FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
Relationship therapist Esther Perel has a famous line that "The victim of the affair isn't necessarily the victim of the marriage." In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage. For a variety of reasons, I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman. The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.
Rarely are divorces truly "out of nowhere," more normally divorce filings formalize the death of a marriage that has already broken down completely. Long processes of fights, counseling (secular or religious), compromises, deals, fights, betrayals, and failures precede the actual legal process. The actual filing often reflects a situation where there is no marriage going.
A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash. Absent any care for his wife's feelings, most men will have no real interest in doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.
In my own marriage (which is great and nowhere near divorce), my wife and I have a regular fight about chores that goes something like: she thinks I don't do enough chores around the house, I think that I would totally do them if she would stop doing them first. She's home more than I am for a variety of work reasons, and she has a lower tolerance for seeing dishes in the sink, for seeing a full laundry bin, etc. I'm at work later, left to my own devices I will happily spend a few hours doing all that, but I won't reflexively do it when I get home from work, while she will sit there during the day working and see the dishes and they will bug her and she'll do them.
Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.
Keep in mind that men typically control more of the finances. Both in terms of assets and income, and servicing debts and taxes. I would have vastly more ability to mess with marital assets than my wife would: I make more money, I know where the assets are, I would know how to move them around.
This is before we get into things like Exit Affairs, when an extramarital relationship is just a tripwire to make her file, or physical abuse.
So the dynamic is often that a man stops doing anything around the house, stops substantively being a husband, and then a wife files. So the decision these women are making when filing isn't "Happily Married Woman vs. Divorced Woman" it's "Abandoned, but legally married woman with no legal tools to control her spouse's use of marital assets, still expecting divorce vs. Divorced woman, with legal tools to control spouse's disposal of marital assets."
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
What superstitions do you have? What ordinary acts do you find vaguely supernaturally sacred/blasphemous?
For me, I don't really like most cakes, but if I'm at a Birthday Party or especially a Wedding and there's a cake for the event, I feel like not eating a little bit of it would be deeply disrespectful. Like saying "I hope your marriage fails."
Equally, out of some vague sense of karmic justice, if I'm late for something I self consciously avoid doing anything rude to try to hurry up. So no cutting people off in traffic, no letting the door slam in someone's face, etc. I just feel like if I cut courtesy corners like that, the next piece of luck will 100% go against me.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
Line item veto.
It was briefly introduced in the 90s, but ultimately declared unconstitutional. It would be a method of breaking the "giant omnibus bill" system of government, by allowing the president to remove pork-belly spending at will. ((One proposal I've seen would restrict the veto to bills passed by a simple majority, bills passed by a two-thirds majority that would allow congress to overturn a veto would be immune from a line item veto, so if we really put together a compromise bill that has near unanimous congressional support it would be immune))
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
One of the most striking things reading Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, a history text on Asian immigration to the United States from the 1800s to 1980 or so, was that the first wave of Chinese immigrant laborers to the western continental US largely just...died out for lack of wives. Most of the early Chinese immigrants were men, who came over planning to earn money working on construction or mining or in service industries, earn money, and return to China or import a bride. While some brides were successfully imported through various means, the crackdown on Chinese immigration meant that vastly fewer brides ever made it over than were needed, and the realities of exploitation and debt left most Chinese laborers unable to afford to return to China successful. American women mostly disdained to marry Chinese men, for a variety of reasons, and interracial relationships were rare*.
As a result, most of these thousands of men lived out their lives in America and simply died, never having any long term romantic partners, only the occasional mining camp prostitute. An entire population and subculture, it existed and died out, failed to reproduce itself. Contemporary accounts and census figures back up that the Chinese population dipped for a period, before immigration resumed. Chinese-Americans who grew up during that period, the children of the handful of couples who successfully imported brides, report the shade-like presence of these aging men in the Chinese community, dozens of honorary uncles all childless and often filled with regret. White society barely noticed them: after all they didn't have any children or any power of money or language or politics. Politically, legally, and socially, it was possible to just eliminate these men from the "dating" pool.
Another anecdote, reading Lee Kuan Yew's From Third World to First at the moment, he talks about Singaporean students traveling overseas, and disproportionate numbers of Singaporean women bringing back foreign husbands. Talking to Singaporean friends of mine, they corroborated this: Singaporean girls who study in the US are more likely to stay in the USA, and more likely to marry an American either way. Singaporean boys are more likely to stay in Singapore or return to Singapore, because of the social privileges accorded to sons. College educated women find that Singaporean men mistreat them, they don't want a woman who is smarter than they are, they want a submissive wife; as a result women choose other options. Singapore's particularly bad gender balance, despite being a fully formed and wealthy state with sovereignty, is determined in part by this social reality. This is a problem that Singapore must combat to maintain its population. The way the country treats its women, and the way other countries treat their women, makes maintaining the culturally and intellectually open society that Singapore's success was built off of a direct trade against their gender ratio.
The striking point being that the gender balance is socially determined. Thousands of Chinese immigrant men weren't the victims of a gender imbalance per se, though at that time in the West there probably were factually too few women for the white population. Singapore's choices around foreign education weaken its gender balance because of fetishes formed ten thousand miles away. These thousands of men were marked for sad single ends because of a social construct around their race. Society chooses how to distribute women, not in a command economy sense necessarily, but in a broad preferences sense. No matter how bad the percentages are in aggregate, some men will be marked for success and others for failure.
Inasmuch as gender balance is a dial worth playing with, the obvious levers at the national level in a first world context to pull aren't killing off men. They are abortion and immigration. Sex selective abortion is a major issue among certain communities, and should be wildly illegal. In China the ratio of births is 120:100, in parts of India it is little better. While it is less common in the US as a whole, it does happen in some immigrant communities.
Open immigration policies equally lead to gender imbalances, immigrants are more likely to be men. Privilege female immigration significantly more highly, and it isn't hard to improve the balance quickly in the United States or the UK or France. Import Venezuelan or Burmese women by the boat load.
For that matter, first world men have the personal option under the current law to import wives quite easily. The fact that they don't is largely a social choice those men are making. They don't face a material gender imbalance, they choose to face one for the sake of social structures.
These social structures also probably have much more to do with your dating pool than do population level statistics. Middle class American men want equally middle class American wives, shunting aside the opportunity to date poorer or immigrant women. Men often want women less educated and successful than they are, leaving educated women on the shelf. Manage how your society treats women, and you will face fewer parents seeking to have sons instead, you will attract more women from abroad, matchmaking will be easier among your population on class/education/social bases. Social constrictions create the gender imbalance as experienced in day to day life, be ready to violate or manage them and much of the problems melt away.
So in the long run, I do not think we face terminal societal decline as a result of these problems. Historically, societies have dealt with worse, they simply sentence some men to misery, and because the kind of men who can't get a girl are disproportionately "losers" in other ways to begin with it doesn't tend to have much impact on history. The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves. The wealthy West, by comparison, is doing a great job. We don't need a war, we just need better marriage norms, and the courage to address our problems.
*Interesting contrast: Takaki talks about Filipino men being considered a crisis because they were TOO seductive, too smooth. Newspapers and politicians wrote screeds against the menace of Filipino men seducing white women. Takaki, of course, being an Asian and a liberal, is willing to say directly and quote sources that Filipino men were simply "great lovers" or "more attractive and stylish" or "more attentive" than white men; while he is totally unwilling to state that Chinese men died out because they were ugly or weren't great lovers, inasmuch as this was perceived it was the result of racism.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
Saltburn as a Critique of Privilege Discourse
Full of spoilers, just don’t read it if you plan to watch the movie later.
