FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Some people will tell you nothing is interesting about Epstein because they've formed that pre-existing conclusion on the topic and nothing will dissuade them. They've assumed an attitude of maximal cynicism to appear suave, and all the elites must be pedophiles is a way to avoid ever being disappointed.
I think there's some interesting stuff in there:
-- Epstein was much closer with his brother than previously thought. Generally people reported that he wasn't close with his brother, but they're in constant communication here, and his brother was clearly aware of just about all the inner workings of Epstein-world. Why hasn't his brother been brought before Congress? Here are millions of Republicans and Democrats alternately all talking about investigating every little conspiracy theory about Epstein, and we never bothered to just ask his brother under oath? The guy needs to either spill or be in prison, right?
-- Epstein was much closer with a lot of major Democrats, and much more of a #ResistanceLib than previously reported. He was kind of a really classic university blue tribe guy.
-- Epstein had significant ties with the upper reaches of Israeli politics
They also paint a broader picture of Epstein in general. Reading more about him in the emails, like reading the book list, makes me think that when this all settles down in another ten years or so Epstein is going to be revived as an online hero cult. Here's a guy, with no college degree and no family connections to speak of, who made himself a billionaire and put himself in the highest circles on what appears to have been sheer personal charm and charisma. Whether he was an Israeli spy or a master sexpot seducer of men and women or just a world-class bullshit artist, the guy was a fucking genius. There's going to be weird online communities of young men and women that worship him once we settle on who he was.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
How do we make kids have more agency?
Self organized play. It is the sine qua non of childhood agency. Kids will, left to their own devices, self organize to achieve their goals, with those goals mostly being or rhyming with "fun." We know this from Herodotus, who tells us how to identify a high agency child who might become the Great King of Persia, and who is right about everything in the end:
When the boy was in his tenth year, an accident which I will now relate, caused it to be discovered who he was. He was at play one day in the village where the folds of the cattle were, along with the boys of his own age, in the street. The other boys who were playing with him chose the cowherd's son, as he was called, to be their king. He then proceeded to order them about some he set to build him houses, others he made his guards, one of them was to be the king's eye, another had the office of carrying his messages; all had some task or other. Among the boys there was one, the son of Artembares, a Mede of distinction, who refused to do what Cyrus had set him. Cyrus told the other boys to take him into custody, and when his orders were obeyed, he chastised him most severely with the whip. The son of Artembares, as soon as he was let go, full of rage at treatment so little befitting his rank, hastened to the city and complained bitterly to his father of what had been done to him by Cyrus. He did not, of course, say "Cyrus," by which name the boy was not yet known, but called him the son of the king's cowherd. Artembares, in the heat of his passion, went to Astyages, accompanied by his son, and made complaint of the gross injury which had been done him. Pointing to the boy's shoulders, he exclaimed, "Thus, oh! king, has thy slave, the son of a cowherd, heaped insult upon us."
At this sight and these words Astyages, wishing to avenge the son of Artembares for his father's sake, sent for the cowherd and his boy. When they came together into his presence, fixing his eyes on Cyrus, Astyages said, "Hast thou then, the son of so mean a fellow as that, dared to behave thus rudely to the son of yonder noble, one of the first in my court?" "My lord," replied the boy, "I only treated him as he deserved. I was chosen king in play by the boys of our village, because they thought me the best for it. He himself was one of the boys who chose me. All the others did according to my orders; but he refused, and made light of them, until at last he got his due reward. If for this I deserve to suffer punishment, here I am ready to submit to it." [116] While the boy was yet speaking Astyages was struck with a suspicion who he was. He thought he saw something in the character of his face like his own, and there was a nobleness about the answer he had made; besides which his age seemed to tally with the time when his grandchild was exposed.
What do we have here? Boys naturally play, they naturally choose the best and most noble of them as leader, they punish those who don't participate. They're learning to operate within the world according to their abilities, developing their leadership abilities, Cyrus is clearly a future leader. In a nobility based society, that must mean that he has noble blood and is meant for great things, because he has such strong agency.
