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
1d ago
I actually do think there is significant room to blame white stakeholders for pulling up the ladder behind them. The most significant part of the support for affirmative action has always been from existing stakeholders, who want to reduce competition.
A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harvard Law, like the Manson family, believes so firmly and mystically in his own superiority that no white loss in a racial conflict can rattle him. He believes in his superiority as a talented white kid as firmly as he believes in gravity. He is one of the Great and the Good, his talent got him here, giving tithes to those inferior to him will only enhance his stature. After all, if I'm a white kid with a 165 LSAT who can't get into a T14, every 160 LSAT Black kid who gets in is a spot that could have been mine, I coulda been a contenda if only things were different. But if I already got in, if I'm confident that my 179 LSAT is such that I always will get in to whatever I want, then I'd rather a less qualified kid got in than a more qualified one. If you're trying to get into a class of 800, ever non-merit spot is a spot you lose, I go from having 800 chances to get in to 600 chances to get in. If I'm already in a class of 800, every non-merit spot is a kid who isn't competing with me anymore for the top spot, I go from competing to be 1/800 to competing to be 1/600. Let the Blacks push out the whites and the Asians, the Blacks won't be able to compete with me anyway. If we're all at a firm together, my pedigree and my talent are worth more the fewer people exist with my pedigree and my talent. Affirmative action at top schools is a way to narrow the field of actual competitors from that school.
Imagine as a model an elite selective law school where 800 new students are admitted every year. First 400 students are admitted on "pure merit" for LSAT scores, the top scorers are brought in automatically. Then those 400 students vote on the rules used to choose the other 400 students. The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit. The kid with a 179 LSAT doesn't benefit from making sure that the kid with a 172 LSAT makes it in. The kid with a 172 is quite likely to compete with him in class for the top spots, the gap in ability isn't that large. But if he votes to admit kids on affirmative action grounds with a 160 LSAT, those kids aren't likely to compete with him. The same applies for any situation where incumbents are choosing the rules for those coming after him.
For a young white man applying to school, trying to get a job, trying to make partner, affirmative action harms him. For an old white man who already made partner, affirmative action helps him maintain his power, no young up-and-comers are coming for his crown because he makes sure that the lower levels are full of undeserving sycophantic incompetents. As corrupt leaders choose unqualified lackeys and promote them above their competence level, knowing that the lackeys will be forced to remain loyal to the leader because they can't survive on their own, so incumbents elevate diversity picks knowing that they won't threaten the current leadership, and will remain loyal to the institutions, because they owe their success to those leaders and institutions and values.
We saw this dynamic play out in the Democratic party over the past ten years. An emphasis on affirmative action in their choice of candidates left them with a thin bench, and allowed Joe Biden to become President. Joe Biden was always incompetent, but he had tenure, and by supporting minority candidates he protected himself against the rise of anyone ambitious and competent enough to supplant him. We didn't see ambitious young whites rising in the Democratic party, we saw affirmative action picks everywhere, and as a result in 2020 we wound up with the only half-competent white guy in the race winning, despite his being older than cable television. Nor would Joe have lasted as long as he did in the presidency with a competent vice president breathing down his neck.
Stunting the rise of competent competitors benefits boomer incumbents, protects them from being pushed out on an ice floe when they should be.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It's amazing how bad humans are at understanding probabilities. The existence of some successful white men doesn't mean there is no widespread discrimination against white men, any more than the existence of successful black women tells us that racism against blacks is fake.
Affirmative action's impact is by its nature stochastic, but as the old Democratic campaign line goes when you are out of work the unemployment rate is 100% for you. It's not that every white man makes 20% less, it's that some percentage of white men will be unable to get a job or a promotion or a project completed, while the rest move through their lives normally. If I'm at a law firm that commits itself to diversity in the partner ranks, it's not that I'll be paid less because I'm white when I'm an associate, or paid less if I make partner, it's that when I come up for partner I might draw the short straw and be up as the same time as a black guy or an Asian girl and get shafted.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Ellison was going to pick someone with pro-Israel credentials, and almost certainly someone Jewish.
Why is this almost certain? There's no shortage of Christians with pro-Israel credentials.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
We'll see how I look by 40. I've tried buzzing it down to a 2 a few times, and I have an odd shaped head, I feel like I look like a baby, and also like I shouldn't hang out too close to a synagogue.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I have family abroad in a country with iffy relations with the United States, so I've always joked that if I had to do a runner I'd show up at my uncle's doorstep, and hopefully have squirreled enough money away from whatever white collar crime has caused me to flee the country that I'll be able to open an American theme hamburger restaurant.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
What will come after post-modernity?