Saltburn is an excellent film in the Sex-Thriller Dark Academia vibe genre. Interestingly, for a movie where the protagonist engages in incest-adjacent homoerotic sex, fucks a grave, and hangs a lot of dong, it’s a deeply conservative movie in message. In my mind the philosophy of the film isn’t in Ollie’s speech about the rich “having no natural predators” and thus being vulnerable to attack by an upper middle class striver like Ollie. Rather, I think Farley’s monologue to Ollie earlier in the film, at the birthday party, when he tells Ollie:
Oh, Oliver. You'll never catch on. This place... (he gestures to the house) ... you know, it’s not for you. It is a fucking dream. It is an anecdote you’ll bore your fat kids with at Christmas... Oliver's Once-in-a-Lifetime, Hand job on a haybale, Golden, Big-boy Summer... And you'll cling onto it and comb over it and jerk off to it and you’ll wonder how you could ever, ever, ever, ever get it back. But you don't get it back... Because your summer's over. And so you, you catch a train to whatever creepy doll factory it is they make Olivers in. And I come back here...This isn't a dream to me. It’s my house.
The film is largely about celebrity and privilege discourses. Celebrity culture is of course most vicious in the British tabloids. Think of the life and death and afterlife of Princess Diana: made miserable and made immortal by gossip columnists, given power and forced to endure public ridicule, driven to death by the paparazzi only to become the subject of award winning books and films and prestige television decades after her death. We had to have her, desired her, wanted to be her, and we hated her and were jealous of her and felt she didn’t deserve what she had, and our hate and our adoration killed her, suffocated her, and once we’d driven her to death we fuck the grave, we masturbate over her remains, we always want to comb over the ashes again and again and make another retelling of Diana’s story. The same with Marilyn Monroe, with Brittney Spears, with Aaron Hernandez, with Mac Miller. We want to tear them down, we drive them to insanity, to death, and then we are left with the memories. We create these powerful celebrities, we worship them, we destroy them, and after they are destroyed we talk and talk and talk about them because they were the interesting thing. Philadelphia sports media worshipped Nick Sirrianni and Jalen Hurts when they were lucky, and they couldn’t wait to sharpen their knives to tear them down once they got unlucky. One of the most primitive urges, anthropologists theorize that the first kings were sacrificial, that the power of the king was in his extinguishment, as a scapegoat or as a victim.
Privilege discourse is the same. Ollie play-acts as impoverished, but he is upper middle class. Uses the mythology of struggle, uses a critique of his own class, as ammunition to get the attention of the true aristocrats. Ollie is a freshman at Oxford, from an upper middle class family, he has every opportunity to build himself a good life*. But as much as he attributes his success to his willingness to put in work, Ollie does all this to avoid working. He doesn’t want to build, he wants to be handed things, because he perceives other people having been handed things. He struggles not against oppression or misery, but against anyone anywhere having it better than him. Privilege discourse is all about the upper middle class, the college educated, critiquing those a little better off than they are. It is rooted not in oppression but in jealousy. The Marxist doesn’t seek to critique the rich for their existence, but for the oppression of the poor. Privilege discourse was built around critiquing the easy lives of the perceived favored races, rather than complaining about the oppression of the disfavored races. It’s not coincidence that it appeared as actual brutal repression started to slack, particularly for the ivory tower academics who wrote these papers. The shift from a dynamic of escaping a misery that one was forced into, to a dynamic of criticism, of jealousy of the perceived easy lives of others, has been the fuel for so much of the culture war. In a nod to Hlynka, the flavor of the discourse is visible in the Grievance Politics wings of both Tribes. So much of Red-Pill adjacent discourse is oriented around this idea that women live better lives than they deserve, not active bad things happening to men.
College students know the dynamic: the law school WoC Collective has ten members and nine of them are dating white guys. So much of racial discourse is bound up in [weird]( sexual tension. Even moreso among the queers, they want to destroy the straights even as they just after them. People who allow their lives to be consumed by hostility and jealousy, they want the target of their hatred, they want to be them, they can’t live without them. This extends to the phenomenon, in so many post-colonial countries, of National Liberation Parties that never move past their revolution. Revolutionary leaders, and their heirs, continue to dominate government decades after their putative victories. They dance, naked, in their conquered mansions; but they have nothing to give their people but reliving their golden summer of revolution. The populists demand entrance into the commanding heights of culture controlled by their enemies, but they can build nothing once they are there. The revolutionaries, the barbarians, can’t build, they are culturally sterile. They lust after those happier than they, they dream of tearing them down to earth, of taking away their unearned privileges. But hatred is all they have. They can’t build anything after they capture the world they lusted over, they can only dream of their victories in the culture war.
Jealousy is the core of privilege discourse, and of celebrity worship, and jealousy is ultimately sterile, it does not produce but only destroys. Farley’s prophecy to Ollie comes true darkly, not with Ollie being banished from Saltburn and living a middle class life where he still dreams of his hand job on a hay bale, instead with Ollie taking control of Saltburn and gaining nothing from it. His life will always be devoted to that one golden summer he was at Saltburn with Felix, no matter what else comes of it. That summer with Felix becomes the peak of his life, by his jealous obsession and efforts to destroy and steal it. At the end of the film he dances naked through the halls of Saltburn, is that nearly as satisfying as his one golden big boy summer? Ollie can’t produce the experience of Saltburn, he can only murder it, and then masturbate over its grave. This was the experience of the barbarians who conquered Rome: they could destroy Rome, but they could not reproduce it. Most of the Germans and Goths and Vandals who destroyed the Western Roman Empire first sought entry to Rome, sought to become part of the empire, to enjoy the wealth and grandeur that was Rome. They destroyed Rome, but they couldn’t live in it, because they couldn’t reproduce the institutions that built it and ran it. Cavafy writes:
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
...
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
The barbarians are a solution for the civilized, but so was Rome a solution to the barbarians. The existence of the barbarians in Cavafy gives the possibility for the people to see an apocolypse , to give up on working on their problems, to stop legislating, to just wait for the worst. But Rome was a solution to the Barbarians, it organized their society, it gave them something to strive for, to organize themselves towards, to pillage. The destruction of the Western Roman Empire wasn’t the glory of the conquering barbarians, it was their degeneration, their slow downfall into a morass of chaos.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
The Dickstretcher Theory of Online Credibility: A Turing test for the Social Media Age
One bullet point on my little Reddit-Ghislaine-Epstein conspiracy theory post that drew a lot of laughter was my story of buying an expensive vintage watch on Reddit, from a user I gave a lot of credibility because he posted in strange and obscure subreddits on the same account, including a subreddit for hobbyists in stretching one’s penis to restore a circumcised foreskin or to attempt to extend length. Obviously dickstretching does not coincide with high trustworthiness or reliability, nor does it particularly coincide with expertise in watches. But it’s simply so strange a thing that it passes the Turing test.
The big pile of comments on a random, obscure hobby subreddit is the text equivalent of reCaptcha tests that just require a click. The process is simple, it wouldn’t be hard for a scammer to comment on weird subreddits, or to program a bot to do it, but A) to my knowledge no one tries that, B) It would take a fair amount of effort and time for an account that would later get banned, and C) I do think there is something ineffable about the drunkard’s walk of a real human commenting on weird shit that real humans like. I’m thinking of how this fits into a broader theory of online credibility, and how to assign credibility.