We still recognize that young leaders will grow into great leaders, but we've Goodharted it into adult-organized school-sponsored clubs that don't really do much of anything but provide "Leadership Positions" for gunners to put in their college applications.
What we need to do instead is encourage entirely self-organized play for young kids, put them in a position where they both have the ability and the desire to self-organize to do things that interest them. To do this we need to do three things: Allow and accept reasonable limitations to abilities, allow and accept reasonable risks to safety, allow and accept reasonable suboptimal outcomes in tradeoff for more agency and creativity. As a toy example take Basketball, and you have three basic paradigms: Sandlot1 archetype of kids playing self-organized pick-up games every day on their own, the organized coached league archetype of youth basketball, and the Bowling Alone archetype of a kid practicing skills by himself in the driveway of his home.
Sandlot is a perfect mid-century American equivalent to the Cyrus story above: the boys self-organize to play out the stories and legends they see adults playing out, the best of them (Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez) is their natural leader and goes on to become a great man.
For the most part we can say for our toy example that a coached team in a league is going to produce the best outcomes in terms of developing basketball talent and minimal risk while giving almost no freedom and developing no agency for the players, pick up games develop agency but give a lower quality in basketball development, practicing skills alone in your driveway gives maximum freedom as to time and style to the kid while developing low quality skills and no organizational agency.
What we want is to develop kids who self-organize spontaneously to achieve their goals. We want kids to Sandlot themselves, to get together and decide to play, figure out the obstacles on their own, and play ball. That's agency. We don't want them to sit at home doing drills by themselves, that doesn't develop agency, and it also doesn't tend to help kids develop any skills. And we don't want to force them to only compete in organized leagues, where they are told what to do and when to do it, as that limits agency: instead of playing basketball as a fun activity they do on their own, they play basketball when mommy takes them to basketball practice and the coach tells them to play basketball.
Limitations are the core of creativity. If every kid has a basketball hoop in their driveway, there is no need to go to each other's houses to play, you can just stay home and play by yourself. Sure, if I have a basketball hoop then I can go out and practice free throws any time I want, but that keeps from doing the far better activity of playing with friends and prevents us all from learning to self-organize. Needing something from others creates the need to self-organize, to create a social grouping and do things together. If the basketball hoop is at Chris' house, then to shoot basketball I need to go to Chris' house and hang out with him. If we both have a basketball hoop in our driveways, then I don't need to cooperate with Chris. But the limitations have to be reasonable, we have to provide enough stuff to allow kids to play, but not so much stuff that they don't need to get creative or work together. I have to be allowed to do some things to get there, which requires accepting...
Risks have to be accepted in this process. I have to get to Chris' house, a couple miles away. That means I have to be allowed and trusted to walk there, ride a bike there, some accident might happen on the trip. I have to be there for some time by myself. I have to have the free time to do it. I have to be out of my parents' sight for that time. Chris and his older brother might beat me up. I might get hurt. My parents have to be willing to accept that, rather than requiring that I only play basketball in a league with coaches that keep me from getting bullied or beat up and have been SAFESPORT certified etc.
Suboptimal Outcomes The best youth athletes come out of coached programs optimized to teach kids skills properly, not out of spontaneous kids playing for fun. The more coaching the better. But that reduces agency. We have to be willing to accept that we're trading some degree of agency development for some degree of basketball skill development.
Now of course, the ideal is probably somewhere in the middle. Kids can be on a school team or in a once-a-week organized league while also playing pick-up after school every day, and a kid that really loves basketball might want to spend hours practicing free throws or dribbling drills on his own even when nobody else wants to. Leagues help to build skill and love for the game, encouraging kids to later move on to self-organizing.
We can apply this model to everything. When one kid had an xbox, everyone wanted to go to his house to play xbox. When every kid has an xbox, they all vegetate at home. When one kid has a car they all go on adventures, when every kid has a car or no one is allowed to drive anywhere, nothing happens. Kids need limitations to overcome, acceptance of risk in overcoming them, and acceptance that it might not be the absolute best use of their time in doing so.
