FiveHourMarathon
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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.
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FiveHourMarathon
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21d ago
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Automated voices on self-checkout gas pumps and cashier stations must be muted by a single clearly marked button press. If this makes it harder for you to run self-checkout, hire cashiers. Any time a store implements self-checkout, they must have a CostCo style cart-checker on the way out. It is unacceptable to me how easy it is to steal from Grocery stores, and that the grocers have decided that they'll just let dishonest people steal rather than hire someone. It makes me want to steal.
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On a related note, create a process by which jobs can be certified as "easy" by OSHA and thus eligible for lower-than-minimum wage. Such as the aforementioned cart checkers. It should be possible to hire someone for a job that isn't worth minimum wage.
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Abolish almost all police enforcement personnel. Police should function purely in investigative and administrative roles. Instead, a 2% flat income tax on all citizens will fund both detectives and a public militia consisting of all able-bodied individuals. Every male citizen will be expected to serve 20 hours of militia service per month, patrolling local neighborhoods on call for emergencies. Completing your service hours will entitle you to avoid paying the tax, if you don't serve you do pay the tax. Citizen militias will be on hand at all times, day and night, to respond to crime calls and other emergencies.
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Abolish DA and PD offices. Rather, the roles will be combined as State's Lawyers, and the same lawyers will be assigned randomly to prosecute or defend any given defendant. This will mean that defense attorneys and prosecutors will have the same experience, relationships, and access to investigative, police, and judges.
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All fitness and sport equipment will be tax-free.
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Significant encouragement towards mixed-income and mixed-use housing developments. The ideal layout is the classic American small town, where a series of small row-homes and apartment buildings border large corner homes where the local Doctor/Lawyer/Banker lived. There is significant value in having poor and rich Americans interact and form social bonds.
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No product can be marketed using any kind of patriotic or "American" theme unless it is owned, headquartered, and predominantly assembled in America.
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Strong encouragement for alternatives to graveyards. Graveyards are becoming increasingly sprawling, depressing eyesores of identikit headstones, poorly maintained because of bad finances, too large because of a system built for a much smaller population. A bitch and a half to move if development becomes necessary. Cremation, mausoleums, Tibetan Sky Funerals, go wild. But graveyards are a problem.
FiveHourMarathon
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2mo ago
I've definitely heard a lot of it. "God give me the confidence of a mediocre white man" "What I could achieve if I were a white man" "It must be so easy being a white man" "I had to twice as much to get half as much recognition as I would get if I were a white man."
These are stock memes. It beggars belief that you've never heard anything like that, so I'd tend to suggest you weren't listening "right." You might have heard a more subtle variation than the rather extreme example in OP. Though I also tend to feel sometimes like I move in significantly less SJW heavy circles.
And of course I hear the inverse quite often. "I coulda been a contenda if only it hadn't been for [affirmative action/the Conspiracy/women/Jews]."
Neither Tribe has a monopoly on the external locus of control. It's a trait of identity politics, and one of the reasons I decry the rise of identity politics on the Right, it's ineffective.
FiveHourMarathon
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13d ago
The Democrats are fumbling the ball, but Republicans still need to recover it, and as of yet they show few signs of being willing or able to do so. Jews moving away from the Democrats need to go somewhere. And the GOP is not offering a welcoming environment at this time. Some Jews who come to the conclusion that Right Wing Antisemites are merely harmless morons while Left Wing Antisemites are powerful and dangerous will make the switch, but I doubt it will be a mass exodus.
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Taking Communism on its own terms, historical materialism is refuted by the Soviet Union's failure even if it experienced a period of success. One of Communism's primary doctrines and promises has been the historical inevitability of the Communist form, that Capitalism's contradictions mean that it must inevitably fail, and be supplanted by Communism. This was the official belief of the Soviet Union, and remains afaik the official position of Red China. The failure of the Eastern Bloc and its reversion to Capitalism contradicts the core tenets of Communism as the right side of history. The promise of Communism was never that it could deliver a period of relatively decent development relative to expectations, it was always that it would deliver a permanent world of equality. It had such persuasive power to so many intellectuals in the 20th century because they genuinely found Marx's arguments persuasive, and believed that Communism was inevitable. The failure of the Soviet Union was strong evidence against that belief. It should be noted that the continued existence of Red China should be a riposte, but that still doesn't really fit into a simplistic view of Marx, and few on any side are very pro-China.