I’ve talked before about James Clavell’s fake-Japanese three-hearts model. Humans are vast, we contain multitudes. We have different layers of opinions, those we share with all, those we share with some, and those we share with no one at all. These are as different identities as can exist.
Balaji in his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast talked about how different forms of identity interact online. Your real name account is often presenting a fake version of yourself, a version approved by HR and family, politically more mainstream views; other than professional extremists who profit from presenting extreme non-mainstream views, who I often suspect push their views farther than they are actually felt because that’s what brings in listeners and profits. I actively do not trust real name accounts, and avoid real name forums, for that reason: if you’re making money I don’t trust you, if you’re not making money I suspect you’d like to that you’re just lurking on that pawn hoping for a promotion. Your totally anonymous board, your Chans et al, have been noted before by @DaseIndustriesltd as producing a particular kind of identity, one where you only exist as a representation because there is nothing else to cling to, no persistent identity or username to place a reputation on, so one can only think in generalities. I’ve never been able to get into them for that reason, I just don’t think in generalities, call it narcissism but I don’t identify by anything that comes up, and don’t have much interest in being tagged one way or tagging others.
Pseudonymous accounts, reddit or our little reddit clone, are the sweet spot in my opinion: it would be a chore for anyone to link this to my professional life so I can let them swing a little free-er, but at this point I’m attached enough to the username that I’m unlikely to just toss bullshit out there*. Sure, on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog and one has to take everything with a grain of salt, but I can at least form long term opinions of users and usernames and form coherent views of them, and too outrageous of lies will torpedo credibility and leave you a voice in the wilderness. I’m sure some people have rolled their eyes at stories I’ll tell, but if I claimed I was benching 400 and fucking models after I finish my PhD work at Harvard one could just block me out because it would be obvious I was lying. I’m motivated to tell the truth by both my inner desire to share my real life and a requirement that I offer something realistic to get audience traction, the truth being the easiest lie to remember I stick with that when I’m dealing with complex shit on here.
Which brings us back to dickstretching. When I see an account where everything is in line, it feels fake. It could be a bot, it could be a person fronting, it could be a person who just genuinely has generic beliefs; but real is 1/3. When I see weird shit, it feels more authentic, everyone is into something strange or incongruous or shameful. Lord knows I am, and themotte has thrown it out at me when someone sees an opening. When I see somebody online who claims to be a strict tradcath with a hot tradwife and 8 tradkids who attends mass every day and is preparing for the war to come; I think it’s all a troll. When I see somebody online who claims that some ideology appeals to him, and also likes this or that anime (I don’t know which are obscure or common), and doesn’t like burritos, and is a Buffalo Bills fan, it feels real. When I see somebody who genuinely admits to things that aren’t flattering, it feels true.
Idk where this all ends up. As authenticity online becomes harder and harder to parse, because of the mix of social pressure, bots, monetization of the lowest levels of human discourse by the thirsty blood-funnel of capitalism, weirdness is becoming the only thing that works for me to know someone is real. Let your freak flags fly, and look for other ships flying theirs before you have a parlay. From online discussion to online dating, the only way to trust anyone is to know how they stretch their dick.
*Aside, this is why private account histories should be removed as a feature, if I tell two different versions of the same backstory I should be call-out-able.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
9mo ago
What strange, unique, personal, harmless design flaws does your body carry? On balance, looking around, I'm extremely satisfied with my body, but over time I've noticed...some minor problems.
-- My ears clog up with wax, any time I get a cold or my seasonal allergies act up. No method of removal solves it reliably other than using those drops from the drugstore several times.
-- I feel like I can't really spit with any velocity. Seriously, I don't get how people spit on other people to start a fight, any time I spit it just kinda...falls? I can't get much forward momentum on it. I guess I could spit on somebody's shoes if I leaned over, but that seems like a bad idea before a bar fight?
-- I have seriously flat feat, the "barefoot" shoe trend is great for me. I'm still frustrated that it's gone away, I basically buy Amazon knock-offs of shoes that Merrill and New Balance used to make. I see a shoe that promises arch support and I groan. Supposedly flat footed soldiers were once frowned upon or something? But idk why, other than shoe limitations I've never had a problem.
How about you?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
Elections are by their nature a contested environment not just between the individual candidates, but as Tom Scott touches upon in this video on electronic voting, between the candidates, their respective voters, and those administering the election. You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works. You need to understand that the purpose of an election is not to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and their voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. [some spelling corrections]
So one side gets a Heckler's Veto until they are convinced of the legitimacy of the election? If they're upset enough, then the government needs to alter procedures until they are satisfied? No evidence is required, merely a sense of disquiet among some portion of voters? What procedural changes would produce a "legitimate" election for those people?
Mottizens who have dated: what percentage of your partners would you say were Marriage Material? How many Marriage Material partners did you have a shot with?
I'll define Marriage Material here as any of: you would have wanted to marry them OR wish you would have married them OR you feel in an objective sense they "deserved" marriage even if you didn't really want to.
Partner and had a shot with I'll mostly leave to you. I'd say anyone after age 16 with whom you had a romantic relationship that lasted more than 5 dates or with whom you made love while in a romantic relationship. But I feel like that inquiry is more fact specific and context dependent.
For me: it's 5/25 I'd say could have or should have married, including my wife who I did actually marry. A rate of 20%, and five real opportunities across my youth. I could fiddle one or two either way, but after that it's a steep dropoff into people I couldn't imagine being with today.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
My problem is that it still hasn't been demonstrated to me that the action abolishing Disney's local control benefits the taxpayers of Florida, rather than harming both Disney and Florida. Lose-lose governance by deterrence does not appeal to me. Sanctity of contract is also highly important to me, but I'm not sure that carries broadly beyond business-Rs. I'm open to evidence that it's good, but I haven't seen it.
But Disney came out swinging against DeSantis. It wasn't his "goofy-ass...fight," it was Disney's goofy-ass fight. DeSantis' only real choice there was to remind them that they are a corporation and tell them to get back in their lane. Anything else would have resulted in DeSantis looking like a bootlicker who caves to Woke Corporatism the moment his moneyed masters yank on the chain.
I think you're ignoring the "ignore it" option. DeSantis could have just said "You stick to cartoons, I'll run the state" and decried Disney's intrusion into politics, without wading into the muck with them. If you're wealthy, you probably own shares in many "woke corporations" and you don't want to get punished for what management does.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
What’s the Greatest Rock and Roll Song of All Time
I was looking up the meaning the lyrics of Rosalita by Bruce Springsteen earlier in the week, trying to figure out if there was a particular slang meaning to the lines “Windows are for cheaters, chimneys for the poor, closets are for hangars, winners use the door.” What I came across was this thorough analysis arguing that Rosalita is possibly the single greatest rock performance of all time. Which got me thinking, was it? I think the greatest rock and roll song of all time would have to: be recognizably Rock and Roll to the majority of Rock audiences throughout time, I want something that Wolfman Jack would love while still having pushed and developed the genre further, so however much I love Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal it's out. From a great rock and roll band as an aspect of "career achievement" so one hit wonders are out. Can't be too obscure, the all time GOAT should be recognized by mass audiences, so anything by the Queers is out. A great upbeat car-radio song, so ballads and such are out. Covering classic rock and roll themes of teenage love and freedom and joy, so something too political like Eve of Destruction or too weird like Iron Man is out.