- Interesting note from the Wikipedia article related to recent discussions:
In 1998, Michael Polydoros sued 20th Century Fox and the producers of the film for defamation. Polydoros, a childhood classmate of David Mickey Evans, the writer and director of The Sandlot, claimed that the character Michael "Squints" Palledorous was derogatory and caused him shame and humiliation. The trial court found in favor of the film-makers, and that finding was affirmed by the California Court of Appeal.
This seems obviously correct to me. Using a kid you knew as inspiration is not defamation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
While I was flying I read Portnoy's Complaint, which was exactly as brilliant as people said it was, better even. But all the recommendations and mentions of it focused on the early scenes of his youth, while ignoring that the majority of the book is actually about his adulthood. Another case I think where a lot of reviewers or "knowers" don't actually read the whole book, they either read the first half and gave up or they just heard other people mention it and mention the same things.
I just started The Naked and the Dead which I'm having a little trouble with the language. Lots of minced oaths.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I mean, why are we scared to say that the bike and ski helmets are inherently unaesthetic, dorky, and weird looking? Riding a bike is already fairly unaesthetic, but riding a bike with a helmet is basically doomed to dorkiness, and the more the helmet is optimized for any functional purpose the worse it tends to look. I do typically wear a helmet when I ride any considerable distance, but I'm under no illusion that I look at all cool doing so.
That said, seatbelts I remain a fan of. The numbers simply are what they are, and I don't think avoiding a seatbelt is really any improvement in comfort in a modern vehicle. I do occasionally drive classics that feature no or minimal seatbelts, and I suppose I'm taking a risk there but there's a corresponding benefit. My favorite tuner car modifications to see young guys drive around with are the addition of aesthetically obvious safety features. The fire extinguisher ostentatiously anchored to the floor in easy reach, the two strap hanging off the bumper, the four point racing harness in the driver's seat.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Whatever Putin is thinking, it's a fair bet that Russian commanders and soldiers on the ground are going to have no problem putting Arab adventurer mercenaries in higher risk roles with worse equipment compared to Russians serving their country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Point number two is even more dire for Ukraine than Russia, especially manpower-wise. There's really no solution for it other than getting Western countries to send troops, and I don't see that happening.
The solution is actually pretty easy, and Russia is already doing it. Based and trad white Russia is importing thousands of Arabs on the promise that they can settle in Russia if they survive the war. Go to various third world shitholes and promise citizenship for service, an EU visa is vastly more valuable than a Russian one. EU/USA visas would of course have to use oblique language regarding "Ukrainian freedom fighters" in credible fear of "Russian atrocities." But as long as one is as brutal as the Russians have been, you don't end up with many of them leftover anyway.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
It gets buried under the general mythology, but WWII was full of war profiteering and corruption within the US Armed Forces and on the homefront.
I'm not sure that individual incidents of corruption are all that strong a signal. We'd need to really have a strong idea of what the base rate of corruption is.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
who takes orders from a badass girlboss captain of course
Trek had that during the good years, Voyager remains my personal favorite in the series as it is the one I grew up with.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8d ago
There's an interesting dynamic to this kind of thing in fantasy universes.
The original Star Trek was revolutionarily progressive in having a multiracial crew. There was a presumption of American leadership (Kirk), but it also featured a Japanese crewman twenty years after Hiroshima (Sulu), a Russian during the height of the Cold War (Chekov), and a black woman during the civil rights era. Trek unites all of humanity by creating an alternative "other," the Klingons. The displacement of the kinds of stereotypes that we used for the Other and the Enemy, the Russians/Japanese/Blacks, onto the Klingons inevitably leads those who feel othered to identify with the Klingons. So then we have to reform our views of the Klingons in TNG, and so we need the Borg to be the new absolute villain.
Same thing happened in WoW, the Orcs go from bad guys to misunderstood victims.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8d ago
Ok do you have any counter examples of arguments? "One time there really was a wolf" just seems like a fully generalizable argument to panic over everything.
If anything the failure of the Sydney Sweeney thing to catch fire strikes me as evidence that we're past peak woke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8d ago
No.