We first have to answer what comes after Capitalism. Capitalism is universal solvent, it slowly melted through every ethnic or ideological or traditional or religious barrier that tried to hold it back. It ate ethnicity, it ate religion, it ate nationalism, it ate gender, it ate the narrative of progress itself.
It will not be possible for a new narrative to assert itself until it first slays Capitalism.
And even within our science fiction, we can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of Capitalism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Thought of our discussion of this recurring trope reading Eig's Ali:
By the time he was seven or eight, Cassius was the leader of a pack of boys ever on the lookout for action. Odessa would look through the screen door and see her eldest son standing on the concrete porch, like a politician on a platform, addressing his youthful followers about what he had planned for them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
The problem here would be that alimony is based on the income of the partners, not any expected inheritance. Assume for this hypothetical that I am "Worth" $200k/yr after taxes.
Scenario A) I work for a law firm where I am payed $200k/yr after taxes, I live on $100k and save the rest.
Scenario B) I work for the family business, I receive a salary of $100k/yr after taxes, I save nothing, the rest remains within the family and either benefits me indirectly or will come to me as inheritance eventually.
If Mrs. FiveHour left me, alimony and property settlement would be calculated based on my income and assets. Under Scenario A, that would be based on $200k/yr in income plus splitting the savings. Under Scenario B, it would be based on $100k/yr and there are no savings to split. A divorcing spouse can't reach speculative inheritance.
The "trick" is in trusting my folks to manage the money for me for decades before I see it.
Child support is a little different, as it ought to be.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Wow, that's a solid stat pull. I'm genuinely surprised by it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig headed fool.
I notice, you are prejudiced, he is acting out his insecurities through violent bigotry.
I'm going to register that I think this is a troll post, the quality is so low that I have trouble believing in it. Numbers pop up only for one side, ethnicity and religion are conflated in different ways for different groups, hatreds are elided at random.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
@RenOS seems to A) Want to go to this game and hang out for social reasons, B) Prioritize not losing money over making money C) in front of people. Playing tight will maximize the odds that you stick around for most of the night, getting the social benefits of playing poker, and minimize the odds that you'll bust early and need to rebuy and/or look like an idiot.
We can't know the level of the table, so we can't reliably increase the odds of winning by advocating for aggressive play. We can reliably increase the odds of hanging around all night by advocating tight play.
It's pretty similar to what I'd tell someone prepping for a boxing match in two weeks: practice movement, keeping your hands up, throwing straight punches quickly, backing away. That might not be the best strategy for winning a boxing match, but it's got decent odds against an untrained opponent, and it's got very good odds of avoiding getting knocked out quickly and looking like a fool against a similarly skilled opponent.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them.
I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.
The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.
I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.
And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.
Huh. That's an interesting angle. I was thinking about that earlier today shoveling snow, how reading a novel like that is inherently selfish in some ways, but then I only managed to finish it through a book club, so it was inherently social and connection based for me.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
*Thereby excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I started reading last December and which probably would have made my top 5 for fiction had it been included.
Interesting, in my accounting I put books in the year I finished them. Probably because the point of the exercise for me is actually finishing books, rather than being in the middle of so many books that Mrs. FiveHour yells at me because they're all over the place in our bedroom.
I really do need to read the Outsiders at some point.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I look forward to them when I get out of town in the spring then!
They just feel like spring books for me. Maybe February if I drive south a few miles.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I guess I'll do the same even though nobody asked:
I asked!
I've been hesitating to tackle Nixonland by Perlstein so maybe that's what's next.
I was underwhelmed, I didn't really get much of a thesis out of it. There's better books on the same topic.
I took a page out of an the ACX review of it from last(?) year and made my wife read it to me while I was high. Had a similar experience to the reviewer in that I found the descriptions too intense at one point and made her stop. Second favorite book this year.
Wow you have no idea how much you just annoyed my wife in three weeks.
Less Than Zero by Ellis - Quite a read, really dark. I whipped through it though, it's kind of gripping. It felt very 80s so no surprise it was released in 1985. I would recommend this book to skinny women age 18-25 with an occasional coke habit.
Lucky Jim by Amis Kingsley - Pretty funny and possibly the most British thing I've ever read. It's about an early career English history professor in a provincial university and his struggles. It might have done lasting psychic damage to me when I was a freshman in college and a massive misanthrope with a superiority complex. I'd recommend it to grad students and adjunct professors who can't seem to get a tenure track.
I'm adding both these to my tbr pile.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Anna Karenina: A book like this is hard to even review, but it's certainly worth your while.
