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.
User ID: 195
Update to prior CW topic, in another round of America's favorite game Everyone Has a Sex Scandal Eventually: Vice reports that Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation
From Vice's reporting:
Tim Ballard’s exit from Operation Underground Railroad earlier this year followed an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct involving seven women, according to sources with direct knowledge of the organization.
Sources familiar with the situation said that the self-styled anti-slavery activist, who appears to be preparing for a Senate run, invited women to act as his “wife” on undercover overseas missions ostensibly aimed at rescuing victims of sex trafficking. He would then allegedly coerce those women into sharing a bed or showering together, claiming that it was necessary to fool traffickers. Ballard, who was played by Jim Caviezel in the hit film Sound of Freedom, is said to have sent at least one woman a photo of himself in his underwear, festooned with fake tattoos, and to have asked another “how far she was willing to go,” in the words of a source, to save children. These sources requested anonymity because they fear retaliation. The total number of women involved is believed to be higher than seven, as that would only account for employees, not contractors or volunteers.
OUR states only that:
Tim Ballard resigned from O.U.R. on June 22, 2023. He has permanently separated from O.U.R. O.U.R. is dedicated to combatting sexual abuse, and does not tolerate sexual harassment or discrimination by anyone in its organization.
The Mormon church meanwhile chips in to scold Ballard as well:
Last week, a spokesperson for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement to VICE News that contained a pointed rebuke of Ballard. The statement accused Ballard of inappropriately using the name of a church elder, President M. Russell Ballard—the two are not related, despite sharing a last name—“for Tim Ballard’s personal advantage and activity regarded as morally unacceptable.” The church did not specify in its statement what activity it regarded as “morally unacceptable.”
Prior thread on Ballard's film here; My own prior comment here
My read on all this is that it is a human psychological tragedy, Ballard got lost in his own masculine heroic fantasy. Good men nearly all carry the fantasy of, as they say, wishin' a nigga would. We want a reason to give our World of Cardboard Speech. We have the urge to engage in violence and adventure, but we want justified violence, righteous adventure. We want to fight, but fight for the right. Ballard found it in child trafficking investigations. He got to play James Bond in real life!
And what does James Bond do? He sleeps with every woman he sees, "as part of the mission." One can see the logic, if these OUR operatives were in an undercover role pretending to be a couple, that making love would be important. Blowing their cover could cost their lives, could endanger the children they are there to rescue, so whether they want to is irrelevant, they have to! But that was also part of the fantasy for him: he wanted to have to, he wanted an environment where he just had to sleep with these women, which he would then enjoy. No doubt, in his mind, the women involved shared the same fantasy. After all, while else would they join OUR and put themselves in these operations?
Ballard never meant any harm to anyone, he never meant to take advantage, he just thought he had found a moral loophole, an opportunity to enter a morals-free zone for a good cause. Apparently the women involved, the rest of the organization, and the Mormon church disagreed.
We should be wary of our fantasies of righteousness, as men. Engage in self-criticism, when we want to have a reason to use righteous violence, sometimes we just want violence. Which itself isn't necessarily a fatal flaw, there is value in harnessing masculine urges in positive ways, that can be seen as the basis for all social function. But we can't let our fantasies obscure our real mission, or harm those around us.
FiveHourMarathon
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11mo ago
The plan wasn't to have him win the primary and take a dive in the general, it was to have him enter the Republican primary, force the "serious" Rs like Bush and Rubio and Cruz to take ridiculous unpopular positions and look silly arguing with Trump, ultimately lose the primary, and then HRC crushes a Bush or a Rubio who took absurd positions in the primary campaign. The early Trump campaign was intensely flamboyant, and seemed highly unserious by contemporary political standards, everyone assumed the establishment would rally and knock him down.
What happened then was some combination of
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Trump's "absurd" positions turned out to have a massive following among everyday Americans. He started winning. He knocked out like seven serious R contenders one after another, and at first knocking out Jeb Bush and Chris Christie was helpful for HRC, but he got addicted to it, and pretty soon there weren't any R contenders left.
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Bannon, who in this theory was a patsy they all thought was a nut who wouldn't achieve anything, the equivalent of the director they hire in The Producers, took it seriously and was extremely talented. Springtime for Hitler was hit!
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Trump realized he liked winning, and would give it a shot. He started drinking his own kool aid, buying his own sales pitch.
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Clinton (et al) tried to puncture the Trump surge by attacking him personally and leaking info on him. Trump took offense at this, and said OK you're gonna try to hurt me, I'm not taking a dive. He was willing to take the L, but the other guy has to pull his punches in that situation, if you make it a survival problem the Tomato Can has to fight back.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
How familiar with his work are you? Did you ever read Kitchen Confidential?
I ask because when you read the book that made Bourdain famous, it rapidly becomes obvious that he was troubled long before he was famous. He was the Samurai Sword kid at a liberal arts college before he dropped out and headed into the world of cooking. Much of the charm of the work comes from Bourdain's hard partying, booze and drug soaked world. He dropped in and out of cooking jobs and drugs over the years. His personality before fame was self-destructive.
The problem with finding causes for suicide is that you can always find someone who suffered something as bad or worse who didn't kill themselves. Some people kill themselves over seemingly minor slights, others suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune well past the point at which I would have cut bait.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo 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
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5mo ago
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE?
Sure, a great example is to look at people who hear of the DKE once on Reddit, and never shut up about how they see it everywhere.
