FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
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
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
I understand the domain names are a fun way to extract rent for nothing, but are they really that important in any structural sense? Especially in an internet that is dominated by social media, and then even more when it is dominated by AI itself, domain names feel more and more secondary to one's experience of the internet.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
SI is nice as a tell you're dealing with a cultist, a moron, or someone arguing in bad faith. Like neopronouns or land acknowledgements.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
By 2030 we won't believe this ever happened.
Wins this big are always multi-causal. In the same way that huge businesses involve multiple points of luck and skill lining up, or that every championship sports team involves a couple of players having career years.
But this will have major impacts on the future of the country. Will Texas be purple in 2028? Certainly both sides will have to consider it in play, and Dems will have two years in the Governor's mansion to engineer it further. If Texas goes Blue, the Republican path to the presidency changes completely.
This won't necessarily happen, but preventing it from happening will require effort by Republicans, and trying to make it happen will lead to efforts from Democrats. Policies are going to change in order to accommodate these goals.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Is your theory that Paxton is actually a principled public servant and not a wildly corrupt whoremonger forced to trot out his own betrayed ex-wife for advertisements?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
I mean sure, but he's got around 35 others so he should only be 3% upset about it.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Someone on twitter described the Michigan Democratic ratfucking as like "defecting to Germany during the fall of Berlin."
That's pretty much accurate.
I have trouble even feeling bad for Elon when he gets targeted with Lawfare at this point.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Men voted 49% blue to 49% red, Women voted 58% blue to 40% red, White Men voted 43% blue to 55% red.
You call this stark? Your lede had me thinking it was at least 70-30 either way.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
I'm not sure "Trump is an inveterate liar and just be sayin' shit sometimes" is really an argument that the Republicans are more principled when it comes to gibs.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Homeboy, Trump literally promised $5k debt financed cash free and clear if the Republicans won. The gibs are out of control.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Abbott is a function of Paxton.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Abbott
Outrun
I see what you did there
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
Polling isn't (and never was - 1992 in the UK remains infamous in the industry) good enough to call close elections, and the 2026 Senate election is close.
The thing that has always been most curious to me: How many people vote for the wrong person? Like, literally vote by mistake. They walk in planning to vote for Rogers, they sit down at the table and vote for Rogers, they walk out and would tell you that they voted for Rogers, but they actually filled out their ballot for Sayed.
It clearly can't be zero. That would be impossible. Speaking particularly currently as the father of a newborn, no comparable task has 100% accuracy rates.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
11d ago
Probably? I'm counting "winning big" as "taking the Senate" which was considered the reach goal before the campaign season started. It's totally within the realm of probabilities that there Democrats don't the Senate or that they don't take the house, 1/4 and 1/20 per the market odds. But I think a miss of that magnitude will break any sense of trust or credibility polling has had on the culture, either they're useless horoscopes or Trump's various vote-repair efforts have succeeded in altering the rules and making them useless.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
11d ago
Make sure you measure the actual dimensions of the TV and, preferably, hold up a piece of cardboard in the wallspace you intend to use for it. A lot of times people end up with an absurdly large TV because shopping in store, 65" feels like a reasonable compromise position, only to get home and find it either doesn't fit or dominates a too-small room.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
11d ago
Nate Silver is at this point essentially saying that there's no way to soften, or unskew, or fiddle with the mechanisms in the polls and produce a Republican win: either the Democrats win big, or polling as we know it is useless.
This concerns me, in that polling is a significant part of how Americans understand the world. It may be that polls are no better than horoscopes, often with less math!, but it can't be denied that millions of Americans understand the polls as meaningful information about the world. A polling miss this large will break people's brains.
One of the refrains of the 2020 election conspiracists has always been a reasonable motte: It doesn't really matter if the election was stolen, if enough people think it was stolen than it damages the legitimacy of democracy and the government etc must step in and seriously investigate the allegations of wrongdoing to assuage those concerns. If the confidence of the public is shaken, it must be restored, even if the allegations are factually false.
I'm worried that this is gonna be the big one. Democrats lose, when Democrats have abundant "objective" evidence that they're going to win, and as a result a large part of the D electorate decides that elections are fake and fixed. Or Democrats win, and Trump refuses to accept the result for whatever reason, and gets enough traction to make it a real problem for everyone.
Probably, nothing ever happens. But I'm worried. The polls are unequivocal at this point, the result may not line up with it.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
11d ago
Tom Brady did it for a long time with the Patriots.
Tom Brady routinely took lower pay than he could have with the Pats, he never took the league minimum. Lebron joining the Sixers for free is a totally different animal. A player taking a pay cut to allow for salary cap room for a better team is one thing, a player who is top 25 in the NBA taking the league minimum is another.
The sixers probably won't play well, for a variety of reasons. But if they do, it'll be an interesting discourse.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
14d ago
Automatic weapons are not the biggest deal. But what are you going to do about armored vehicles? Really hard to kill a tank with your AR-15.
The days of Washington when an armed, motivated local population could defeat a great power (though not on their home continent) in open battle are long over.
This is such a stupid motte-and-bailey. Sure, if you ask a marine captain: "Can you take control of a small town if all the men in it are armed with semi-automatic rifles?" The answer is obvious.
But if you ask him: "You have to take control of this small town. Would you rather that all the men in it had semi-automatic rifles, or foam pool noodles?" The answer is also obvious.
Civilian ownership of AR-15s doesn't have to be a win-now button to be useful.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
14d ago
It's amazing how cursed the Sixers have been as a franchise that this team isn't a bigger story.
