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FiveHourMarathon

Wawa Nationalist

17 followers   follows 6 users  
joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

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

17 followers   follows 6 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

					

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

I'm a big fan of Liu winning gold, in that I knew some competitive figure skaters years back and they were just so brutalized by the sport by the time they were 20. She looked a lot more normal than most figure skaters, you can tell she spent a year or two not starving herself.

At the same time, I can't imagine how pissed off the other girls must be that she could just take a break and come back.

Luckily things are looking to be a bit more stable now at least.

Not bloody likely. Trump is going to threaten to put tariffs on again, making very unclear when things will be settled.

Problems for Hockey that hold it down:

-- You can't see the puck on TV. The author in the linked article defends that you don't need to, but that's kinda goofy, and also pretty telling that he isn't saying "yes you can," he admits it is a problem even if he claims that it shouldn't keep you from liking hockey. Not being able to see the ball in any other sport is an immediate crisis.

-- It's freakishly expensive for kids in the USA. Travel team hockey costs around $7-15k/yr and some higher than $20k. That's crazy numbers. Competitive youth golf is cheaper than that. That's getting into "cost to keep a horse" territory in a lot of places. While travel teams are a problem in all sports, the rest of the big team sports in America still have a viable path for a kid who joins rec league teams and then makes the high school team. In hockey there's very little pipeline to the NHL other than through elite youth programs. It's a rich kid sport.

-- The population center of gravity in the US keeps shifting south, and even the northeast has had mild winters preventing ponds from freezing to safe levels in recent years, so nobody is playing hockey outside the way it was meant to be played.

I don't think a parliamentary system would typically find itself in this particular mess, where the executive wants to do something that he could not possibly find the votes for in the legislature.

Another win for the free market, another win for the free people.

Another moment of absolute chaos, in which half-assed policies make it basically impossible for the hypothetical manufacturer looking to plan to produce goods in America to plan ahead and invest.

I'm digging women's hockey this olympics, for the obvious patriotic reasons. I'm actually thinking it's a vastly underrated women's sport: the level and pace of play actually makes it more watchable than the men's, the girls are pretty and normal. It's much more entertaining than women's soccer, and the players are much easier to like than women's basketball.

But at any rate, the culture war angle interesting to me: lesbians have fallen off hard as a sexual fantasy, while at the same time homosexual men have surged, compared to when I was young.

At twelve in boy scouts, there was a common dirty joke: Right (index finger inserted into thumb and finger loop), Wrong (two index fingers bumping into each other), Fun to Watch (two thumb and finger loops bumping into each other). This more or less reflected the common understanding of homosexuality at the time (and our painfully stupid understanding of sex): two guys hooking up was disgusting and bad, two women making love was maybe not normal or moral but boy was it hot. This was reflected in media like The L Word (which my painfully square sister loved), episodes of shows like Sex and the City, etc. A woman could dip her toe in gay, or be turned on by lesbians, without it permanently scarring her as a partner, the male gaze was happy to absorb the content. Gay men were almost never eroticized, they were generally treated as jesters or sexless, gay sex took place exclusively off-screen. Lesbians reached acceptance through straight male and female masturbatory fantasies, gay men through pushing what was really happening as far out of mind as possible.

Compare to today, where Heated Rivalry is such a hit that seemingly every woman is flicking the bean to it, and women's hockey appears to be doing it for real and no one cares. Heated Rivalry has a huge following for the fantasy of maybe, what if, somehow, there were two gay guys in the NHL and they were actually good at hockey? Where we have like a dozen confirmed lesbian couples in the olympics playing against each other, and I'm not seeing any dirty fantasies about it. We've lost the raunch culture, the male focused Vulgar Wave of entertainment. There's not the Bulldog Briscoe to bark lasciviously and yell "hot" after every mention. What culture seems to be saying is that we've gone from Right Wrong Fun to Watch, to Right Right Who Cares.