I suspect that the average dumb (human) person does know they're a bit dim, so it confuses me how this finding can even arise.
I think something we don't think about enough is how dumb people use heuristics to help them navigate a world where they are vaguely-aware that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to participate.
My wife and I argued for a whole drive to Philly about a tweet she saw that went something like: If you're more intelligent than your partner and better at arguing logically, winning every argument with them by arguing logically is abusive. She thought it was retarded, I said that while the use of the term "abusive" was rather florid, the point has some validity. Picture a couple, one a well-educated motte-ian wordcel able to deconstruct and reconstruct a logical argument about anything at any time, the other a nice and well intentioned imbecile who can't string two sentences together. If they agree on logical argument as the way to settle things, the motte-izen will win every time, and the imbecile will never get what he wants, even if the imbecile happens to be right. One side getting what they want every time is bad for the relationship in the long term, even if the imbecile agrees that they lost the argument, they will notice not getting what they wanted later, and they will resent it. They may resent it incoherently, unable to logically explain why the outcome is unjust, but they will resent it nonetheless. This will be deleterious to the relationship.
The idiot moves through life thinking that salesmen are evil, because he knows that a good salesman can talk him into something he'll regret, it's happened before. I will never forget a waitress at my parents' favorite restaurant, telling them about how she needed a new car, and she went to the dealer intending to buy a used Jeep Liberty (a bad car, but a small and economical one) and wound up getting talked into buying a brand new Jeep Commander (a $50k seven passenger monstrosity that FCA's CEO would later call "not fit for human consumption" and state should never have been sold). She had no kids, she had no outdoor hobbies, she had zero need for a seven passenger SUV, but she got talked into it. On a seven year loan at a crazy interest rate.
The dimwit chooses tribalism, because the black skin good white skin bad is an easy meme to keep track of. He'll only benefit modestly, if at all, by his tribal champions being elevated, but it's easier than figuring out actual policy questions, and it avoids the salesman problem again.
The moron assumes that everyone is out to get him, because he has precious little ability to defend himself if they are. Everyone has an angle, he intones sagely, because he has been fooled so many times. Paranoia is adaptive, like a skittish rabbit.
FiveHourMarathon
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7mo ago
Let's Make the Regular Season Great Again: Contra Freddie De Boer on Why the NBA Sucks Now
Freddie De Boer posts on why players demanding trades is making NBA fandom unsustainable. I was shocked to see how spectacularly Freddie missed the point, and bought into the very frame that is itself destroying the NBA. TLDR: Dame Lillard, star guard in Portland, demanded a trade from his hapless team to Miami. His team did ultimately trade him, but to noted metropolis Milwaukee instead. Freddie uses the occasion to talk about how it makes no sense for a fan to root for his home team if he's in a second tier city, because his team will probably never win a championship.
While Freddie does notice that Dame got traded to Milwaukee, he failed to notice that Brooklyn assembled three superstars who all demanded trades to: Philadelphia, Dallas, and Phoenix. And the Knicks over in Manhattan have been hopeless for decades. Player empowerment isn't about moving to big markets, it's about moving to superteams where players get the best chance to pad their resume with a championship.
Freddie buys entirely into the very frame that is destroying the NBA: that the championship is the only thing that matters. When we rate players' legacies entirely by their playoff success, and when fans only want to root for teams that have a "shot to win a championship." In a world of perfect parity, theoretically, each team would win a championship ever 32 years, reach the championship every 16, and the semifinals every 8. Of course, there will never be perfect parity, so every time a team wins a second championship in less than 32 years, another team gets shuffled back to the end of the line. If fans only want to root for teams that win championships, they won't root for most teams.
And of course that idea is clearly silly if you look abroad. In Europe, soccer teams buy players from each other all the time, and in most leagues there is a price at which teams are forced to sell against their will. Literally every European soccer team outside of maybe a dozen doesn't have a shot at ever winning a meaningful championship, yet so many of them have fans that will literally stab each other over team honor. Fans of rich teams win, fans of poor teams know they never will. Both still have fans. How do we explain that?
How do we make it worth rooting for the Pacers if the Pacers are as likely as not to never win a championship in your conscious lifetime as a fan? By creating things the Pacers can win. The NBA is already doing their best to make the regular season count more in the minds of fans, but it is already so far gone that I'm sure that won't be enough. Honestly, I don't even care enough about the NBA regular season to know how the regular season is structured, so my examples will be from the MLB or NFL.
So I have a proposal for all American leagues, not just the NBA, for how to astroturf some fan engagement in the regular season, even for teams that don't have a shot in hell: create public trophies for rivalries that are displayed in stadiums prominently after rivalry match wins, and the absence of which is displayed after losses. Basic idea runs like this. At a prominent area near the entrance to every stadium, each team would be required to erect a display area for trophies. Enormous, gaudy, awful trophies. Both the display and the trophy will be designed specifically for two things: so that fans will be tempted to take photos there for social media, and that fans entering the stadium will notice the presence and even moreso feel the absence of these trophies. You could have trophies for specific rivalries (Yankees would have the Red Sox and the Mets), or you could have trophies for division rivals (Eagles would have Dallas, the Giants, and the choke artists formerly known as the Redskins) or you could have both. The team that won the last match/series gets the trophy, publicly displayed in their stadium for fans to take photos with before games. The fans of the team that loses have to walk by the empty plinth before every game, the blank space reminding them that the trophy is in Boston/Dallas/New York, filling them with rage at the enemy having the trophy. Foment rivalry and hatred, force official channels and associated press for both teams to cover moving the trophy, make placing it at the winner's stadium a public event.