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Few people are Utilitarians, such that they'll accept any amount of abridged Human Rights for a % improvement in development. The Soviets had a bad reputation for human rights abuses. There is a point at which many of us would "most respectfully return [our] ticket" for utopia.
That being said, I largely accept that argument as regards, particularly, Castro in Cuba. Mostly because the rest of the Caribbean doesn't offer much else in the way of developmental and human rights success stories compared to Cuba, while Poland and Germany are a pretty clear demonstration that Capitalism delivered better results than Communism. If anything, economic results in the Caribbean seem to show that they should have just stayed colonized.
FiveHourMarathon
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14d ago
What do you mean by this?
Trump had the courage to engage and lead on the issues. Discourse on free trade agreements has changed completely from 2015 to today. Discourse on Russia and the support for Forever Wars has all but flipped partisan valence. Polling of the public, and the positions publicly espoused by Republican political candidates, have changed as a result of Trump's leadership on the issues.
Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump...
I think it is incumbent to pretend to be a true believer in public. Trump's supporters believe that he is a believer, that is enough. If a leader is perceived as cynical, think Mitch McConnell, it is difficult to push public opinion.
We can debate what kind of costly signals are sufficient to reach a point where True Believer vs Extra Savvy Counterfeit become indistinguishable. When the young aristocracy physically fight and die in Flanders, it sort of doesn't matter if they're doing it "cynically" for credibility or honestly for patriotism. There's a broad perception among Trump's supporters that he has suffered for his beliefs, that he could have had an easier time of it personally if he had changed his view, and I do think that is important in terms of his ability to move public opinion.
FiveHourMarathon
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25d ago
The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief.
I don't remember where I first heard it, but something that stuck with me about a lot of the LARPer wing of TradCaths who are making "endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope" a byword instead of a gag, was the observation: if your God hates all the same people you do, you aren't really religious, you just have an imaginary friend.
FiveHourMarathon
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9d ago
there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis.
I found the perfect metaphor for this scenario after yesterday: the Falcons drafting Michael Penix Jr. 8th overall, after signing Kirk Cousins for huge money in the offseason. All the possible outcomes are bad scenarios for the Falcons. If Cousins is good, Penix never plays, and they wasted the 8th pick, with which there is no question they could have drafted someone at 8 who could help Cousins win. If Cousins isn't good, and Penix actually plays, then they've wasted $45mm/yr for the years they should be benefitting from the cheap Rookie QB contract, undermining the team they could build around Penix if he's good enough to get picked 8 overall.
It's possible that this all plays out fine, and the Falcons are good despite it. Like the Niners and Trey Lance. But they're betting against themselves somewhere. They're either spending $45mm/yr because they're worried they might whiff on the 8th overall pick. Or they spent the 8th overall pick because they were worried they have whiffed on the massive free agent QB contract. The scenarios where things actually work are worse than they would be otherwise.
FiveHourMarathon
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7d ago
I might overcorrect towards giving people some grace on these things, because I can't imagine ever talking to my wife like that, it's so far outside of my experience that I don't want to assume I know what people are thinking. I know many people have more contentious relationships than I do.
FiveHourMarathon
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7d ago
So the argument is, if not for religion my life would be even worse?
FiveHourMarathon
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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
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1mo ago
I highly recommend the book. It is extremely light and fun and easy, it's a great beach read kind of book. If you're interested in Bourdain's life and mind, I'd say it's a must, because that is the first work he published that made his name, or the last thing he wrote before becoming famous depending how you look at it. So I think it probably offers more insight, or unique insight, compared to his later works which are going to be influenced by his life.
It is true, you never know, that is one reason a gun in the house ups successful suicide rates so much, for some people it must just be a fleeting moment of "this is all too much", it passes for most but some pull the trigger, and a gun makes that easy (I say this as a gun toting red blooded american). But damn, sober doorknob hanging? That can't be a good way to go.
Fascinating Factoid: a high percentage of people who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge and happened to survive said they regretted jumping immediately as they were falling.