It's not really a very good example. Everyone's bubble varies, but I don't know of anyone who really cares about it.
The people who are trying to gin up controversy around it feel like culture war dead-enders who are trying to produce content. The media outlets reporting it are dying clickbait legacy outlets like Rolling Stone or GQ, not even dying but-still-important legacy outlets like the NYT or New Yorker.
All the natural reactions to it I've seen, even online, have been some variety of eye-rolling at the whole thing, or making fun of Sweeney for the movie flopping because she made a feminist movie, it's all meta-commentary that assumes someone else cares about it all. The film itself looks to be Sweeney's Hard to Watch, an overly serious film from a hitherto unserious actor.
So I see where you're coming from, but it ultimately just doesn't have the juice to get anywhere. People don't care. American Eagle isn't a big enough brand, Sydney Sweeney isn't a big enough actor, the whole controversy feels like going through the motions.
Now if the movie were to become a hit, then we'd get something out of it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Writing twelve year old characters for adult readers is a different thing
I don't really think this is true. Natasha in War and Peace is 13.
(particularly if you're using those characters as didactic puppets to get your message across).
Bingo
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Trump can still be a starmaker for three years, he can still endorse and attack, he can still appoint to sinecures and fundraise for. Any Republican would-be titan can be easily placed in a position of power by Trump, and that won't entirely evaporate upon his death, Sauron like.
Plus, somebody is going to get his dying endorsement, and that will count for something. I don't think enough that it can win anyone the presidency, but probably enough that it can keep any other Republican from winning it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
If you want to read about MIT freshmen, then read about MIT freshmen.
What's weird and often disgusting to me is the practice of writing a story about middle schoolers and making them think/talk/act like college freshmen at MIT. You're writing fiction, you can choose what age you want the characters to be!
If you want to write a story with mature, rational, scheming characters who talk frankly about sex; then you ought to place them at an age where it makes sense for them to be mature, rational, scheming, and have frank conversations about sex. If you want them to be eleven, write them as eleven year olds. Game of Thrones is an unfortunate example of this, of course, though I think GRRM is bright enough to have recognized the problems and that's one of many things keeping The Winds of Winter from ever being publishable.
There's no rule saying you go to Wizard school at 11! Wicked has seen plenty of success making magic-school a college level endeavor, with Elphaba beginning school at 17 in the book and 20ish in the play (and played by comically old actors in the unfortunate film)! HPMoR could easily have started by having McGonnagall say "We start wizarding school at 16 here. Starting at 11 would be quite irrational!"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
It seems very unlikely to me that everything works in a sufficiently mechanistic or rules based way that 1) photos exist of Donnie snuggling a teenage girl, 2) they are in the possession of the federal government, run by Donnie for some time now and by his sworn enemies for years before that, 3) We've never seen them before, meaning that his sworn enemies were too principled to leak them, 4) they haven't been destroyed, meaning that Trump is either too principled to have them destroyed or in some kind of power struggle with someone within the federal government.
This all just seems to be way too much "playing by the rules" on all sides to be credible for me. The theoretical FBI agent who is too principled to leak it under Biden, and too principled to destroy it under Trump, while also being too powerful to be fired by either, doesn't strike me as a realistic character in our drama.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Good luck!
Almost everyone I knew in law school had at least one exam that they thought they failed that they actually did really well on. Your feelings coming out rarely have much to do with how you did.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
There's an epidemic of people who want to write within the YA/Coming of Age paradigm, but don't actually want to write a story with child characters doing child things and thinking child thoughts.
Say what you like about JK Rowling's writing*, her eleven year old Harry Potter reads like an eleven year old. Hermione is smart, but she reads like a smart eleven year old who reads a lot. The trio are brave, but stupid. They're scared of minor things, irrationally. They lack incredible leadership or organizational skills. Draco is a bully, but he's a middle school bully.
Yudkowsky's Harry Potter reads like an MIT freshman, or maybe a dorky high school senior. He does not think or act like a child. Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
This makes sense in that Yud was 30 writing his Harry Potter fanfiction, and I doubt that Yud spent a lot of time with kids.