How will this help? Even in a down season, an otherwise mediocre team can sometimes sneak in a win against a hated division rival.. Now, rather than just playing spoiler, fans of down teams have pride to play for: we might not win the championship but if Any Given Sunday this game, we still get to keep the trophy, and more importantly keep the other guys from having it.
The other change, to discourage tanking, is to alter the draft order system. Sprinkling top talent among weaker teams is good, I like parity, but teams being as bad as possible is an awful spectacle. So I like the proposal I've seen before: at the 2/3 or 3/4 point of the season, the bottom 5-10 teams get the top 5-10 draft picks, but they are awarded in order of those teams finish to the season. Those bottom feeders are put into a new league table for the last 1/4-1/3 of the season, and the team with the best record gets one, second best gets two, etc. This would discourage teams from fielding anti-competitive teams after realizing their team is sunk, from selling at the deadline for future picks. Hell, teams in the bottom half might be buyers at the deadline to try to get that number one pick! Give teams that are out of the playoff race something to play for in the remainder of the season.
Proposals like that, rather than further complicating roster management or constraining players, will help make the Regular Season Great Again, and that will give fans of every team something to root for.
FiveHourMarathon
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10mo ago
Or people who publicly flipflop on serious ideological issues seem more like psychotics than they do like fair minded thinkers. It often strikes me as arrogance rather than humility.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
And I'm old enough to have friends who were complete shitbirds when we were 19 and who found Jesus at 30 and now won't shut up about it. And while I respect them for their change, I kind of reject their lectures. I stayed at a 5 (semi open relationship with the same girl) all along, you were at a 0 (lie to girls about your career and family to try to trick them into sex) and now you're at a 10 (premarital sex will lead to hell). Maybe take a chill pill, a touch of humility, if you were wrong then you might be wrong now.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo ago
The due diligence question is obviously is this actually a fundamental aspect of science as stated or is it misrepresenting a more nuanced principle?
Politically, this is the instrumentalization of Chesterton's Fence (and the related concept I've taken to calling "Chesterton's Ruins"). The status quo bias presumes the wisdom of the past, in a Panglossian logic, isn't so bad, so you need to justify any changes. It's the conservatism of the comfortable.
I just watched this happen at a local courthouse. A new young judge was just seated. He wants everyone to think well of him, he wants to be seen to be energetic not lazy, he looks at his schedule and his first trial isn't until the end of next month! So he calls the two lawyers in the case and says, can you do Friday? They, of course, say yes, because judges never reschedule anything unless it is really important and they don't want to piss off the new guy.
But now those two lawyers are calling everyone else they're working with and rescheduling things to make Friday work, and the ripple effects are felt throughout the courthouse. And all the other judges are mad at the new judge, for fucking with the system. But he had no idea, he just saw an opportunity to do something and did it.
FiveHourMarathon
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4mo ago
I recall the term being thrown around in survey of niche articles in right wing publications circa 2014-2015 to refer to a concept vaguely like "Right Wing but Irreligious," a conservatism that did not center evangelical Christianity, with a listed cluster of guys I had never heard of who argued different versions with the similar theme of right wing but leaving lame-o evangelicals behind. This included both Richard Spencer types who wanted to refocus conservatism around the white race (or hatred of the Blacks), and Rand-ian objectivists. I was never under the impression this was much of a movement, just an intellectual argument that was somewhere in the vague fever swamps that lay to the right of The American Conservative to which I subscribed at the time. Guys like Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison would mention the concept, and associated figured and publications, as a line item. My impression was that the concept was largely aesthetic, about appropriating a disrespectful anti-authoritarian, "alt," hipster aesthetics rather than lame wal-mart corporatism, punk rock not christian rock, etc.
It wasn't until the Clinton campaign elevated that discourse that I started to have any real familiarity with it, and what it refers to. I don't know to what extent we can trace any real influence the "alt right before it was cool" had on the broader alt-right movement of today.
I recall attending a conference on "agile" corporate structures at a business school, and in the typical form of these lectures by professors I half remember exactly one line and little else. He talked about how as a young college student in Europe in the 70s, he was involved in campus marxism, and the goal for everyone at the time was to be a "number" who got arrested or infamous for some act of protest: the Munich Six, the Birmingham Nine, etc. And he talked about how at the time, he could tell the difference between like nine kinds of communist, and could clock someone within seconds of meeting based on small aesthetic cues or minor vocabulary choices. He could tell a Marxist from a Leninist from a Stalinist from a Maoist from a Trotskyite from an anarchist from a third-world-ist etc. But for the rest of the world these differences were unimportant: those are all communists.
In the same way, those on the Right can tell the difference between fourteen kinds of right-winger, and the natural tendency is to giggle at normies who confuse Richard Spencer with Curtis Yarvin, or think either of them have anything in common with Mitt Romney. But for normies their coding isn't that strong. So the "rise of the alt right" has less to do with whether anyone in particular has so many followers, but more to do with alt right rising as a blanket classification for every right winger in skinny jeans.