The whole idea of placing blame for someone's suicide on a one-to-one basis is always going to end up hackneyed. At best you're talking about an egg-shell-skull on the part of the victim. Even someone like 2arms1head, who wrote a well-reasoned manifesto for why he killed himself, there are people like that still living.
I'd place suicide in general on a spectrum from self-preservation to self-destruction, shooting oneself in the head is one end of it, but something like heroin addiction is pretty close. You know it will kill you. Probably not today, but the odds of an OD add up until one day you don't make it. Bourdain:
...wrote in Kitchen Confidential of his experience in a SoHo restaurant in 1981, where he and his friends were often high. Bourdain said drugs influenced his decisions, and that he would send a busboy to Alphabet City to obtain cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine, and heroin.
He always had that self-destructive streak in him.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
He brought a unique voice to the forum. One can of course doubt any story on the internet, but I recall a SSS thread where I asked how many marriageable partners each poster had a shot with over the course of their life. Of course various personal narratives of how each poster met their partner were part of many responses. Hlynka's was unique in that he reported marrying the girl he accidentally knocked up. It was simply a very different vibe.
I've had frustrating philosophical disagreement with him. I think he discounts the degree to which political affiliation is something born into rather than chosen, and find his Trump support baffling. But I also thought he fought the good fight in many cases.
I ultimately find the weird mommy issues of the posters who just can't obey the rules to be so interesting. This is at the end of the day a clubhouse, no one makes money off it, no one pays to play. The desire to rebel seems so cheap in the context, like it comes from a thwarted desire to do so with a real authority figure.
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
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1mo ago
You bat people are insane. They're both inexperienced fighters so the bat hits are going to be pretty bad and the knife hits are going to be pretty bad. But a bad knife hit still means someone is getting stabbed, which is way, way worse than a bad bat hit. The only way the bat user wins the fight is if they get lucky and get a very good hit in (like bashing the person full-force on the head). They only get maybe one chance, then the knife user can just close the distance by lunging.
My answer was Bat before looking, but I caught the ETA before I posted so I'll reply in detail.
This all hinges on how one assumes an "average" person to behave, and in who you picture when you imagine an average person. I picture two males, late twenties to early fifties, out of shape but not totally sedentary, blue collar workers. Any time your model changes to make the people bigger or increase physical fitness it is advantage to the bat as strength doesn't scale with toughness, any time you increase courage and willingness to accept injury to win it is advantage to the knife. An additional X-Factor, obviously, is how much baseball experience you imagine the average person having. If you picture your batter having played baseball from tee-ball to high school, I'd give him a much higher shot. if you picture this being the first time he ever touches a baseball bat, much lower. This is going to enter into who you picture when you picture average: a small white town in the USA is going to have a lot more "average" baseball experience than a city in Germany. If you have the hand-eye coordination from years of hitting baseballs, the odds of someone getting in without getting hit get lower.
You "knife people" are thinking that you shoved a neuralink up each contestant's ass and they are now being steered by billionaires with xbox controllers. You imagine they are acting with perfect courage and sangfroid, that damage done to them is only notable for its physical impact and not for the psychological. You picture it as a video game where the knife guy tanks the hit from the bat and then goes in for the kill. This would work, for a person with perfect courage and sangfroid. This is not the average untrained person.
Most people will be unwilling to get hit with the bat, they will be scared of getting hit. While the rational choice is to accept the pain and at worst broken left arm or ribs or some missing teeth and stab the other guy to death, most random people will not be willing to do so. They will be unable to force themselves to take a hit and keep moving. Even if they try to, they will hesitate or feel pain and be thrown off balance mentally by it, they won't close, and they'll get hit again.
If we were to model this in reality with random people, I suspect that the results would be close to random, and that it would take many trials to see any kind of result, because the mental fortitude to murder someone at the risk of one's own life is pretty stochastically distributed, and it would be the defining factor in the match.
FiveHourMarathon
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2mo ago
Those who didn't originate the thought but they are its loud propagators, so BAP, who are filled with the kind of racial hate where they dislike Hip-Hop solely because of its blackness. I know they'd yeschad me calling them racist but that's not my angle. I'm not criticizing them for being racist, I'm criticizing them for allowing their supposedly great intellects to be subjugated by their racism; to be made retarded by hate as they showboat their inability to appreciate beauty.