What are your nominations? I’ve never been a huge Stones or Zeppelin fan, so I didn’t pick one from those, but I still feel like it’s incomplete without at least a nomination for each. Mine below:
Pro: Great lyrics with classic rock and roll themes of teenage freedom and cars and love affairs, driving galloping beat and energy, fits into the peak rock and roll moment when it had fully risen to cultural dominance but before splitting too heavily into subcultures (punk, metal, alt, etc) and before Thriller really split off pop as a distinct genre, just a little long with multiple excellent bridges without hitting absurd In A Gatta Da Vida lengths. I feel like this song could have opened for Chuck Berry in 1955, and for Van Halen in 1990, and rocked both crowds across thirty five years, Legendary concert piece by a classic concert band.
Con: Relies on the sax for most of the power of the instrumentals and guitar + sax is an evolutionary dead end, Bruce just generally doesn’t feel musically as influential as others on the nominations list like Dylan or Hendrix outside of New Jersey.
Like a Rolling Stone Bob Dylan
Pro: Nobel Prize winner Dylan is certified the greatest lyricist in rock history, covered by a thousand bands for the pure poetry and because it can be taken in a million directions, lines that are both so specific and so universal, The Band is great on this one.
Con: Dylan is more folk than rock and his electric era wasn’t really that long, too slow and not heavy enough, in the last forty years almost no one has ever danced or gotten laid to this which pulls it away from core rock styles.
Pro: Berry deserves more credit than any other individual for putting Rock and Roll together from spare parts and the creator deserves credit for the creation, this was Berry’s most legendary song even though he stole the idea from a concert played by his cousin Marvin, it’s been covered by everyone from Judas Priest to John Lennon because they all thought it was that important.
Con: It’s only halfway there it’s the seed not the tree, the quality of the talent performance and composition just doesn’t hold up to others on the list.
You Shook Me All Night Long AC/DC
Pro: Dave Barry described the opening as the greatest couplet in the English language “She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean;” probably the heaviest rock can be pushed before splitting away from something Chuck Berry’s crowd would recognize at all, and the overall composition is just tight and powerful and perfect.
Con: Cock rock can feel kind of lame to me at times betwixt and between heavy metal and pop music, pretty simplistic and straightforward relative to the artistry in the musicianship of Rosalita or the lyrics of Like a Rolling Stone, kind of advertisement rock at this point.
Pro: If you thought this was a serious nominee, for even a second, please let me know in the comments so I can ignore everything that you ever post here in the future.
Purple Haze Jimi Hendrix Experience
Pro: Rock is first and foremost guitar music and Jimi was the greatest guitarist of all time, legendary associations of Woodstock, Jimi had the courtesy to stay forever 27 and so never gets the later cringe associations of working with Yoko or Barack Obama or releasing an ersatz Christmas album {though lowkey I love that Dylan album}, everything heavier than the Doors owes Jimi a debt.
Con: Jimi doesn’t have the volume of material to deserve the “career achievement” aspect of the award, short and simplistic, about drugs.
Raw Power Iggy Pop and the Stooges
Pro: Proto-punk par excellence, what differentiates rock from what came before and after is being hard and loud and this is as loud and hard as rock and roll gets, as authentic as punk ever got before the authenticity had to be disputed for those who saw the stooges, covered with bruises. Also, watch the Amazon Documentary it’s great.
Con: the stooges really aren’t very good at music, with Iggy saying he learned most of his composition from Captain Kangaroo.
I'm really kinda thinking Rosalita takes it.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/hillary-clinton-election-president-loss
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/20/why-hillary-clinton-lost/
All deride Hillary's supposedly obvious and massive flaws as a candidate, while ignoring that she was inches from winning. Massively flawed candidates don't end up there. Massively flawed soccer teams don't lose on penalties in the world cup final, they fail to qualify for the tournament at all. Hillary was a hugely talented presidential candidate who ran a very effective campaign (especially behind the scenes and within the establishment) who lost to another hugely talented political/media savant.
2nd place finishers are always underrated in today's culture.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
6mo ago
Reports emerging that the USA is "pressuring" Israel to have a fully developed exit plan before invading Gaza to which Netanyahu presumably replied "Leeeeeroooooy Jeeeeenkiiiiiiins."
NEW: The Biden administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flush out what its strategy is for the day after it completes its stated goal of eradicating Hamas in the ongoing Gaza war, a US and an Israeli official tell [The Times of Israel]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his inner circle have indicated to their Biden counterparts that Israel has not yet come up with such a strategy and instead are more focused on the immediate goal of removing Hamas from power in Gaza, the US official says. (2/4)
But the US official cautions against this approach, saying that devoid a strategy for who will control the Strip if and when Hamas is removed, IDF is more likely to get bogged down in Gaza indefinitely, despite Israel insisting that it does not want to re-occupy the enclave (3/4)
[] National Unity chair Benny Gantz and fellow faction member Gadi Eisenkot demanded the creation of a Gaza exit strategy a upon their entry into the government and that they have tasked a committee with drawing one up. (4/4)
Meanwhile Blinken has reportedly been meeting with the Israelis for 8 hours.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
I agree with your points, and also with @2rafa about the course of the sexual revolution. But also:
-- If you're interested in the topic, I recommend the podcast You Must Remember This which did a long series on erotic films of the 80s and 90s, placing them in context and talking about the social movements around them. Karina Longworth always does a good job with the material, trigger warning for occasional performative woke acknowledgement if that kind of thing bothers you overly much. One of the things she highlights is the way that rating systems, censorship, the rise of home video, and pornography interacted to place different meanings on ratings. There was a time when X and NC-17 were legitimate ratings that indicated a real film intended for adults, both slowly succumbed to being viewed as porn. It used to be that a film (often a sexual thriller from overseas) marketed as NC17 would be a hit, all the adults would go see it. Now that is hard to imagine.
-- I theorize the rise of internet pornography has made viewing sexually arousing material outside of privately hunched over a laptop seem perverted, even homosexual, to a modern audience. Even as barely-pubescent teen I caught the tail end of the "finding a foreign movie my parent's didn't know had tits on video" cultural moment. I remember watching stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien with my buddies because there were naked girls in it, I don't think we understood anything about the movie. Once internet porn became practical with DSL, I don't think anyone did that, watching something became a purely private endeavor. Decades earlier, porn theatres existed, where men would congregate to watch porn. The idea of going to a theater to see a movie with a heavily arousing tilt strikes me as strange, if I went to the movies without my wife it might even feel kind of gay to be in a theater full of other dudes also getting aroused. Everyone is a goon-er now, but everyone hides it, that's for your home, not for the big screen, or even for watching with family.
-- Don't underestimate the degree to which one work can ruin an entire genre convention. Don Quixote killed the chivalrous romance. The Daniel Craig Bond Films were so dark and serious because Austin Powers was absolutely huge right before they were made, and everyone on set was conscious of the fact that they couldn't do a sex scene without the entire audience giggling and someone shouting "Do I make you horny baby? Yeah! Shag now or shag later?" at the screen. Today Austin Powers is almost forgotten, but in 2006 it was totally unavoidable if you were making a spy film. An effective parody can kill a genre. So can self-parody. Game of Thrones did the whole obligatory sex-scene thing to death, and then completely self-immolated in the final season. The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale. RE: Dune upthread; GRRM ripped Herbert off pretty directly in using scenes like "bring me a child prostitute to torture" as establishing bad guy credentials, but GRRM abused it and HBO beat it to death on camera, so while in the novel having Vlad torture-fuck-murder child slaves seemed edgy, in the film it would seem derivative (of the thing that was itself Derivative from the book). As with how the Bond films are still working in the shadow of Austin Powers long after we've forgotten Austin Powers, GoT has now been lame for five years, we forget just how bad the Finale was, and just how much prestige and power was lent to the show leading into the finale, how excited everyone was for what the Extended Universe would produce next, and what a complete fucking letdown the whole thing was. But in 2020 when the first Dune film came out, they had to avoid all association with GoT it was overplayed and toxic. That kind of influence can really carry, and can make a scene unshootable for decades at a time.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
These two aren't necessarily small-scale, but they are relatively compact by conspiracy standards (ie, they could be true while the rest of the world is still basically Blue Pilled)
-- Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were a work. Snowden is a deep-state public Kamikaze, by revealing that the government was doing something hard that the NSA was bad at doing (finding target communications in the haystack that is general communications streams), no self-respecting terrorist or spy or drug lord would use the public channels that the NSA is known to be monitoring. Then the terrorists all download the "encrypted" supposedly secure apps...which the NSA either puts out itself, or has a backdoor into, or just finds it easier to monitor who is using the secure apps than it was to go through all the insecure communications. So they set up this big scary leak that publicized it better than any other effort possibly could.