Is this a fall-off in the lesbian fantasy in particular among younger straight men and women? Is it a fall off of male sexual power versus female sexual power? Is it the painful wokism of modernity? Am I just not looking at the right media?

Come on boys, let's get out there and RETVRN to tradition and objectify some female athletes when the pads come off!

It's all in the context, Conservatives under Julian the Apostate were probably all about the importance of sodomy as part of growing up the way the great fathers of Rome did.

Look within yourself, there's a conservative inside you.

I'm not debating their CW bona fides, just the goofiness of it. It's embarrassing.

Pruning and uprooting are quite different tasks and philosophies.

chump

Exactly.

It's not about the math. It's about being made to feel like a fool.

Scott had that post recently about crime rates and spent a lot of time talking about shoplifting, and I think one big difference is that shoplifting when I was young seemed like something really risky. And now with self-checkout, it just seems like I'm only paying because I'm a chump.

Aside: City Journal used to be a publication I really liked, then I saw their college rankings where they weighed Jewish Issues higher than any other aspect of college, and essentially rigged it to get goofy ass answers, and since then I've been really confused by them.

"we don't need the Olympics, we have the Asian Games" and so on.

That seems like an odd thing for the ChiComms to be saying in 2026, when they seem to be pretty competitive in most of the Winter Olympic events. They aren't winning Gold everywhere, but they had a few events that were nearly sweeps, and it seems like every event I see a PRC competitor on the broadcast.

The Super Bowl halftime show peaked in the early 2000s, since 2016 or so there just aren't acts universally big enough to fit the bill.

A conservative is someone who wants to conserve what is both existing and good.

Dreher, at his recent worst, is a reactionary, who wants to turn the clock back and destroy what exists.

"Do you get along with your father, and do you think he is proud of who you are?"

Gym bros wear completely different clothing that doesn’t show off

Speak for yourself. I'm mostly in either a tank top or shirtless when I'm in a public gym.

It's wrong to look in such a way that she would notice, ie staring/leering/etc.

The best point for reference being a hypothetical like "If my very jealous and hormonal wife were standing next to me, would I do this?" Or maybe "If a guy was staring at me like that, would I expect a fight to break out?"

Enjoy the show, but have some class. Your eyes don't make noise, there's no reason anyone should be aware of what you're looking at.

For reference, I've been going to gyms for fifteen years or so and I've never had a confrontation with a woman over staring at her, and I've certainly looked at a lot of women. Every climbing gym seems to have one girl I refer to only as "headlights." I did once have a confrontation with an enormous dude, because I was staring at him doing like 400lb squats and I was impressed. The only time I've ever been confronted by a woman in the gym was when I was dropping snatches from overhead with bumper plates. I calmly explained that this was the correct way to bail on a missed lift, and that I periodically practiced it when working towards a max.

And, as @FiveHourMarathon points out, the historical method of creating virtue is intentionally creating a sort of limited Hard Times even amongst a society living in Good Times.

I tend to think that the problem with the Good Time/Hard Times/Decadence memeplex is that the unit of analysis is typically wrong. The luxury or thrift of the majority of people don't matter, for the purposes typically considered. What matters is really the leadership class of a society, both as aspiration and model for the lower classes and as the most important engine of society. We're concerned about the actions of the Patricians, not the Plebs.

A society experiencing "hard times" can still have an elite focused on creature comforts, a society experiencing "good times" can still have an elite that focuses on The Strenuous Life. The concept of decadence within the western tradition has always been a warning against the former, normally coded in terms of oriental despotism, and towards the latter.

Huh. Maybe I'm the idiot.

Given that this started with a discussion of Brett Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thread I am going to call the sides broadly in favour and broadly against Devereaux's thesis pro-D and anti-D for brevity's sake.

This whole comment is very confusing because Deveraux himself is the contra of the original point being debated, so the anti-D side is the pro Hard Times side etc.