I don't think this is a good steelman of why the DR types wouldn't grok onto hiphop. Hiphop is, as a cultural shibboleth, nearly unequaled in the catch 22 it places white people in. And the defining feature of white-identitarians on the dissident right isn't their racism, its their conspicuous sensitivity to racial slights against them. Hip hop's place in culture would be an ulcer for them, not because hip hop is Black, but because Hip Hop goes out of its way to degrade white people involved with it.
It doesn't happen every time, by any means, but I've heard each of these responses to the question "do you like Hip Hop?" called racist:
-- "Yes, I love Hip Hop, I'm super into it, I know everything about it." Ewwww, wigger, cultural appopriation, etc etc. And God forbid you sing along to the lyrics! You're not allowed to say nigger, they are.
Ok, so listening to Hip Hop as a white person is racist, the right answer must be:
-- "I don't listen to Hip Hop, I only listen to [other music]." Obvious racist, denying Black excellence, made retarded by hate, yadda yadda. No, it doesn't matter that you love Bad Brains or Charlie Pride or Mingus.
Ok, so I have to listen to Hip Hop, but it's bad if I appropriate Black culture, and I can't sing along to songs with Nigger in them, which is basically every rap by a Black artist, I should listen to white rappers.
-- "I like Hip Hop, but really only like Eminem and El-P and stuff like that, their lyrics speak more to me personally." How racist do you have to be to only listen to white guys and not the many great Black rappers?
The status of white rappers is itself an obvious inequity. A true case of having to be twice as good to get half as much credibility!
Now, of course, that isn't the standard outcome. Most white people like rap and it's just fine. But DR types are often defined by their strong sensitivity to racial slights, they are people who really suffer from that kind of thing psychically, who Notice. They hate being in a position where a vague and byzantine social code defines the statements they are "allowed" to make without being accused of something. Less charitably, they're often people who don't have the social know-how to navigate these situations successfully.* Hip hop gives them an ulcer.
Semi related, because you seem to be an enthusiast of hip hop culture and history: why did rap rock fail? I've been listening to a lot of Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, Time Zone, Public Enemy's album with Anthrax. Up to 2000, you see a lot of crossover. Beastie Boys were one of the most important groups in bringing hip hop to the mainstream, but that was a sterile evolutionary line for some reason. Ice Cube had a punk rock group, Body Count. Rock and punk bands frequently included a bit of record scratching or hip-hop production. Then like Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit happened, and it was so lame it killed it? But that seems like a weak explanation though. In many ways, it feels like Rap/Hip Hop wasn't really solidified as a Black cultural patrimony until much later in the game, white rappers adopted it rarely but unselfconsciously in the 80s and 90s, while after 2000 white rappers were required to pay tribute to Black culture in a way that earlier artists didn't; and in turn Black rappers in the 80s and 90s recognized punk rock and metal as interrelated genres they were interested in, similarly rebellious youth music, which naturally interacted. The split in 2005 when I was a kid, seems to be much harder than it was in 1985. Am I off base here?
*All this applies equally, if not moreso, to race-warriors on the left. The same thing that gets a Slate thinkpiece about "microagressions" from one overeducated Black author is "just joking around" or "literally what are you talking about" to another Black guy. Something I've been thinking about a lot is the way that pushes for group rights are oriented around differentials in group identification and sensitivity. For one man, second class citizenship status is just fine as long as his life is ok; for another anything but perfect equality for his racial group is experienced as a constant open sore. I'm not sure all of this is downstream of culture, some of it feels like a personal predilection, genetic or otherwise, towards offense taking.
FiveHourMarathon
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14d ago
Kavanaugh: I hate that he has literally never had a job. In his bio he has no job he's ever had that wasn't either judicial or political. He's never argued a case in court or had a client. Judicial jobs, even as clerks, are rarefied air: everyone treats you with deference. He worked briefly in an "of counsel" position at a law firm, and it's not clear he ever did anything there, literally he couldn't give a good answer when asked. I also find him to be a bit of a government stooge, in regret over his role with Starr he finds the President to be immune from just about everything.