-- Affirmative Action is not primarily targeted at increasing diversity or reparations or whatever the fuck. It serves the primary purpose of stripping the Talented Tenth from URM communities, preventing those communities from ever really improving or forming alternate cultural power bases. If you're a fairly high-iq, conscientious, young Black or Hispanic male, and your choices are between starting a business in your (normally shitty) community or going to Harvard, which are you gonna pick? And a community needs smart and talented men to make the (normally stupid) decision to start a business. Charles Murray has written a lot about the Big Sort of High IQ individuals as a result of educational/professional meritocracy and the negative effect that can have on community; but think about it, it is so much sharper for Black students.
These are much smaller
-- Elevator buttons do nothing. The door doesn't close any faster if you press the button but it gives you something to do.
-- The Bachelor Season 25 producers removed a contestant from the show and edited her out of the earlier episodes in post production. Either because she got Covid, literally died, or did something so horrible that it couldn't be associated with the show at all.
-- Trump 100% originally ran for President on a dare from Bill Clinton. It was supposed to be a joke run to weaken JEB! and Ted Cruz and soften them up for HRC in the general, then he got there and thought huh maybe I can win the damn thing. None of the principals involved can admit to it after it went the way it did.
-- Significant portions of accepted history are misinterpreted fiction, and we have no way of proving which are which.
I'm going to go back to my theory that Conservatism is returning to what things were like in your lifetime or your parents lifetime, and Reaction is pushing back before living memory. I've argued it extensively here before.
The net result is that where before you turned 40 and got comfortable and started to say "Gee, I'd like the world not to change too much, I like it the way it is..." there was a party you voted for. Nixon, Reagan, Dubya all won elections in the US promising less change, keep things the same. I'm not sure that much of the modern Right Wing today promises keeping things the same, keeping them how they were when I grew up. Many seem to urge us on towards change, towards tearing up the social contract I grew up with, towards Retvrn to something I don't know, something new and scary. When I was a kid abortion was legal, my elementary school principle was Black, my dad's best friend on the charity board was gay. If you try to abolish the policies that allowed those things, or if I am convinced that you will even if you won't, my natural conservatism won't help you, it will hurt you. At times, there is no conservative option on the ballot in American politics.
I think this jibes with your Brexit theory of young Brits: traveling the EU and working or partying as they pleased was their birthright, it's what they grew up with. You can't sell conservative to them and say, oh we're going to destroy the world you grew up in. That's a contradiction in terms.
Millennials won't, can't!, become conservative if you don't put conservatism on the ballot.
Exactly. The fact that you reach for a racial epithet when you're trying to inflict pain says something. Racism by the classic definition is thinking that someone is inferior or hating them because of their race.
Analogy, a man can't get it up, he's impotent after an accident. His wife says to him, over and over, "Honey it's fine I love you, not your dick, I don't think any less of you at all! You're still just as much a man as you were the day I married you!" Maybe he even believes her. Then she gets drunk one night, and they get into a fight, and she screams at him "You're not even a man, you can't even fuck me, you're a pathetic eunuch, half a man at best!"
Which is the truth? The polite bromides mouths when she's sober, or the hurtful epithets she reaches for when she is drunk? If someone brings it up when they want to hurt you, whatever they say sober you know they think it but they're too polite to say it sober. It's pretty obvious she does think less of him, and that she thinks he ought to think less of himself.
That said, this kind of incident is beneath notice.
On a personal note: My man, I don't want to be a jerk, but you had it right in your post a month ago when you said
My absolute lack of contact with any huma[n] female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.
And you gotta realize that to say it's difficult to find a woman who meets your specifications:
If I want a girl who isn't fat, isn't stupid, and has some zest for life outside of Kpop and TikTok inside of her, or anything at all! Or is 0.75 times as physically attractive as me...
is as absurd in a free sexual market as a capitalist worker saying the only jobs he can find are beneath him. My brother, what you can get is your market value. A guy is a 6 if he can attract a woman who is a 6, a woman is a 7 if she can seduce a guy who is a 7; QED. It's like ELO, you're as good as the opposition you beat, in real life not on paper, this isn't college football where the analysts decide the rankings. So when you say
I think the dynamics are much different for zoomers. In every zoomer/ early 20's couple, I see the guy is more attractive than the girl. The stereotype of "hot girl ugly but funny guy" is flipped on its head with zoomers.
All I can think reading this is, do you maybe have a little Greco-Roman homoeroticism hiding under all that "just 'mirin the dudes?" So when you say:
aren't the stats indicative of something? More sexless/whateverless! men? I understand its "still easy" if you meet certain criterion but what explanation do you have for the increased sexlessness?
You seem like a great guy, a man after my own heart {other than your opinions on glute development}, so it shocks me that you say this. It is not that hard to go get laid.* You can show me stats that the median man is fat, that doesn't make it hard to run five miles or hard to lift weights, it means those men aren't trying. You can show me stats that the median man reads no books, that doesn't make it hard to read a book. Those stats are reflective in large part of a huge number of men who just flat out aren't trying, are ambition-free automatons of fat and grease and CoD achievements, are marginally employed in dead end jobs they hate to pay for their takeout and Xbox(whatever the fuck it is now). Those guys are losers. It might be slightly worse to be a loser today than it was 50 years ago, in the interest of charity and having a happy and functioning society it might be worth exploring how we can make life better for losers, but in a meritocratic sense it is their fault. They aren't good enough. It's a low bar, and they tripped over it.
Which brings me to another question I've been pondering across other circumstances lately, what makes a meritocracy good enough? The platonic ideal of a meritocracy, where effort and talent are distributed and rewarded perfectly fairly according to some innate virtue of humans involved with no luck or unfairness whatsoever, has never and will never exist. All meritocracies we seek to implement are imperfect, all meritocracies produced by nature are imperfect, ruined by genetics and circumstance if not by loopholes and local knowledge. But when is it good enough that we are allowed to just blame people for failing to put in minimal effort to succeed.**
The classical liberal/capitalist/equality of opportunity view is that as long as everyone gets a fair opportunity to apply, whoever gets in gets in, what's a little nepotism or inheritance between friends as long as everyone gets to play and we pick the best people who apply at the end? I tend to fall here, and for the most part I think the dating market sits here right now. Everyone can apply, but the people who get in, get in; the distribution might not be fair in the sense that everyone gets enough, but it is fair in the sense that everyone gets what he deserves.