That's accurate, but a big underlying tension to the halftime show drama for a decade now is the degradation of pop music as a common part of American civic religion. When Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, or Prince played the halftime show it was expected that better than, what, 75% of viewers would enjoy at least some of their music? I don't think an act exists today that hits that kind of penetration. You're either picking oldies, like Bruce Springsteen, or what are ultimately by the standards of pop music up until the 2000s niche acts. Adjusting for population size, Thriller had a penetration of like 25% of the population listening to it; the best selling albums of 2025 like Taylor and Wallen only get to about a fifth of that. Morgan Wallen is notable as a crossover country star with sales so large that he shows up on the "normal" charts, but he's less than half of Shania Twain's penetration at her peak. The top selling acts of today are more like niche styles, where they used to be universal. The highest penetration acts are ten or twenty years out of date, which brings accusations of being stale, the modern acts are loved by 10-20% and hated by 10-20%, and mostly have lyrics that can't be repeated on television. Spanish language being the hack around this.

Growing up I just sort of understood this, I don't know who told me exactly, but in elementary school I thought of it as just a thing you were supposed to do that one listened to Counting Down the Hits with Casey Kasum every weekend to know what was going on in the world, and that not liking what was popular was somehow a bad thing. A Good American was supposed to appreciate Linkin Park, Eminem, Shania Twain, Cher, and Metalllica; at least a little. The county fair could be counted on to get one or two real pop acts every year, and young people went to them whether it was your favorite band or not, because it was a big time pop show in our little town.

I guess I have trouble understanding how anyone is getting worked up about Bad Bunny when Kendrick and Dre were unquestionably "worse" on culture war grounds. I didn't have to explain what was being bleeped out to my parents. Playing foreign rap music was basically how I got around requests for rap when I managed a gym with a "family friendly" mandate on the radio.

Sure, but what I see out there is the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe getting performatively mad at each other, with the Red Tribe acting as though the halftime show was coordinated by some perfidious cabal of Oberlin professors and the Blue Tribe declaring that they are the normal ones. When the reality is that this was coordinated by such evil libtards as Robert Kraft and the Walton family, and that is the agenda that needs to be questioned.

I just don't think you can make a map that really works. There's too many baptists in NYC, too many liberal arts colleges in Indiana. The cultural capital of the country is too mixed up. Texas is the only region that maybe has a strong enough identity to secede, but that would depend (oddly) on future Texan leaders moderating their red tribe culture warring significantly enough to get buy in from the 40% of the state the votes blue. The reverse in California or New England may also work, if they could moderate, but they are far behind Texas in regional identity.

I live in Pennsylvania. If I drive half an hour north or west I'm definitely in Appalachia, if I drive an hour south or two hours east I'm in the heart of the megalopolis. There's no clean line where people would feel happy drawing that line and letting "them" have the rest.

I guess what I'm getting around to is that I don't think there is a future where Red or Blue America can balkanize successfully, rather a future balkanized America would require stronger regional identities which moderate between Blue and Red. The populations are too mixed, and the ambitions that underly the culture war movement are too universal. Red Texas or Blue New England cannot secede, Purple Texas and Purple New England might be able to.

I can't recall a halftime show that impressed me more, particularly. He was definitely a lot better than Kendrick or Dre or Usher, because mercifully I didn't understand the words.

But I think most of the Discourse around this misses the point. The NFL as an organization wants to market more to hispanics at home and abroad, hispanics in America are less bought in to the NFL than whites or blacks, while Mexico and Latin America offer potential for growth. Move that godawful team in Jacksonville to Mexico City one day?

This was a calculated decision to punt on Anglo audiences that the NFL already owns to appeal to hispanics.

There is no American Civil War that can result in balkanization. America has been too unified for too long.

If that is the inevitable result, it will be after decades, if not centuries, of civil wars, plural, which eventually massacre enough people to create clean stable lines.