I read it for the first time in high school, and barely understood it. I read it again a couple years back, and enjoyed it greatly and got a lot out of it, but felt like I got bored of it near the end. Then that same week I was reading some interview in the NYT Sunday Book Review, and the author said he didn't really get Anna Karenina until he turned 40, and I sat there like fuuuuuck I gotta wait another seven years?
Two Years Before the Mast: an absolutely incredible story of seamanship, camaraderie, and the old west. Reading this book in the California summer was an unforgettable experience. It is on the very knife's edge of exponential growth taking root in California that has lasted through today. Be sure to read the author's postscript on his return visit 24 years after and his son's postscript 72 years after. An unspeakable sense of nostalgia and yet also a sense of what stays the same.
Somehow I'm both not sure what this book is about, and sure I want to read it, from this little review.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it
I just downloaded Forest Passage so maybe it will reveal more. I find Junger fascinating.
On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity.
I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?
Plutarch's Lives: Perhaps the greatest historical work ever written? But also, not a true history - it's fundamentally a philosophical book about human character, human greatness, and human folly. Plutarch is concerned with what it is to be human, and what types of men make their mark on history, and his Lives are deeply-painted portraits of character.
This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek. Everything you said too, and Plutarch was a genius writer, but the underlying political project was one of the biggest things that stuck with me. Plutarch used his literary and philosophical genius to forward his goals and ideas.
Contemporary alt-lit
If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
How is it structured, is it set buy in and then play cash and buy in again if you bust, or single buy in then tournament and pay out by rank, or variable buy in?
For the most part if your concern isn't making money (which depends more on the people you are playing with than on any skill you might build in a couple days) but just in not losing it: then your goal is to play tight, fold most of your hands pre-flop, and don't worry too much about bluffing or calling bluffs just play when you have a high percentage hand. This is where you start pre-flop:
Try to memorize the basic shape of the odds for the good hands, and give yourself basic rules of thumb for which to play through. Don't get obsessive with position or anything like that, if everyone else is playing at that level you're probably screwed anyway. If you're playing with ignorant normies, just playing tight and knowing which are the good hands will make you pretty solid. If you're playing against obsessives, it's going to take more than a week to get good enough at strategy for it to matter.
Personally, I'll add that as you play you can learn more about your own issues with certain hands, and either focus on learning to play them properly, or just learning to avoid them. For a long time I consistently lost money playing pockets, I'd take it to the flop because the odds were worth it, then fold immediately under pressure because I wasn't confident that the other guy didn't have a higher pair. So I started just deciding pre-flop that if I felt good I'd go all-in pre-flop and if I didn't I'd fold pre-flop for anything under JJ or QQ.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Roehm's boyfriends.
I'm still giggling from William Shearer describing the early SA as subject to the kind of dramatic internecine squabbles only possible between homosexuals.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
So for this week's "What Are You Reading" thread, we're coming to the end of the year and I just finished a few books, so I'm going to post my whole 2025:
Books 2025
Same rules as last year. These are the books I finished in the year 2025, meaning I read them, on paper or screen, all the way through. There are some other books I started but haven’t finished, I don’t give myself credit for those.
I aim for 26 books finished every year, so one every other week. Mostly because you hear about figures like Teddy Roosevelt reading a book a week, and I cut that in half for various reasons and try to stick to it. This is a totally arbitrary personal goal, and it is funny to me how IRL it’s almost impossible to discuss with anyone without it turning into a weird personal dick-measuring contest. There’s almost no one I talk about it with who doesn’t reply with some variation of: A) Insecure Excuses along the lines of I WISH I had TIME to read so much, and I wasn’t so BUSY all the time [with things presumably far more important than FHM’s leisurely reading]; B) Books are Dumb along the lines of I only read blog posts summarizing non-fiction self help books; C) Braggadocio, Actually I read THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE BOOKS this year, how did you ONLY read 26.
I don’t get why, to me, it’s only relevant to me personally, because only I can know how I read things. What I skim and what I comprehend every word of. The quality of the stuff I read. How much free time I have. I’m not really interested in comparing with people, but they can’t help themselves IRL, it touches a nerve. Which I guess it does for me to, but only to me, in that this is important to me in some way.
Anyway, recommendations if you want stuff a mottizen might like, or if you’ve read it and want to discuss it, feel free to comment.
I define a “book” by format, a bound codex front to back.
Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger — Might have been the most fun I had reading anything this year. It’s a great book in its own right, a gonzo creative writing exercise in half-invented rumor mongering gossip about people you might have heard of vaguely. Read it, afterward you’ll be able to confidently expound these anecdotes at parties, and when someone talks about modern celebrity culture, you can talk about how everything really went downhill after Fatty Arbuckle was fingered for raping a girl to death.