FiveHourMarathon
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5mo ago
Conservatives/rightists loving Bonaparte is the centuries long version of the left wing Twitter gag about how MSNBC rehabilitated Dubya and made Liz Cheney a hero for opposing Trump, that inevitably in 2036 they'll rehab Trump and say we should vote for Don Jr to keep Matt Gaetz out of office.
The great conservatives of the time were all opposed to Bonaparte, the great liberals all favored him at least a little. So the question does become, is trad unchanging, or does anything become trad with sufficient time? A lot of Napoleonic borders either created nationalisms, or became future flashpoints for competing nationalisms.
I've no intention of seeing the movie, but I don't understand how you try to make a movie called Napoleon? Napoleon and Josephine, great movie idea. Napoleon in Egypt, great movie idea. The rise of Napoleon, great movie idea. The grande armee, great movie idea. Waterloo, great movie idea. You can even sneak in a thoughtful slow paced Elba movie! And bitches love franchises, you find the right actors you can do a Napoleon movie a year for five or six years! Which gives you an opportunity to introduce "our guys;" fictional side characters whose arc is contained within each film, with maybe a later callback.
Trying to fit his entire career, an entire era, into one film? You might as well make a movie called America and try to cram the civil war, the world wars, and the sixties into fifteen minutes each.
Slightly different topic but I tend to think the people who make it to play pro sports are significantly above group level IQ. Like Oher being 100 IQ. I just can’t see a 70-80 IQ functioning well enough to understand pro-sports concepts or being capable of training themselves to get there.
People like the idea of human beings as like character creation in DnD, you put too many points in Str and you don't have any left for Int! It feels just, it feels fair, it allows for humans to see a role for themselves in an Eigen Plot, even if they're not the big strong hero they still have a role.
The reality is human traits aren't distributed fairly. [John Urschel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel#::text=John%20Cameron%20Urschel%20(born%20June,of%20the%202014%20NFL%20Draft.) and Frank Ryan are guys who played in the NFL while obtaining and holding PhDs in mathematics from MIT and Rice respectively. Some people are just better than others. The idea of the dumb jock, and of the nebbish nerd, are copes designed to help people feel better about their own lacks.
I've never actually seen the movie, or read the book, it didn't seem like a plot that would interest me. But consider that as many as 80% of NFL players declare bankruptcy within three years of retirement [ETA: This number is probably wildly inflated, but it points to the general concept that a non-HoF level NFL player typically goes from making millions to making almost nothing in a year when they retire]. It is very common for players to think the money will never stop, to spend themselves into game-day paycheck to game-day paycheck, for their career to run out earlier than they thought, and next thing you know they're broke. It is quite likely that Oher is looking for alternative sources of revenue.
Simultaneously, he will never ever escape the movie. Even if he had been a truly great NFL player, he would always be "that guy from The Blind Side." As the poem goes, O-Line isn't a famous position for anyone other than Jason Kelce:
You'll note the life of Dick Szymanski
Is not all roses and romanski.
He centers the ball, he hears a roar-
Is it a fumble or a score?
He accomplishes amazing feats.
And what gets photographed? His cleats.
Ultimately, he quickly became a top 1000 O-Line player in the world, a fringe guy hanging around the edges of the NFL, rather than a top 150 player in the world who starts for an NFL team. For virtually any NFL player, they have defined their life by football for a decade or more. In high school he's the best player on their team, in college he's royalty. The end of their career becomes a crisis of self-definition, who am I if I'm not a football player? The lucky ones become coaches or commentators, the rest have no good answer to the question. Oher faces the additional obstacle towards his identity, he faces the Oscar-Winning film, he's stuck. In every room he enters he is "that dumb kid from the movie" before he is even "Super Bowl Winning Baltimore Raven." Even the sympathetic articles introduce him primarily by the movie, rather than as a starter in two Super Bowls. Viewed in this light, I suspect this is more of a tragic personal lashing-out played on a national gossip circuit. It's sad to me, and even worse that race is going to get dragged into it.
In general, when I see a celeb complaining about the contracts they signed early in their career, my prior is that they hit their sell-by date and can't understand what happened and they are lashing out. From Tab Hunter to Ke$ha, products of systems think they did it all themselves and wonder why the system claims so much of their money.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
I've lived and worked around Amish and Mennonite communities my entire life. I admire their lifestyle, their community, and their philosophy. I think the world has a lot to learn from the Amish, especially in terms of the communal decision to adopt technological standards. I buy my produce from Amish farms whenever possible, I have worked alongside Mennonite contractors, I grew up around scoutmasters and farmers and distant uncles with PA dutch accents, I would guess that my interactions with Amish-and-adjacent folks is probably top-5 on this forum at the very least. I know and admire the hell out of the Amish, I highly recommend Knock's essay Utopia in Pennsylvania. That said, the refutation to the Amish question is pretty thorough and not particularly difficult:
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They're essentially parasitic on the USA. The Amish have no defense policy, they don't even really have a police force or a court system. They rely on the English for any of those things when they become necessary. Their safety from external threats is entirely dependent on the broader American nation. It's not really a scalable solution. Somebody needs to do all the things that allow the systems to exist by which Amish communities are protected, allowed to function.
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As a comparison they suffer from the Private School problem: private schools can expel students more or less at will for behavioral problems, while public schools have to educate every student. Amish communities don't have lots of drug use because if you start using drugs, you're cruisin' for a shunning. Assuming that the kind of person who wants to do drugs wouldn't simply leave the Amish community of his own accord. If you allowed any town to simply exile anyone who refuses to obey social rules, the statistical outcomes for the remaining residents would improve.
