
Other "weird" and "alt" aesthetics have developed similarly.
I mean the correct answer, if you own a car and live 50 meters from a car wash, is that you neither walk nor drive to the car wash, you drive somewhere else and pull through the car wash on your way out or back when it happens to be empty.
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