The Civil Rights law/protected characteristic view, is that certain traits can be discriminated on while others cannot. I can discriminate for a job on intelligence, but not on race; by strength but not by religion. An actress hired for her looks is fine, as is a basketball player hired for his height and speed; but Goddess forbid we should limit either opportunity to whites. So the above, but if you refuse to date Black guys that is fucked up; if you refuse to date Jewish girls that's wrong. There are elements of this to dating today, but they are small enough that while I am sympathetic and think they should be addressed {for the happiness of all, Love Hard was the Xmas romcom of the year}, I don't think discrimination as I understand it undermines the basic meritocracy of the system. Some wokes are trying to expand the categories of protected characteristics in dating, to race and weight and height and birth-sex and whatever else people are bitter about. That is just goofy, and undermines the entire point, as they could always just date other ugly people.
The pseudo-Marxist/Kendi/equity view is that a meritocracy cannot be a meritocracy if it does not deliver some reasonable shot at happiness to everyone, no one can be left behind. In dating, this is the view of the body-positive and the incel. The fact that the system offers no shot at happiness to an individual means the system is unfair by definition, a true meritocracy would have to deliver fair (in the sense of livable) results to everyone. The problem here is the confusion of need with want, of living with standard of living, of pride with survival. Make everyone equal on whatever basis, they will find other bases for discrimination.. Hierarchy, uh, finds a way. Maybe there's something to moderating the consequences of failure to whatever extent possible, but to try to equalize outcomes completely is madness and deleterious to humanity.
What's everyone else's opinion?
*In America or the EU, for middle class white men. I can't speak to anywhere else or any other cultures.
**@SaruchBinoza if you think the responses here are anti-male, try posting the same story but for women being unable to find a good man, and watch the claws come out. The responses aren't anti-male, they're anti-whiner. I expect the responses would be the same here if someone posted saying "Maaaan, I just can't find a job, no one wants to pay me enough for my skills!" or "I just can't learn to do math" or especially "I just can't lose weight no matter how hard I try!"
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
A Tale of Two Presidents: Why the last two years should finally put "Credibility" to bed as an argument in foreign policy
Argument Summary: "Credibility" is the argument that sometimes great powers have to engage in actions with tangible negative expected value in order to achieve an intangible benefit of being perceived as credible by enemies and friends. The last two years has proven this completely wrong: Biden ripped a multi-decade bandaid off and bottomed out America's credibility with the image of Afghans falling off landing gear, while Putin has stuck to his guns no matter what in Ukraine rather than take the L. A year later America and NATO's credibility is at an all time high, with valuable prospects joining the US centric alliance for the first time in years. Putin, meanwhile, has cratered Russian credibility just a year later, losing control of his near-abroad and failing to project strength. This sequence of events suggests that credibility probably does not exist as a useful concept, or that if it does it is so mercurial that expending significant costs to obtain it is foolish.
Credibility arguments are nearly always someone explaining to you why you should keep doing the thing that was a bad idea to begin with: because you need to prove you are not deterred by things like rational calculations, you will follow it through to the end long after you should have given up. This will convince others not to mess with you, you're loco, you'll do things that are bad for you just to make it worse for them. Ben Friedman discusses a history of the concept here, Daniel Larison discusses further here. It can be compared to deterrence, but based on projections of behavior rather than projections of physical might. Examples abound in failed American colonial ventures of the past decades: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. Focusing on one example, the infamous "Red Line" on chemical weapons use by Assad. The Credibility part of the argument is that because Barack Obama said there would be consequences, it doesn't matter if it is in America's interest to attack Syria, the US has to attack Syria to prove that Barack Obama wasn't a liar. It punts on proving that the attack is a good idea in favor of the principle that nations must always back up their words with actions, for fear that showing weakness could be fatal to US interests.
Considered in the light of Credibility, the last two years have proven the argument completely wrong.
America's credibility in foreign policy was never lower (in the 21st century) than the start of 2022. America had repeatedly since 2016 renegged on commitments to putative allies the Kurds, secular afghanis, various other partners. America had elected Donald Trump, which represented a tremendous shift in foreign policy on a dime. Trump threatened to pull out of long standing treaty obligations if other members didn't pull their weight, declared trade wars on long time allies etc. (Love him or hate him, it is obvious that the shift back and forth again lowers the reliability of US foreign policy even if you agree with the shift). America then elected Joe Biden, who (whatever your opinion on his character and performance) had been described as mediocre by people as varied as his former boss/running mate and the nation's boogeyman, and his own supporters earlier in the election season. Biden then proceeded to cut and run in Afghanistan, accepting the international opprobrium of failed US foreign policy consensus as the consequences of a series of presidents being unwilling to.
A year later, American credibility in foreign policy is higher than it's been since before Iraq II. Neutral, wealthy European countries are jockeying for space under the USA's nuclear umbrella. Local allies that don't suck are sticking it to geopolitical enemies. As Hanania points out Fukuyama has been proven right: America is the indispensable nation for its would-be allies, accept no substitutes. (I'm aware that the Baltic countries have contributed more to Ukraine as a %GDP, but that proves the point: even doing their best Poland and Estonia just aren't big enough to shoulder the weight) What happened?
Arguably, what happened is that Putin tried take advantage of America's weakness. Putin himself built his credibility in the Syrian war, where he stood by his man at some cost despite no obvious benefit to Russia. I don't want to get into kremlinology motive arguments, but Putin's actions match what credibility proponents argued would happen, so it doesn't much matter whether that was really his motive or not, the results will match the scenario. The apparent weakness of the West is part of any positive Russian war plan circa February: the West is too weak and divided to support of Ukraine, while the West lacks the prestige for Ukrainians to want to be part of it badly enough to fight for it. Both those postulates have proven disastrously incorrect.
Putin has then repeatedly doubled down on the failed invasion. I've argued in theMotte that circa March/April Putin could have declared victory in a punitive Denazification fight, brought his men home, and there wouldn't have been much NATO could do about it. Would there have been any will to hold Hungary/Germany back from buying Russian gas to punish them for something that already ended? Instead Putin has repeatedly upped the ante, doing the kinds of things Credibility-mongers argue the US ought to have done in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria: institute a draft, loosen rules of engagement (I think there's an argument to be had about whose were looser to begin with though), knock out infrastructure of neutral parties that support the enemy. Putin keeps pushing farther with each reputation-shattering defeat to get all the credibility he has lost back and more. Once again, I don't want to get into Kremlinology, but his actions resemble what a Credibility theorist would recommend enough that it doesn't matter if it is his "actual" motivation or not. He is behaving as though he is doubling down on a lost cause to prove a point to the international community.
The results speak for themselves. America is riding higher than ever. Finland and Sweden joining NATO is a plum, Germany increasing military spending is a gift, and allies around the world are happy to align with America. There's been no shortage of allies screaming for American aid, despite what happened to the Kurds, because A) America is the only nation that can provide that kind of aid in that volume and B) the kind of native allies America wants are the psychotic idealists who would light themselves on fire just to blow smoke in Russia's eyes not the kind of people who make cautious reasonable decisions.
Meanwhile, Russia's efforts to gain credibility appear to be losing it credibility. We've walked it back from "Russia could maybe beat NATO in a straight up fight" to "Russia can't handle NATO supplied farmers without mobilizing the whole country;" from "Russia will roll Ukraine in days" to "Russian forces can't stand against Ukrainian forces face to face." From "Russian Wunderwaffen demonstrations" to "Russian Rust." Lyman has fallen, Kherson and Severodonetsk could be next soon. Russian brokered and guaranteed peace deals between Armenia-Azerbaijan and Tajikstan-Kyrgyzstan are falling apart with no sign of Russian intervention, and the Russian sponsored collective security and trade agreements seem to be either failing or leaving Russia behind. Countries are not impressed by Russian power, because Russian power is being drained by a failing and flailing war in Ukraine, the costs lead them to think they can get away with messing around on Russia's borders right now.