The Odyssey Emily Wilson — A lovely, crisp new translation. I try to read Homer at least once every year. There are a lot of things I got out of this version that I didn’t get out of other versions. Translation is its own art. Wilson’s work is right at the border of what I’d consider a useful translation. Read it if you have read the Odyssey before, but want another angle.
Where Men Win Glory Krakauer — A biography of Pat Tillman. I’ve always liked Krakauer ever since reading Into the Wild years ago, when I gift Tolstoy to anyone I inscribe it “Listen to Pierre.” The book is a real throwback to early GWOT times, how everyone felt right after 9/11, and just how bad the cover up was. The book is a bit of a hagiography, despite Krakauer’s best efforts, trying to portray Tillman as something other than a professionally violent guy who saw an opportunity to do some real violence for a good cause, but it leaks through in journalistic accounts of Tillman sucker punching other teenagers and hiding the assault charges from colleges to avoid the consequences of his actions. Read it if you feel like it, but it bogs down in the second half trying to figure out exactly what happened to Tillman when I don’t really care.
Rivals Jilly Cooper — This is such a fun romp, I read it with my wife. A Jeffrey Archer type 80s business heist forms the scaffolding of the story, but it’s all just window dressing for various characters to bounce off each other in various erotic combinations. It’s a shame bisexuality hadn’t been invented yet, Cooper could have done so much more if you have a few utility players on the team. Read this if you want something funny and light at the beach, she’s a good enough writer that some of the jokes make me laugh out loud.
Alperton Angels Janice Something or Other — A modern epistolary mystery novel told through text messages and notes apps. It starts off pretty good, and seems like it might really work, but ultimately it was one of the worst books I read this year. I read it with a friend, and when we were 3/4 of the way through, I posited a ridiculous twist ending as a bad joke, and that’s exactly what she did! The whole book is ruined in the last ten or twenty pages! Bails on everything that was interesting in the first part. No one can write a good ending to a scary book anymore! Do not read this one, and if you do stop 3/4 of the way through and just remember it that way.
The Sandman Omnibus Neil Gaiman — From a pile of recommendations for graphic novels that y’all gave me, I pulled this one. I don’t know if it counts as a book, it’s a comic. But if I had bought it in print, it would have been like seven books or something like that. I’ll just count it as one. Really strong work, very interesting, at first it’s a little bit too far into just being comic book slop, but it develops in interesting ways. Reading it around all the Neil Gaiman controversy, it made me think a lot about the way Gaiman projects himself into the work, and a particular kind of man. Gaiman wants to be a master who doesn’t want to be a master, a feminist patriarch who wants to uplift women who want to be his slaves. His behavior with women makes perfect sense reading his work, and it’s hard to see how fans of his expected anything different. Read this one if you want a long fantasy read without too much thinking.
Fewer Rules Better People Lam — It’s barely longer than a pamphlet, but makes a compelling argument for why removing laws and regulations is necessary to produce virtuous outcomes for everyone. Read it so that when you buy copies for all your local councilmen you can explain to them why they should read it.
Ask Not Callahan — A history of women destroyed by the philandering, and other crimes, of the men in the Kennedy clan. I have this bad habit of reading oppositionally: when I read a polemic against someone I make points for the, and when I read a polemic for them I make points against them. In this case, while I was blown away by the detailed research into all the terrible things that had been done, and the ridiculous horniness of JFK and brothers and fathers and children and cousins and nephews (seriously, it’s genetic) I didn’t necessarily buy all the harm they were supposed to have done. Read this if, like Mrs. FiveHour, you love Kennedy dirty laundry, but I’m still in search of a neutral historical group biography of the JFK-RFK-Teddy group; everything is either slander or hagiography and it nearly always focuses on just one brother and mentions the others when I want all three of them to the same detail.
The Story of a New Name Ferrante — Second book in the Neapolitan quartet. Exquisitely written, and worth reading for the art of it, but a whole lot of nothing happens for the most part, it’s a lot of work to get anywhere. Read it if you like the series, I’ll get to the third and fourth this upcoming year.
Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace — My big project for the year. I’m not sure what to say about it. It’s brilliant. It feels like it one hundred percent predicted the modern world in many ways, but it’s also so long and so intricate and so weirdly plotted. Reminds me of and probably inspired Motte-Adjacent writer TLP’s and his hatred for his own reader, DFW is engaged in a meta conflict with his own reader. It’s brilliant but it is almost intentionally bad, disgusting at times for no reason, but the writing is so brilliant, I can’t make up my mind. I love DFW’s short stories, but this took me several tries to read, and in some ways I feel like at its best Infinite Jest is a collection of short stories that are connected into a madcap plot. I’m still processing this one. It appears in the list where I started it, but I finished it much later. Read this if you want to read something brilliant, and don’t mind that the author actively hates the audience, you probably owe it to yourself to read it once, it might be the last really great book ever written.