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The whole theological concept of Anabaptism is built on the core idea of informed adult choice, they reject infant baptism because they believe that people should choose to enter the faith in a fully informed way. All Amish have total free choice to stay or leave at any time, the only thing holding them there is social pressure. Statistics show that between 90-97% of Amish kids return from Rumspringa and join the church. ((I haven't dug into the statistics deeply, but I'm told that the stricter the community the more kids tend to leave permanently)) Imagine what NYC or SF or Seattle or your nightmare modern progressive hell-hole of choice would look like, if the bottom 3-10% of worst-behaved least socially adapted kids just left town at age 18 and never came back. Short of a federal prison, if you took the 3-10% of people who were most prone to choose something other than a peaceful happy life, whether in a slothful or a Faustian fashion, and removed them from the population, you would see massive improvements. Being Amish isn't just a status one is born into, it is also a set of choices one has made. If you narrowed the subset of the population in your statistics to people who have chosen to remain in the religion of their forebears, chosen to remain in their hometown, gotten married and had kids, had solid employment, I would bet the statistical gap narrows significantly.
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@f3zinker 's frank The Grand Inquisitor style elitism is probably not all that uncommon. Yes, all these things might be bad for the population but not for me. This is visible in the fact that there are very few converts. While it would be difficult to enter some of the more strictly closed communities, there are Mennonite churches where outsiders are welcome to worship, and over time if one bought a nearby farm converts are welcomed to join the community over time if they show good faith. We don't see that happening at scale. People, who have the option to live this way, mostly don't.
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From a progressive perspective: what about the oppressed within Amish communities? I've never met a gay affirming Amish community, though they'll deign to sell a gay couple some pies or quilts they're not about that kind of life. So what's a gay amish kid to do? The Amish are a community founded on religious dissent, but how does the religious dissenter fare? Where does the beaten Amish wife flee? Amish life is a mold by which most people who fit can be made happy, but some people by bad luck will not fit. What do they do? Where do they go? Well the answer in a world where the Amish community is parasitic upon the English community is: they leave the Amish. In an Amish world, that question may be more difficult to answer.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo ago
I've always considered this issue to be one of white people shooting themselves in the foot.
There is no "white people" there's just a bunch of individual white men. The power of "white people" will only mildly trickle down to any individual lower-middle class enlistee. Individual benefits are how they're making that decision, not the success and power of "la raza."
Shooting oneself in the foot is making the decision to sacrifice oneself for an imagined community that doesn't give a shit about you.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
I'm not super anti-porn, but I am in favor of these policy changes. Let me give an illustrative analogy:
I use marijuana. Weirdly, while my nickname in middle and high school was Weed-Man because I had long hair and wore a vintage green m65 all the time, I started using it after getting married. I think thc is great, it is fun, it lacks the hangover of alcohol, and it allows me to shut down the neuroticism of my brain and unironically enjoy things in a way I otherwise fail to do. As a Frasurbane adult, I take edibles with my wife and go to a nice dinner and La Boheme and I think that is a just-fine thing to do. I'm against the criminalization of Marijuana, because I use it and think it can be good, and because criminalizing it is ineffective (as a nerdy high schooler I had no idea where to get alcohol beyond the limited ability to steal it, while I had five phone numbers in my phone that could have gotten me weed despite not even smoking), and because people shouldn't be punished for using drugs on basically libertarian grounds.
On the other hand, I recently spent months writing letters to the editor, bothering my local police department, and attending local meetings to foment action against a local gas station that was advertising, with big banners, Delta-8 ThC products. This gas station is directly on the main road to the high school I attended, I stopped there frequently after early-spring track practice for hot chocolate. I spent hours playing the gadfly, until they agreed to stop selling.
I have no inherent objection to Delta-8 products, I've used them before, but the idea of them being sold unregulated and without ID to kids, to high schoolers on their way home, is capital-B Bad. I am mildly negative on teenagers using weed at all (my wife and I joke that we think weed is for marriage, and there is evidence it can trigger schizo stuff), but more than that I don't think it's a good idea for them to get it easily. If there was a sketchy head shop downtown, out of the way, in a place teenagers know they shouldn't go, that would sell Delta-8 and other semi-legal drugs (Kratom, Salvia, etc) I would object less. It's the idea of a kid just buying it on the way home from track practice, probably taking the gummy immediately to avoid possible detection at home, that scares me. They bought it with no ID check, no effort to hide it, right next to the TicTacs and the Arizona Green Tea, it can't be anything bad right? It's harmless, I bet it won't even work, I'll take two of them and drive home. If it were anything serious, they surely wouldn't be allowed to sell it like this!
In the same way, this policy will not prevent all kids from watching any porn. No policy will achieve that. But a well outlined and enforced policy will increase the barriers to watching porn, and make it seem less normalized and easy. Kids going to sketchier sites and finding porn less easily is a positive outcome. They will likely consume less porn, and will be aware from the circumstances that it is something kinda bad, kinda dirty, kinda socially disapproved. They will have that judgment in the back of their head, keeping it at arm's length, from the context in which they view it. That extra effort will serve to express viscerally to the kid that this stuff is kinda maybe bad and dangerous.