KBJ: I don't like how she was nominated, and haven't seen anything to change my mind as of yet.
Kennedy: Absolute nightmare of a Justice. Obergefell will go down with Dred Scott on the list of universally reviled precedents, if the current structure of the Court even survives the results of Obergefell. The number of ways the fake-test he created in Obergefell can and will be twisted by future Justices has the potential to undermine the constitution completely. The only positive way I can skew his opinion is that he wanted so badly to protect Gay Rights that he ensconced them into a framework that will allow a conservative court to protect other rights that they care about more than they care about gay marriage.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
To be fair, the book feels like it takes place across an area no larger than maybe Arizona at the outside. There's no indication of cultural variation.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo ago
I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.
Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos” contest
I can’t resist commenting on how the ongoing freakout over the Kansas City Chiefs making the Super Bowl perfectly encapsulates everything that has gone wrong. Taylor Swift may have endorsed Biden in 2020, but as Max Meyer pointed out after attending one of her concerts, everything about her aesthetic and place in the culture is implicitly conservative. Her fans want to be attractive and meet men. They’re not interested in changing their sex or cheering for urban mobs looting the local supermarket. If you simply give them some semblance of normalcy, they’ll be on your side and vote in opposition to the left and what it has become. But instead of that, they get conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl being rigged so Swift can then endorse Biden.
We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.
There’s something deeply poetic about this freakout centering around football, the sport that has always served as a symbol of wholesome American normalcy. The old mantra of “the personal is political” always reflected a major electoral weakness of the left. It revealed an inability to have any thoughts or passions that aren’t part of an ideological agenda. Most people don’t care about politics all that much, and feel more positively inclined towards whichever tribe doesn’t try to make them feel guilty about that fact. If you’re watching the AFC Championship game and try to steer the conversation to which players are vaxxed, most sports fans aren’t going to want to talk to you anymore. For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.
As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:
I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.
Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!
The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.
I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.
The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.
Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.
AND YET
I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.
So when Richard says:
For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.
He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.
*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
It was one of my favorite Trump moments because you could sort of watch him reasoning out his new pro-Life position in real time on camera, and all the pro-life activists were cringing and trying to insert their epicycles of morality that explained how Abortion is Murder but that mothers should not be prosecuted.
A lot of these comments in trying to steelman "Kissinger is Evil" are focusing on the question "Should Kissinger be hated?" I'm going to focus on what I think is your real question, the much more circumstantial "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?" To answer this I'm going to tell a couple of personal stories, passed down to me by my elders, because hatred of Kissinger among people under 50 is largely a meme passed down to us by leftist elders.
My father was raised in a deeply conservative christian community that was religiously anti-war. So while he was far from a hippy, he was against the war in Vietnam and avoided the draft. His best friend from high school joined the marines, went to Vietnam, served for years in multiple tours in combat, received a pile of medals. His friend was back in town on leave and crashed at my dad's place, he had changed from high school, told my dad that he just liked killing at this point, that he and his squadmates would shoot children and try to stand them up with machine gun fire, that they had burned villages full of women and children, that if they ended the war there was no chance he'd come back to the USA and get a factory job he'd go fight wherever anyone would hire him. He went back to Vietnam, and was one of the very last US soldiers killed, in the last months before US forces were pulled out.
What I think examining Kissinger's record on the merits ignores is a lot of context:
-- Kissinger had an outsized personality, known to cavort with blondes and flirt with women, he appeared in the news constantly, was a "public intellectual." He had much more of a public presence than, say, Blinken or Kerry. He was identified with the era's policies in a way that other SoS's weren't. His book Diplomacy is magisterial, a masterwork, but it is also massively self-glorifying, he ranks himself next to Metternich and Bismarck, and this self-perception oozes from every speech he ever gave.
-- The war in Vietnam was the defining trauma for a generation. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed, crippled, or traumatized and their families' lives were derailed by the war. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested, prosecuted, fled the country, or restructured their lives to oppose the war or to avoid the draft. Cultural conflict over the war was brutal, so much more brutal than anything we see today. There really were thousands of Americans, marching in the streets, chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!" And then, worse, it turned out the obnoxious unpatriotic faggots chanting for the VC were right, Ho Chi Minh did win. It tore America apart from 1965-1975.