A similar problem infects a lot of media made about kids. Big Mouth suffered from this increasingly as the show went on. The characters were supposed to be just hitting puberty, but talked and acted like college kids.
It tends to destroy my willing suspension of disbelief, and also lead to off-putting situations where a story really starts to become about kids having sex.
*Introducing a new macguffin because you realize that the party is going to get the old set of macguffins out of the way too quickly is, like, a classic rookie dungeon master error.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
Wow. I don't even remember writing this comment. I don't even remember thinking about it. Don't drink and post.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
It was an amazing experience. Everyone in Wisconsin was incredibly nice. People stopped in the street to ask me about Philly. They treated us like uncontacted Amazon savages. Drank together, talked trash, had a great time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
It's fucking remarkable how nice people are in green bay. I was the penis at this game singing fly Eagles fly even though both teams sucked donkey dick this game. Regions continue to exist despite the best efforts of the media.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
I'm pretty sure he doesn't make a penny from this.
I didn't think so, but I haven't been reading lifting blogs for a while, so I didn't want to make an assumption.
I think he likes achieving his goals, but he doesn't like the process at all. I don't see why that should be impossible.
That's pretty much what I'm getting at when I talk about being "stoked" on something. Being interested in it and finding meaning in it.
I don't really think it's possible to "enjoy" doing a program like deep water, even if you enjoy achieving your goals.
I would guess that the majority of people who have done deep water enjoyed lifting at some level, because almost none of them got anything useful out of it.
Maybe they were all cumming day and night
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
I had to look this up to make sure I was reading this correctly...100x100, so 10,000m? 10k? So like three hours of swimming at that pace? That's genuinely insane to me. I've done a mile, but that? That's crazy.
Start updating us if you go for it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Fun is one thing, being stoked is another. See also type 1 2 and 3 fun.
I don't want to get into an argument with an absent third party about what he enjoys. But...he's obviously lying if he says he doesn't enjoy lifting weights. He might have found some way to influencer his way to some money out of lifting now, but he did a whole lot of lifting before ever reaching a point where he could make a dime, and even now it is probably just a hobby. If he didn't enjoy doing it at some level, he wouldn't do it. If he wasn't stoked about it, about reaching his lifting goals, he wouldn't do it. I've read his posts before, he often works out multiple times a day, and he's not a real competitor in any serious lifting series. He's doing this because he loves it, because he is stoked about it. He just likes bitching about how much he hates squats because he finds that kind of negativity to be more serious or whatever.
I'm stoked about jiu jitsu. That doesn't mean I'm constantly smiling doing jiu jitsu, or that it is always fun. There's a lot of times I'm not having fun. Six months ago it was even less fun. But I'm interested in reaching my goals, so that even when I'm cooked and my muscles are exhausted and I'm pinned under some gorilla who is trying to smother me, I'm still stoked to keep showing up, every day that I can, so that I can get better. The stoke is what gets me through the unpleasantness. If I just did unpleasant things for no reason, I'd be a literal masochist.
So like, yeah, I can picture a hypothetical person who just fucks around doing the "fun parts" without ever doing the unpleasant training parts. That's good advice for people like that.
But I know a lot of people who just don't work out at all. Those who keep starting a program they don't like working toward a goal they don't really care about, and give up after a few weeks every time. Those people need to try other advice than "do what sucks."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
I would call smoking a method of suicide rather than a life event within my model. You might as well say "putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger" is a life event that leads to suicide. Certainly, if we're accepting drug addiction, heroin would be the better example.
Probably not. Very rarely will speeding significantly change travel times, you have to be doing a Cannonball Run to see a real difference in your life once you factor in things like getting into and out of the car and stop signs/lights (which I don't think anyone can recommend ignoring in most cases).
Rather, the benefit of speeding is that it is fun, and once you remove the idea of aesthetic enjoyment from your cost benefit you are lost as a human being. But I'm not interested in having the argument about my speeding habits here again.
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