I don't at the end of the day disapprove of porn that strongly. I've stopped using it myself years ago, but I used it enough in my teen years that I can hardly claim purity, and if I like myself (which I do) I can hardly claim it negatively impacted me. What I do disapprove of is the normalization of pornography, the integration of pornography into our culture. I resent that I can't go on any decent sports subreddit or forum without being constantly subjected to weird pornographic metaphors. I hate that pornography has eaten sex, especially kinky sex, that good sex is taken to be a simulation of pornography, there is always an imaginary camera in the room, an audience. I hate that people consider watching porn normal, even if it is. Jesus Christ people learn to have a shameful dirty secret.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
5mo ago
The term doesn't really have legal meaning, just an inflation in language.
But in this case, it actually fits. The teacher isn't threatening the kid with beheading on a personal basis, because the kid is annoying him. He is threatening the kid for the kid's political views, telling him if you oppose Israel you should/will be beheaded, or at least that your teacher will scream such obscene threats at you. This would have the likely effect of preventing other students from expressing similar views, for fear of beheading/getting screamed at by their teacher. The purpose is terroristic: the threat was made to change the expressed political views and actions of the threatened person and the audience.
I would say threats with a political purpose or agenda behind them are strictly worse than threats with a purely personal Animus. For scalability reasons, because of the additional victims in the audience, and because of the added threat to freedom of speech/association/etc. If he threatened a kid because the kid annoyed him, that would only impact the kid. When he threatened a kid for the kid's views on Palestine, the kid is victimized, and any members of the audience who share that view of Palestine are equally victimized because they know their teacher is also threatening them if they speak out (probably throw in anyone who has views that also might cause controversy), and the rest of the group is victimized because their thoughts will tend to be restricted by the threat.
Harsh, signal punishment is necessary to let everyone know that society does not condone political violence and that they are free to speak and think what they will.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
6mo ago
Im turning 26 soon and am single. I dont think that might change very soon.
I got a mini heart attack though when I realized that time is ticking and the pool will only get smaller geometrically from now onwards.
I have nothing in particular to recommend for or against any particular action, but dude, time is not really ticking, your pool isn't getting smaller geometrically, unless you have some very strong personal preference for marrying someone precisely your age or older.
If I recall your vague personal details correctly, you are professionally successful, you work out and eat right and take care of yourself, you have a good relationship with your family, I know from interacting with you that you are clever and can carry an interesting conversation on a variety of topics.. 26 isn't the cliff, it's the very start of your peak. You are just entering the years when women from 20-30 will all find you relatively hot and relatively relatable, when you will have actual accomplishments to show rather than just potential, when you can strike out on your own and do something great. At the very least, you have six-ish years before you start to be concerned in terms of a shrinking dating pool.
This is the best time to date in your life, tbh. If you want to make drastic lifestyle changes to improve your odds, it will just improve them further.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
7mo ago
The reason people won't buy fast motorcycles is instructive as to why street racing is less common today: lack of balls.
I'll cop to it, that's why I don't own a motorcycle. I had a Kawasaki trail bike I was learning to ride when I was 17, 18 but then I got into a horrendous car accident. When I woke up in the hospital, the doctor told me essentially that if I didn't notice any effects in a month I was probably fine, but that concussions were cumulative and that I would be more suceptible to concussions in the future and they would potentially be more harmful. Instantly sold the bike, quit boxing. The risk of an accident that killed me or physically maimed me I could handle, but one that left me retarded? Too grim, I didn't have the guts.
Street racing slow cars at low speeds feels safer. A street rod that does the quarter mile at 80mph feels like something you can handle; doing it in a Tesla at 130-140mph feels insane. The quality of equipment has outstripped the drivers' perception of their own skills. This even though the newer car is safer at 100+ than the old jalopy was at 60.
The Right Wing mentality of the film is the Cowboy-Run-and-Gun attitude of the protags and their org. That if we just gave enough good guys enough guns and enough free rein, they could kill off all the bad guys and rescue all the kids. The failure to do so is a failure of determination, of willpower, of courage. ((I suppose for some absurd value of enough they would be right: if we devoted the entire resources and budget of the US Marine corps to tracking down traffickers it would make it harder))
The left wing liberal mentality is that
Most often, sexual abusers know the child they abuse but are not relatives.
In fact, about 60% of perpetrators are non-relative acquaintances, such as a friend of the family, babysitter, or neighbor (presumably clerical and teacher abuse fit in here? - FHM).
About 30% of those who sexually abuse children are relatives of the child, such as fathers, uncles, or cousins.
Strangers are perpetrators in about 10% of child sexual abuse cases.
Always the left wing liberal solution is something-something structural causes, combined with government surveillance and intrusion into family and private relationships.
Left wing liberals argue that claiming you're anti-pedo so you spend your time running around with guns "tracking down traffickers" is like claiming you're anti-hunger so you spend your time ordering sandwiches from Quiznos for random people: somewhere between wildly ineffective altruism and actively distracting from the reality. It might make some former DHS agents feel like big men, but it doesn't do much to help kids.
ETA: The near perfect inverse parallel is the BLM argument made by many conservatives that Floyd-Style police killings, while unfortunate, are a drop in the bucket compared to Black-on-Black crime. So saying BLM and opposing police is going to cost Black Lives.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
28d ago
Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.