-- Following the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration was dragged into the public view in Congress. Every aspect of the operation of the administration was questioned on the news. Conveniently, Nixon had hidden voice-activated microphones in the oval office, and hours upon hours of recordings were made public. People heard how Kissinger really talked, how sanguine he was about what he was doing. The people heard how the sausage was made, and the very worst grinder was Kissinger. Neither Kissinger, nor Nixon, believed the war was winnable when they took office in 1969. Kissinger, and Nixon, were publicly exposed as absolutely believing that every bombing and every troop surge and every expansion of the war to a neighboring neutral country was not for the purpose of "saving" South Vietnam but for the purpose of putting on a diplomatic front, of showing "the world" that the USA was tough. Every kid that died in Vietnam after Nixon and Kissinger took office, like my dad's best friend, died for his country only in the most attenuated sense. Kissinger was the reason that thousands of American boys died, or were crippled, or had their souls ripped apart killing innocent Cambodians, for nothing. It was one thing to suspect that the American government was throwing lives away over nothing, or to think that they were extremist but mistaken true believers, it was quite another to hear Kissinger state frankly that Americans were dying for some vague concept of "Credibility."
-- This loss of innocence was part of the Vietnam experience for America, and that was pinned on Nixon and Kissinger. After Watergate, Nixon was in permanent exile, removed from public office, public intellectual life, public view. Kissinger hung around, advising, teaching, lecturing, consulting. So Nixon-Kissinger's mutual crimes were easy to pin on the still-present Kissinger. He never got any comeuppance, never got any public shaming. He was never punished, and the rage only grew.
TLDR: It's the combination of his crimes and his public visibility that made him a villain, and the very clear evidence of those crimes convicted him. That villainy is compounded to make him the primary bad guy behind everything the CIA every did between 1950 and last week.
One of my scoutmasters was an old timer, a Vietnam veteran who came home and became a hippie and bought a VW Minibus and lived out of it. Whenever we did the classic skit "A politician, a priest, and a boyscout are on a crashing plane," he would have us change the "politician" to "Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." The kids didn't get it, but the old scoutmasters laughed and laughed. For those unfamiliar the skit goes like this:
There's a small plane, represented by four dining hall chairs in a row. The pilot and three passengers, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an elderly priest, and a boy scout. The pilot turns to the passengers and says "We've lost our engine. There's only three parachutes. Well, I've got a family, and I need to fill out the paperwork with the FAA, so I'm taking one parachute, good luck!" He takes a parachute, and jumps out of the plane. The remaining passengers look at each other. Henry Kissinger stands up and says "I'm the smartest man in the world, I'm vital to the operation of international diplomacy, I'm important to history, I'm taking one parachute." He takes a parachute and jumps. The priest turns to the boy scout and says, "Young man, I've lived a good life, a long life, you take the last parachute, I'll pray a rosary as I go down." The boy scout says "Don't worry padre, there's two parachutes left. Henry Kissinger took my backpack."
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
and also that DEI programs seem to have providing comfortable employment as a primary goal over actually doing anything.
At law schools specifically, while it is difficult to find data beyond personal anecdotes for a variety of cathedral-related reasons, a lot of what are now called DEI positions have historically been used to improve the "Employment at 9 months post graduation" statistics for URM students.
It's a fun little prestige shell game: elite institutions admit a whole pile of under-qualified students, who even if they do happen to have test scores comparable to their white/asian peers will be branded by their skin color as AA admits, when they have poor results the institutions hire them, and then point to all the great outcomes those students have had like working in academia at elite institutions.
Schools with huge endowments use them to float weaker students for a time to improve their numbers to remain elite schools with huge endowments.