The lessons:
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Credibility is a silly, temporary concept; more apt to Twitter discourse than to serious decision making. Ideological actors that want US/EU/RF/PRC support are still going to want the same things whether they think their partners trustworthy or not; their convictions come first the means are whatever they can get a hold of. Credibility is so temporary that it isn't worth taking significant risks or incurring significant costs to obtain, it might evaporate before it gives you anything of value. This of course goes both ways: the USA might piss away the Western good will it has garnered before anything of value is gained, and Russia has a very good chance of turning the war around if it is still in the game when 300,000+ fresh troops are trained and equipped.
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Inasmuch as credibility is worth pursuing, the way to pursue it is by maximizing power and the ability to project it. Getting tied down in increasingly costly quagmires drains power and the ability to project it. Cut loose losing positions, and take that capital to invest opportunistically. Don't get tied to the Sunk Cost Fallacy and keep pushing further, showing more and more weakness. If it isn't working, don't waste more lives on it.
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Because credibility is temporary and unreliable, you can't make decisions based on an opponent's perceived credibility either. Thinking he looks weak so pounce is likely to end poorly for you.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
For instance, this seems relevant if true.
Yeah. I'd say so. Thank you for including that article. Given what was presented in the article by the prosecution, there is no reason to feel that juries are systematically stanning for Black victims or defendants. That was his headline case, it's shit, I can dismiss the whole argument. To say nothing of his misuse of the word Systemic, if the Right starts redefining words the same way the Left does, we're fucked.
In general the law frowns on jumping from fists to guns as proportional escalation. Getting punched does not entitle you to shoot. This is actually a fairly old-fashioned remnant of an era of masculinity, today violence is treated as an on/off switch, and in that environment it seems totally rational to chickenhawks to say "Well getting punched by a Black man is like, totally super scary and he felt threatened!" When the rational response there, given that he was not restrained from retreating in any way, was to walk away and call the cops.
The "gang sign" and "he said he was from California" bit is also pretty hilarious. Are gang hand signs even a real thing?
To say nothing of carrying concealed in a bar being, on net, a bad idea for this exact reason.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I'm working on a playlist of Songs That Are Just Lists of Things. Songs where the lyrics are just lists of stuff, repetitive lines, if you know a few of the songs you'll get the theme pretty quick. So far:
Mambo No. 5 -- Lou Bega
People Who Died -- The Jim Carroll Band
I've Been Everywhere -- Johny Cash (As an aside, everyone here should listen to The One on The Right Was On the Left for some vintage CW Roundup content, TheMotte collectively being represented by the guy in the rear)
Area Codes -- Ludacris
Orgy For One -- Ninja Sex Party
Blood of the Kings -- Manowar
I'm Too Sexy -- Right Said Fred
We Didn't Star the Fire -- Billy Joel
Girls -- The Dare
10 Things I Hate About You -- Leah Kate
We Got Two Jealous Agains -- NOFX
So what other songs should I add to this one? I'm open to foreign language songs if the structure is obvious.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
In terms of small cars, Japanese automakers have been beating Detroit for decades. For luxury vehicles, Germany has worldwide dominance. That leaves only light trucks and SUV's, where Detroit still performs well only due to tariffs. We've sort of forgotten about Detroit since 2008. The perception is that things were bad for awhile, but then the automakers got bailed out and they're okay now, especially #girlboss CEO Mary Barra.
I don't think that is the perception, but I guess it must be yours, because it misses a yuge number of developments since then.
Detroit won't be competing with any $10,000 import hatchback, because they don't even make anything small anymore. Ford literally makes nothing in a sedan or coupe except the Mustang. GM still makes the Malibu, for some bizarre reason, and a couple Cadillac also-rans. Ford, GM, and Chrysler spent decades trying to make a family sedan to compete with the Camry and the Accord, and failed completely. They never managed to produce a car that matched the Camry and Accord in quality, reliability, or features. Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.
At the same time, Ford and GM poured billions into Lincoln and Cadillac over the years, trying to develop luxury brands that would go blow-for-blow with the Germans. They failed, spectacularly, over and over, then landed ass-backwards on a successful luxury branding with the top trim six figure pickup truck. The only American car company to successfully build a luxury sedan to compete with the Germans is Tesla.
Luckily, fat American tastes run towards unnecessarily large pickups and SUVs. But for the $10k import hatchback, the question quickly becomes: what used car are you competing against for $10k? Prior recent efforts at bottom-tier economy cars have largely failed in the USA because of the increasingly quality and survival of used cars, which for various reasons are less of an issue in other markets. The average car on the road is entering its second year of middle school. Will people purchase a Chinese car new over an older Escape or Rav4? Time will tell.
Tesla's success can largely be attributed to building EVs as status symbols, EVs that were functionally superior to every ICE car on the road, looking great and blowing them out of the water on acceleration, silent and potent. Tiny EV penalty boxes have failed over and over, because they deliver a worse experience than an equivalent ICE car. Maybe Chinese manufacturing will solve that problem.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
Thoughts on Consumption, Ethical and Otherwise
TLDR: As costs have changed with automation/globalization/etc the status implications attached to items or forms of consumption have changed, despite the costs reflecting less or even opposite directions of status. Why have the implications persisted beyond the mechanical reasons for it?
A discussion elsewhere since lost, and that acid-trip TEMU ad at the Super Bowl, had me thinking about a statistic I saw in a WSJ article that has really stuck with me.
American’s average spending on apparel has declined from 14% of expenditures in 1901 to 10% in 1960 to 4% in 2002. For the most part, we can see that as early industrialization in 1901, when many things were still tailored, to full factory industrialization in 1960, to early globalization in 2002. In 2023, with full globalization, expenditure on clothing declined all the way to 2%.*
My wife and I are probably a little fancier and more enthusiastic about clothing than the average on the Motte, if asked I would say that I spend more on clothing than I need to and own too much and too expensive of clothing, but we were absolutely blown away by the idea of spending 10% of our annual income on clothing. We agreed that we could probably do it, and have fun doing so!, for one or maybe two years, but after that the budget that would create would just be insane. The idea, as an upper-middle class professional couple, of spending something like $30k-$40k on clothing per year every year is insanity! Buying the best and starting with nothing, I don’t really see how a man in my position could spend more than $10k on clothing, once, with less than $1k/yr spending after that to maintain/freshen, unless one gets deep into really truly strange and expensive frivolities. Yet we still talk about clothing items as status symbols in the same way, despite clothing making up a decreasing percentage of spending, despite the obvious fact that if a lower income American spent like a 1960 American they could easily afford to look like a modern upper class American. Clothing just isn’t actually expensive anymore.
And this got me thinking of how many status symbols have changed so thoroughly in their cost, while remaining essentially the same in their perception. I own a 25 year old BMW 3 Series, which had a $27,000 msrp when new, which I like driving around casually; I also have a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche which I drive for work, which had an MSRP of $48,000 new. ((For those of you following along at home, I never got around to actually buying a new-er manual car to replace it)) Persistently, people will give me “rich kid” jokes about the BMW, while the Chevy is treated as working class. Not only that, guys driving new pickups that retail north of $60k will give me the same guff about the BMW! The branding still gives credibility or prestige, even long after the relationship of cost has evaporated or reversed. Small “sporty” BMW = rich, pickup truck = blue collar.