Incel, properly understood, is more like "unemployed" than it is like "disabled" or "nerd." Most men are involuntarily celibate (they would like to have sex but can't find a partner) for periods of their life. I've expanded the metaphor elsewhere:
We could distinguish [] between the "unemployed" incel and the "disabled" incel. Almost every man goes through periods when he is looking for sex and can't get it, very few young men are permanently physically incapable of getting laid. We could further distinguish among the unemployed incels the three general types of unemployment in Econ 101: Frictional, Cyclical, Structural. Virtually every man has periods of Frictional celibacy, between girlfriends or hook ups or busy at work or on a long term sojourn somewhere not amenable to casual sex. Obviously there's not a "business cycle" to sex, but we could substitute that for the lifecycle of the man himself, almost all men are ready and willing to have sex long before they are able to obtain it, and most are willing to have sex long after they are too old to interest most women. Those two categories are unimportant to us, they may participate in incel discourse for a time but ultimately they'll get their "fair share" of sex over a lifetime. It's the third group, Structural Incels, we should worry about. The Structurally Unemployed are those whose skills have been made redundant by industrial changes and reorganizations. Your coal miners or carriage makers. People who will never get laid with the skills they have. The solution to that is always training and help changing careers. Some people don't want to train and they don't want to change careers, well tough luck then. Sitting around whining you should have a bigger paycheck because you are the best carriage maker in ten counties, and failing to acknowledge that no one buys carriages!, is a bridge to nowhere.
What we see is a lot of guys retain the incel talking points and resentments, that they formed when they couldn't get laid, even after they are getting laid. A lot of guys continue to hate women for withholding pussy even after some women stop withholding it! A lot of guys who came into themselves are still mad about rejections in high school. Which I understand, there was a period between 16-18 when it seemed like I had somehow already missed the boat: every girl I hit on who didn't reject me immediately eventually told me she had lost her virginity some time ago to her [asshole] ex bf, and that now she wasn't really interested in that kind of thing anymore. And it's easy for those kinds of rejections to fester, even after one goes to college and none of it matters anymore. Or, a lot of guys who came into their own after college, once they got a good job, feel like they missed the boat in that ok fine I can date women now, but half of them got fat after college, and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then.
That's the dynamic I think you're seeing!
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
Why would anyone expect these kinds of stunts work at all?
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Understanding pacifism without reference to religion makes it illogical, for fairly obvious reasons. The mahatma didn't tell WWII Jews to throw themselves on the butcher's knives or off of cliffs because it would be effective, he told them to do so because it was divinely ordained that it should be so and would reward them in the next life. It's quite likely that a man who chooses to light himself on fire is not doing so primarily in reference to the effectiveness of doing so on others, but out of a sense that his own virtue will only be satisfied by lighting himself on fire. He didn't do it for the win, he did it for his own soul.
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It sure got a lot of attention. I'm sure we could play with the utility numbers and say that the QALYs he lost lighting himself on fire achieved more media attention than twice the QALYs spent on sane protests by masses of people.
How the hell do we have soldiers that are suicidally committed to opposing American allies? Seems bad.
How the hell do we have allies that our soldiers are suicidally committed to opposing? Seems bad.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
*Obvious confounding factor here is children. Children grow out of their clothing, ruin their clothing etc in ways that adults don't. This probably accounts for several percentage points in the decline, though that becomes its own discussion about natalism and children as cost and children as status symbol.
I'd offer that if you spoke to Trumpers, most or all of them would hold opinions about Trump and his positions that seem paradoxical, totally incorrect, contradictory, impossible, or just flat out idiotic. Trump, despite having served as president for four years and remained politically loud (if not exactly active) for four more since, remains a cypher. Ask eight people what exactly Trump believes you will get eight different answers. There's a temptation, on all sides of the political compass, to treat Trump like an empty vessel and hope that he will favor your cause. He's really a Red-Brown Strasser-ist fighter for the white working class, or he's really a Christian crusader (or for the more biblically sophisticated a Cyrus figure), or he's going to cut government spending and fix the deficit, or he's going to gut the MIC and usher in peace.
There's a standard format that goes: "He just says X to get votes, he really doesn't believe X, he believes Y." He just makes saber rattling noises about Iran to placate the GOP, he's really anti-war. He says anti trade things to appeal to the rubes, he's really pro business. He has a secret plan to fix immigration policy or he has a secret plan to empower a Immigrations and Customs NKVD, he is actually in favor of police reform or he's going to crack down on criminals, he's going to restrain Israel or he's going to let Israel off the leash, he's going to cut regulations and he's going to prevent chemical train derailments.
And the bitch of it is, somebody has to be right. Trump has said so many contradictory things about so many topics that you can easily put together a series of quotes that paint him as anything. He's just so out there and he talks so much, I could put together a photo series and quotes that paint him as Ibram X. Kendi's best friend or as a budding Caudillo. And there are people who hope he is each of those. He's a real person, he has to believe something. But I'll be damned if I could tell you what it is with any confidence.
Just in the last few days I can recall this. I've seen leftists joking about how Trump is going to dominate the debates by calling Biden "Genocide Joe" for supporting Israel. I've heard friends tell me Trump will bring back prayer in schools. I've seen people on here claim that he will drain the swamp.
So the steelman of Trump is that they believe he is a different Trump than you believe he is.
ETA: I literally closed my laptop and my father immediately told me that Trump planned to declare OPEC a terrorist organization and confiscate their funds from the banking system.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
9mo ago
Any good news about Black progress is poisoned or avoided by afropessimist activists, who have a vested interest in presenting a narrative of oppression to soak up donor dollars.