Since this is the Dune thread I'll post my thoughts on my recent readthrough of the first four books. I just read Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune in a row. I wanted to catch up on them in time to see the movie in theaters. A lot of people keep telling me God Emperor is where they get good so maybe I’ll muscle through one more yet. Thoughts:
— Holy shit I feel like I’m stumbling across a conspiracy as I realize that half the fantasy and scifi since Dune was a ripoff of Dune. Star Wars? Just Dune if it was more fun. 40k? Just Dune if you put Leto II to sleep and make the humans fight various Aliens, while really grappling with the scale of a galaxy. It almost feels like a book of memes, a book of tropes that other writers would mix and match and remix into new forms. A Song of Ice and Fire is the worst though. It lines up near character for character, and it amazes me that I didn’t hear about it before. GRRM just took Paul and split him into three Stark sons: Jon Snow is Paul among the Fremen, Rob is Paul the Atreides duke seeking righteous revenge, Bran is Paul(/Leto II) transcending humanity and time itself. We’ve got the murderous young girl, we’ve got the scheming mother, we’ve got the thousands of years of dynasties that don’t go anywhere…on the other hand by comparison to Westeros:
— Why is the world of Dune so tiny and empty? The whole universe seems to consist of like, a few dozen people. The immense human suffering hand-waved off camera never matters, because we never get to know anyone at all. GRRM or Watchmen did a great job with this, Herbert doesn’t even try. The first group of Fremen that Paul and Jessica meet are of course perfectly suited to be Paul’s lieutenant’s to run the galaxy, none of them turn out to be greedy or lazy or incompetent, it’s a sort of galactic scale version of the star Basketball player putting his buddies from high school in charge of his money, except it all works out just fine. Out of all the other billions of people in the galaxy, none of them manage to work their way up to the inner circle. This is, to a certain extent, the core fantasy conceit of Dune: a fantasy of human genetics by which supermen can be bred, individually for Paul and en masse for the Fremen. The fantastical idea that Fremen were super soldiers and that it mattered that they were super soldiers, that living in the desert and fighting your mates a lot would make you ready to take on the Marines, and then if you got enough desert dudes who fought their mates a lot they’d take over the galaxy. History does not back up this idea. But that would have required creating new characters, and we can’t do that. Alia is inhabited by thousands of ancestral memories, souls of the powerful and legendary teeming for attention across centuries, as she loses control of them she is possessed by a nigh-impossible-to-understand terror from deep time…oh wait, no, it’s just the fat guy from the last book. This reaches its parodical pinnacle in Duncan Idaho, a pretty flat stock fantasy character who they physically keep recycling, bringing him back to life so he can sacrifice his life in ever more baroque ways. There are a decent number of named characters, but they’re generally all cardboard cutouts with motivations like “Duty” “Tradition” “Service to the Atreides” “idk I’m evil and want power” or the ever popular “confusing clusterfuck of past lives.” Which brings me to…
— None of the characters do normal things, ever. I understand that Paul, Leto II, Ghanema, Alia, and to a lesser extent Jessica are all supposed to be impossible to understand, they’re supposed to be beyond human comprehension, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes Human. But they never do things for fun. Paul doesn’t like anything, fine, sure, something something expanded consciousness he’s not really human. But no one likes anything. The only people who like anything at all are the villains: Vlad likes murder-fucking boys, Farad’n likes history, Piter wants to fuck Jessica. I guess I’ll spot you Gurney, he likes music, on occasion. None of the named Fremen like anything, except disapproving of other unnamed Fremen liking things. It’s a flat, empty, unpopulated universe. Compare to ASoIAF: Westeros is crammed too full of people who like too many things. They are constantly pinging off each other’s desires, even at times when it doesn’t make any sense. Dune only discusses sex at a disgusted remove, sexuality is unhinged rape, or it is dutiful bonds of marriage, or it is a man being seduced to have his vital fluids drained by a Bene Gesserit. Nobody ever has sex just for fun, the closest we get is some weirdness around Alia in Messiah, but everyone gets together and says “Lets just marry her off to the much older zombie, that will shut her up.” The next time she has sex for pleasure, it’s a sure sign that she’s been inhabited by a Demon (uh, the fat guy from the last book). Nobody ever does anything just for fun. Tolkien’s characters are so much deeper and more human, Sam falls in love with a pretty girl and likes gardening, Bilbo writes up his adventures in a book, Legolas and Gimli compete over how they’ll improve Minas Tirith with their own special skills after the war is over, even Gandalf has his little pleasures of a smoke and telling stories.