I’m utterly confused as to how people around me spend their money, and I’m fairly certain they are equally confused by how I spend mine. I have friends with similar incomes to mine, who are in credit card debt, but also don’t have the things I would expect a person with my income who is also in credit card debt to have. The money seems to evaporate into nights out, travel, concerts, and house renovations. They look at things I “waste" money on, and I can’t say they don’t have a point: I could probably reduce my clothing budget significantly, I own too much expensive assorted strength training and fitness crap, I could reduce my grocery/food budget considerably if I cooked more from scratch. But then I equally look at their spending, and they invite me to go on a trip, or out to a bar, and I look at the price and say I’m not spending $2k on travel, or $100 on a night out. Though I’ll equally admit that my own travel habits are extremely cheap, and my own tastes in food and especially alcohol relatively light and plebeian.
We’re factually in the same social class, we make similar money in similar positions, but our consumption patterns are different. And what fascinates me is that one set of consumption patterns is judged as normal, even blue collar, while another is judged as fancy, bougie, aristocratic. And the meanings of these symbols of upper-class taste have endured beyond and transcended the actual cost-balance of the activities. The expensive microbrewery play-acts as industrial space. Expensive travel is normal, even treated as normative. Housing, education, healthcare are ruinously expensive but treated as normal, invisible even. I’m not sure I know who is right and who is wrong, or even if someone is right or wrong, in terms of what form of spending will lead to The Good Life. But I’m sure we’re both going wrong in reading into status symbols in the way people once did, when the meanings are so twisted and confused.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
And In Today's Round of America's Favorite Game: Is There Any Group That Doesn't Eventually Have a Sex Scandal?
A Right Wing hanger-on of Milo and Fuentes, Ali Alexander (nee Akbar) appears to have propositioned 15 year old boys for nudes and sex, using access to his "network" of right wing activists and donors as a lure to get budding right wing boys to fuck him. Thoughts on Sammy Diddles Jr.'s little sex scandal:
-- Ali appears to be a victim of the demand for extremists outpacing the supply, with left wing outlets hyping him as a major figure, while I've never heard of him before. I'm not that into the online DR, and he does seem to have had enough friends to hang out with Fuentes and Milo, and to get outed by Milo on his podcast. Milo stated that he chose to out Ali because Ali had used Milo's name as part of his pitch, Ali was telling young (presumably queer?) Republican activists that they could get introductions into Milo's circles if they boned Ali. He is cited as having "founded" Stop the Steal, but I'm not clear on exactly what that means. It's not clear to me that, eg, Donald Trump or Kelly Conway let alone Ron DeSantis had any idea who this guy was. Milo and Fuentes are themselves way overhyped, being fairly comic and unimportant clowns. Predictably, when a political activist gets embroiled in scandal he is always listed by his enemies as the single most important member of their opposition, representative of the entire category. And when one group is under pressure, they tend to target the outliers among their opponents to take off pressure. @HlynkaCG 's theorem that when you get a lot of flak you're over the target, as the Groomer accusation becomes ever more prominent. The problem being that no one has actually ever run the numbers to my satisfaction to show who does it more, and if someone did it would be No True Scotsman'd or "That's just what is reported on"'d into oblivion anyway.
-- Ali Alexander's entire career appears to be further proof that nowhere is Affirmative Action as aggressively practiced as among Right Wing political groups. He was a convicted felon, with no notable academic or business achievements, who somehow became a prominent enough conservative voice during the Obama years to get the attention of activists and donors. Be Black and a conservative, you only have to be about as clever as your average twitter ReplyGuy (let alone your average Mottizen or SSCel) to make it to the Big Time. Clarence Thomas, the Hermanator (RIP king), and Candace Owens are the big dogs; but the tendency runs all the way down to the college Republicans, where every school I ever attended had one Black Conservative who made his whole personality being Black and conservative. It was enough of a gimmick that at 21 it would invariably get him included in every student delegation to meet Newt Gingrich or whichever other red potentate was visiting the school that day, where a conservative white guy would have to win an SGA election or publish a law review note to get that same spot. The sheer rarity of Blacks in conservative circles mean that if conservatives choose to care about representation, they gotta take whoever they can get. The result is that the conservative critique of affirmative action is most true among conservatives themselves: never trust conservative Blacks, they have high odds of being morons or grifters because they need almost no qualifications. Being Black and conservative is the single easiest grift in America.
-- Does any organized group avoid child sex scandals over the long term? I'm a Catholic, and I've been enduring the pedo jokes for most of my life flung against my church. Only to watch as Babtists, non denominational groups, men high in academic and artistic circles, and of course politicians and teachers get consistently caught up in the same scandals. What is the solution to all this? Disapproving of homosexuality doesn't seem to work. Disapproving of all sex doesn't seem to work. The kinds of protections that need to be put in place to keep kids from ever being in positions of risk undermine youth mentorship, they force kids to lean purely on increasingly disjointed and "mixed" family lives when they have no male leadership outside the family. I grew up with older male role models all around me, from Scoutmasters and Priests to coworkers and bosses, in addition to my father. How would I have grown up if I had been isolated from those men by barriers of propriety, and if like so many boys I grew up without a father? How do we raise kids when we must protect them from virtually all men? The only solution that occurs to me is to avoid all organized structures, avoid giving men power, but that seems too pat an answer, an anarchist panacea that works in a smoke filled dorm room.
-- The whole thing strikes me as so sordid, precisely because the boys targeted were so close to being of age. I just can't understand it. Why risk literal federal prison soliciting lewd photos from a 17 year old? It is beyond understanding for me that Ali Alexander couldn't wait a year if he was so very enamored of the boy. This goes in general, I can sort of understand when Pedos or "MAPs" (vomit) say they're attracted to minors in that I can imagine being attracted to things I'm not attracted to, after all lots of people are attracted to things like men or fat women or instagram face that I am not attracted to, I can't understand when they say they can't resist the urge. How is "just don't!" not an effective solution? Maybe I'm speaking from privilege in that I haven't had trouble dating in so long (thanks honey!) that I'm not familiar with the feeling of a dry spell anymore? Maybe we need to work not particularly on why fucking minors is bad, but instead on building willpower. Maybe we just need to work on teaching people to delay gratification and pass the marshmallow test, so that people get "tempted" and just say no. That also seems too pat an answer, willpower seems like it will work on a bodybuilding forum but not in real life.
https://www.thecut.com/article/gambling-addiction-casino-world.html
I saw this article this morning, with the online headline "My $5,000 Bender in Casino World"
And my reaction was... Befuddled. $5k? That's it? I'd be modestly interested in hearing a friend tell me about losing $5k gambling. But as the subject of a whole article? Come on. With inflation the way it is, I think you have to lose at least $30,000 before it's interesting. Listing $5k might hurt a lot of people, but the real problem was their prior destitution/poor decision making, not the $5k lost gambling. Just, like, get a job?
I had a similar reaction to would-be academic Kierkegaard's changing his name and moving country to dodge a $10k judgment. Come on, what formidable person can't just pay that off? Tighten your belt for six months and you should be fine.
Maybe it's just seeing the world through privilege, but I feel weird being asked to respect these people. It's an ethos argument: if you don't have your life organized such that you can handle a minor financial setback, you're not a substantial person.
What do you think is, in 2023 first world countries, a large enough financial loss to be interesting, or to force a life change on someone, for a person you would respect?
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