It's the same in Africa that it is in America, where I have friends that tell me racism has increased in the past twenty years despite anti Black racism being in quite obvious decline.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
Freddie De Boer and the Limits of Anti-Classificationist Discourse
Typically in my life my views on racial law have tended towards the Anti-Classificationist rather than the Anti-Subordinationist school, or I suppose to represent all sides on the Motte to the Hierarchical or Purity schools of thought. In my mind, discrimination and group conflict follow naturally once you define groups, and therefore the best thing to do if your goal is to avoid discrimination is to avoid formally classifying groups. Religious denomination used to be a very heavily classified, tracked, and studied American demographic. We used to have a Catholic Seat, and then a Jewish Seat on the SCOTUS; now we have only a single Protestant on the Court, with seven Catholics and one Jew. And forget anyone being able to tell the difference between a Presbyterian and a Babtist; I once completely tanked a job interview lunch by asking a woman who had just told me she was on the board of her local Methodist church what exactly the "method" was and she couldn't tell me. Ketanji Brown Jackson was widely celebrated for increasing the Diversity of the court, but almost no mainstream news outlet mentioned that her appointment was striking a blow against Hebrew and Papist over-representation, nor has the decline of the Jewish justices from three seats to just one sparked a series of hand-wringing op-eds about rising antisemitism. Other contrasting examples include Hutus and Tutsis, where the colonial creation of the categories cemented existing divisions and created conflict. Or how people with Norman surnames still out-earn other Englishmen. While the Norman descendants have faced group conflict on terms of social class, modern Britain did not face a large racial clash, because it was not a classification used by English law, and so you don’t have the congealing of the identity groups that creates conflict.
However, reading Freddie’s latest has me noticin’ a little. The core of the piece is asking why the liberal media tolerates Tyson while continuously reviling somebody like Woody Allen:
The question is, to whom do those rules not apply? For the record, I don’t have any particular beef with the hosts keeping Woody Allen at arm’s length. If they have moral objections to a filmmaker and want to express them when talking about his movie, that’s fine. The trouble is that this sort of moral work needs to be undertaken with the most basic requirement of morality, consistency, the understanding that moral rules must apply to everyone equally. And it’s not just the Ringer podcast network that has a problem with achieving that consistency but media writ large.
Well, I can still complain. We’re living in a landscape where Mike Tyson has not only been credibly accused of domestic violence and rape but made statements that seem clearly to admit to them, has become a folk celebrity with a jolly reputation, and nobody cares.
There will be, I hope, at least some effort to apply the old rules to him. Still, many who spent the 2010s hanging every apostate they could find will simply nod along. You can’t really call it a redemption story because people have largely avoided acknowledging that Tyson has done things which would require him to be redeemed. And I’d love to be able to ask some central authority of Yelling Social Justice why people discussing Annie Hall on a podcast feel that they have to fill painful minutes of airtime with awkward throat-clearing about Woody Allen, while Mike Tyson gets to rest comfortably in kitsch.
And the difference seems so blindingly obvious that it’s punching me in the face, and that’s sort of ruining my anti-classicationist plan. Ctrl-F-ing the article: zero hits for White, zero hits for Black, zero hits for Religion, zero hits for Jew, zero hits for Ethnic-, zero hits for African. Freddie doesn’t mention the possible role that race would seem to play, even to refute it. And in my mind this would be perceived as a failure by either side of the political spectrum.
If one views the media as broadly anti-White, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because he is white, while Tyson is forgiven because Tyson is Black, and PC society demands that we forgive the Black criminal and celebrate Black Excellence. Or, at the very least, that weenie turbolibs at TheRinger are uncomfortable criticizing Black celebrities in ways that might code as racist if taken out of context and uncharitably, and that in an abundance of caution the hosts at TheRinger choose to criticize white rather than Black celebs, softer targets.
If one views society as broadly anti-Black, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because Allen’s victims are white, while Tyson is easily forgiven because Tyson only committed violence against Black women. That the act of forgiving Black men for violence against Black women is itself Anti-Black, it is the failure to provision public goods for Black communities; the protection provided by legal and social sanction against those who commit crimes against Black Women, who if only for reasons of proximity will always be primarily Black men. Hence Bill Cosby eventually got his, he drugged and sodomized white women in between as well.
But neither side will see much logic in DeBoer’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge the obviously relevant facts around the cases he is comparing.
Personally, I find it definitely relevant. Tyson is forgiven thanks to a particularly grim version of the soft bigotry of low expectations, combined with racism against his victims by race and by class. Black celebrities are allowed to act in ways that turbolibs won’t tolerate in white men. White feminists love to start panics around college campus rape or similar problems, while ignoring that women in the college age-range who don’t attend college are more likely to be victimized. The prime targets of Feminism are men like Brett Kavanaugh, while they ignore the much more numerous and more violent men like Chris Brown, because for your average Wesleyan Critical Theorist she is under very little threat from men like Chris Brown and much more from men she actually interacts with. Your media or academia or twitterati feminist will never hang out with anyone who looks or acts like Mike Tyson, she does hang out with people who look and act like Woody Allen or Brett Kavanaugh.
It's all making me question some of my anti-classification bona fides.
Killing this president does even less. Never forget that Bin Laden specifically instructed Al Qaeda to spare Biden, because he thought Biden so incompetent that putting him in charge would be advantageous.
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