— Kudos to Herbert though: he could write a good novel. What’s impressive about Dune is that each of the first four novels stand alone. If Herbert had died or quit writing in the universe after any of the four, the saga is perfectly well concluded. Dune could end with “Paul won, but he sees the Jihad coming” and it’s a satisfying conclusion. Dune Messiah could conclude with the twins born and we just imagine what happens next. Children of Dune could end with Leto II becoming snek and just leave it to the imagination. In the modern world of the obligatory trilogy, or of GRRM failing to ever finish his sprawling series at all, the stands out. At the same time each novel begins naturally, there’s no sense of “hey I thought we settled all that in the last book” or “where the fuck did [new galactic threat] come from?” that ruins so many sequels. Herbert deserves a ton of credit for plotting his novels so that each one is satisfying as a novel in and of itself. That requires a kind of discipline that is so often lacking.
So, anyone else have thoughts on “What if the sand had Cocaine in it and the weirdly Aryan Arabs all got so high they became invincible?"
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
21d ago
I would guess that Iran wanted higher casualties, but also did not want to invite instant retaliation. I guess they might have wanted to achieve a dozen causalities or so. They erred on the side of too few, which is a lot better than erring on the side of too many for everyone. On the plus side, they learned something about Israel's missile defense capabilities.
This assumes that Iranian leaders are constrained to believe in the Israeli government and media's official reports. They are not. Iran is free to spread to its own people that significant damage was done to Israel and that the Jewish world media conspiracy is covering it up.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
When the left talks about fatness being caused by society rather than the individual, well, one of the things is what the society might be able to do to try to get people be more athletic, such as the cities maintaining bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks and climbing gyms. They don't just spring out from thin air, after all - I guess that there would be a possibiliy for private ones, too (climbing gyms, certainly), but the others are a pretty classic case of things that localities do on public money.
Which is why I think, inasmuch as we aren't going to eliminate deductions and go to a flat tax, we should have tax deductions for fitness and sporting expenses and equipment. For the simple reason that these are good things that we want to encourage.
The way I see it, having a strong self-worth is a matter of remembering the variety of audiences that provide worth to you, rather than allowing your self-assessment to be constantly buffeted by the last person you talk to or the room you are in.
My major objection to the way a lot of TRPers talk about the concept of someone being "Alpha" or "Beta" is that they fail to talk about context, Alpha and Beta are inherently ordinal rather than absolute concept. Within a closed space, like a wolfpack or a high school, the alpha male is the biggest and toughest male present. He isn't in any absolute sense Big or Tough, he is the biggest and the toughest. The beta is defined by being smaller, and less tough, not absolutely Small or absolute Cowardly. If the Alpha dies, a Beta moves up.
Using the classic fictional stereotype of an American high school as our pet model, the Alpha male is the star quarterback on the high school football team, right? He's the best athlete, the leader, the chosen one. But if the QB dies in a DUI accident, or transfers schools, or breaks his leg, somebody else becomes the QB. A guy who didn't used to be the best athlete on the team, who used to be second best, becomes the best. That's the nature of an ordinal system of worth.
The problem with the modern world is that very few of us live in a closed system, and so it become scrambled, hard to understand. We live in systems way beyond our Dunbar Number, we live in anonymized urban societies where we feel judged by strangers, or in fake online worlds where we never even see our interlocutors.
People with weak self worth are constantly buffeted by the opinions of strangers, by the ordinal rankings in each room they find themselves in, by a vague sense that an indistinct group of people are better than them. They walk into a room with people better than them, they become servile; while if they are around people worse than them they become tyrannical. They rate themselves around the last interaction they had, forgetting all the good things they've done or all the bad things they've done.
A person with a firm sense of self worth remembers, regardless of what room they find themselves in, the people who love and respect them. Yes there are people better than you, but there are also people worse than you, the fact that you are now in a room with someone better than you doesn't mean you are the worst person in the world. The fact that the last thing you did was wrong doesn't erase all the things you've done right. They rate themselves not on the opinion of the audience in front of them, but on the broader audience, all the world, all the universe, and how they should respond.
Realistic self worth is about steadiness, humility, and honor. As Tony Montana told us, "All I've got in this world is my word and my balls, I don't break them for nobody."
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