-- I honestly think this team, win or lose, will be remembered as more insane than it was ten years from now. Given I'm a homer so I think that VJ and Maxey are going on to great careers; people are going to look back on this team and see Lebron the GOAT, Embiid an MVP level player, stars in Brown, Maxey and Edgecombe. Without thinking that Lebron and Embiid were past their primes while VJ and Tyrese hadn't hit theirs yet. I think in terms of each player at their peak talent, this might end up being the best starting 5 we'll ever see, even if it's not actually the best basketball team.
-- How high does this team have to finish for the NBA to crack down on the Lebron Loophole this offseason? If the Sixers weren't such a joke of a franchise over the last decade plus, we'd already be hearing about how they unfairly got a superstar for free and it undermines parity. Like obviously if they get a ring, but do wear about it if they make the semis? Win the NBA cup lol?
-- My parents' parasocial relationship with Tyrese Maxey went nuclear when Lebron basically said he came to Philly to hang out with him. He's always smiling, always calls the sideline interviewer "ma'am," and now he's so nice that the GOAT basically made his team decision on Tyrese being his new best friend. My mother will not hear any Maxey slander.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
14d ago
He also correctly understands that his wife, on the other hand, at the level of her social station as the queen, and that she does have actual political backing (certainly from her far-away royal family, possibly from other local aristocrats sharing her views).
That is a great example of poorly written patriarchy. She would never act this way, because no one would support her in it. Her father would be in favor of her being forced to do her duty. There's no way anyone is taking her side here. And if the fear is that she'll have him assassinated, the best way to protect yourself from that is to get a child on her.
Like, I get that there is an explanation for it, I just found the explanation so poor that it ruined the book for me.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
15d ago
The "contrary" (read: left of center) views will come back when Trump fails or moves off the scene.
For the past four years, I listened to about four Eagles podcasts a week and every game was appointment viewing. If for some reason I couldn't attend the game or watch it on TV, I engineered my day so I could listen to Reese on the radio broadcast, even if that was mildly inconvenient. This year, I watch the games, I'll attend a few, but it's not a priority. I'm not following the podcasts or the back of the roster moves, if I had to miss a game I'd just shrug.
I watched a little sixers basketball last year, likable young guys in VJ-Maxx even if they were tied to the anchor contracts of injured stars, but I didn't worry about them too much because they were ultimately doomed and hopeless in the near term. This year every day there's a game on TV I bring the baby down to watch it with my parents (luckily basketball tipoffs coincide with me getting home from working and taking over newborn care), I'm listening to Rights to Ricky Sanchez, I even picked up the latest from heavyslime.
The difference being that when the Eagles were good, I wanted to talk about them. When the sixers were bad, I didn't want to talk about them. When the sixers are good, I do want to talk about them. My allegiances don't change, but my dedication to them does.
What we need to do is maintain an honest, open forum and just wait until the worm turns. Which inevitably it will. I'm old enough to remember seeing Forty more years* on the shelf at Borders.
If you went on a baseball forum this month, you'd think Milwaukee was the most important baseball town in the country. If you went on in 2014, you'd barely hear about the Brewers. Liberals have been withdrawing from political discussion of all kinds since 2024, after a depressing series of losses that make you go "man this team will never get out of its own way." When their team looks like a contender for a ring, they'll be back.
*Thinking about it, I wonder if the thesis of the book that Barack Obama's election permanently altered American politics isn't more accurate than I give it credit for, in that the post-Obama many Republican beliefs of the past have been left behind and in many ways the party has remade itself in the image of Barack Hussein Obama. Trump has many things in common with Obama, in terms of positions and style, the he does not have in common with Dubya or Reagan. Maybe I'll delve into this as an effortpost.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
15d ago
We have religious institutions in our world because we have religious doubt in our world.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
15d ago
Man I don't even know about the politics of it all, but it seems like Reddit is increasingly just useless and boring. /r/sixers and /r/eagles are boring. /r/classicwowtbc is in a constant state of mutual flame war. It just feels like the perpetual stew that was reddit has gone rotten and it's not easy to revive it. Reddit needs to crater and maybe something worthwhile can revive.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
15d ago
You can only rehash the same foundational questions about race
Clearly what we need is a new race to worry about.
Good on you, brother. I broadly agree with a lot of your points here.
Accepting that you aren't crazy and that it was the right thing to do and is a military success, how do you feel about the procedural aspects of how the war was started? The war effort lacked a congressional declaration or any kind of approval, but even writing that off because we don't declare anything anymore, it lacked a significant public effort to sell the war to the public in advance. Maybe I'm an optimist about the voting public's sophistication, but I think that some of the disapproval of the war stems from the failure to seek even a fig leaf of any kind of democratic legitimacy and approval. Which raises my question to you, as an intelligent pro-war interlocutor: if a successful morally correct war is launched in a way that is illegitimate, what is the correct punishment to inflict on those who started it? If it's "Nothing, it worked out" then the idea of democratic legitimacy is a dead letter and the president has plenary power to declare war, that seems untenable.
I don't think people think through those procedural questions, but I do think the way the war was started and executed ("We won!" "we're about to make a deal" "We're about to end Iranian civilization forever") left a lot of people confused and maybe a little miffed, and dragged down the approval rating. You appear to be correct at this point that the strait of Hormuz is mostly useable for commercial traffic, with a mildly increased risk tolerance. But the repeated announcements have ruined presidential credibility.
A good guide here is the trajectory of GWOT-PATRIOT Act-Neocon consensus between 2006-2008. Everyone said that the voters rejected Dubya and the wars, but Obama kept most of it in place, and it became part of core American governance. Elections have consequences. A lot of MAGA is going to absorbed into the core American synthesis, for both parties. MAGA might die, the same way "Hipsters" aren't around anymore. But MAGA stuff is everywhere, like how I can go to a local microbrewery on my way home and pick up beer.
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