Moneyland Bullough — A pretty good nonfiction book of anecdotes about different ways that rich people use the tools of international law to hide, launder, secure, and otherwise use money. An ok and pretty informative book, but kind of lacks in a moral argument without fully committing to anticapitalist marxian analysis. If it’s their money, why can’t they use it how they want? Who cares about divorce laws for billionaire trophy wives who get traded up? Read it if you want a quick light read for information, I got it off the free pile at the bookstore.
Journey to the End of Night Celine — What a slog! Why do people like this one? I went in expecting some really interesting cynical WWI book, instead I got a half-assed Henry Miller, a book with no characters who ever felt either realistic or admirable, just an absolute slog of a book that never even hints at an interesting point. Don’t read this one unless you’re determined to finish some stupid list of books, like I was.
The Official Preppy Handbook Birnbach — Oh my God you need to read this. Don’t talk to me about “This is what they took from you” on twitter if you haven’t read this. WHAT A TIME! WHAT A PLACE! WHAT A FEELING! This book captures what it felt like to be a certain kind of person in a certain kind of place at a certain time, and if you’re like me you’ll be deep diving eBay for vintage Lacoste and cashmere for a few weeks afterward. It’s a two day read at most, written as a how-to guide for being perfectly preppy, from cradle to grave. Read this if you love subcultural study and love Americana.
300 Miller — When the movie came out my Boy Scout troop could recite most of it from memory on a ten mile hike, I decided to finally get back to the original material. Wow, was it different. Where the movie felt very GWOT, about beautiful manly White Greeks fighting shifty turbaned Brown Persians. The comic art style makes the Greeks look vaguely like an anti-negroid attack ad from Harper’s in the 1870s. It was decent, but exactly the same as the movie for the best parts, without the inherent homoerotic ‘miring of Gerard Butler’s abs. Skip it.
American Sniper Kyle — Read it for Memorial Day weekend. A quick, interesting read. I have a notes app draft of an effort post about how the book feels more like an athlete memoir than a war memoir, Kyle feels more like Michael Jordan than he does like Carlos Hathcock. Ultimately to pad the book out they include a lot of his wife’s reminiscences about the period, which I really didn’t care about, and the editions released after his death include a bunch of eulogies about how great he was. It’s a quick read and influential so I’d recommend reading it.
Storm of Steel Junger — This was one of my favorite books I read this year. Excellent, brilliant, lovely, incredible, harrowing. Absolute masterpiece. Junger was a brilliant free spirit, who wound up in the most important places on the Western Front, and wrote about them as they happened. Made me want to read everything by Junger, which I plan to. You need to read this one.
Band of Brothers Ambrose — I have a personal connection to this unit, and I loved the HBO series, so for me this was one I should have read a long time ago, and finally got around to. It was the right moment for WWII historiography, and it’s such an interesting account of such an interesting journey for the Screaming Eagles and Easy Company in particular. There’s a lot of inherent depth to a work that has that much first hand interview to it. Read this one at least once.
Fat City Gardner — Recommended by Alex Perez as a great boxing book, it’s a fictional account of two struggling pro-boxers, one teenage almost-an-up-and-comer and one 30ish never-was. It’s a real nuts-and-bolts boxing book, and a vignette of the low end of life in mid century California. Short, punchy, a really solid book, read this if you like the fight game.
The Fight Mailer — A literary journalistic account of the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Ali and Foreman. I’m fascinated by Ali, a singular figure in world history. When our cousins from Austria visited by Great Aunt back in the 60s, the first thing they wanted to do was travel to Deer Lake to try to catch a glimpse of Ali. The best way I can describe in modern terms is maybe if Shohei Ohtani was also Kanye West, or if Tom Brady was also Bronze Age Pervert, if an athlete whose brilliance cannot be denied was also a controversial political and cultural figure. Mailer’s writing is good, and he had a LOT of access, but the book itself was ultimately mediocre. Read it if you feel like it, it’s short and easy, but it mostly just teased me, and made me want to read Eig’s Ali biography.
Original Sin Tapper — An interior history of the end of the Biden presidency. I read it with my wife to see what all the fuss was about and wrote a review on the motte. Mediocre and boring, an exercise in trying to do a directional autopsy. TLDR the Biden senility crisis was totally unpredictable and no one outside of Biden and his two best friends did anything wrong. Don’t bother reading it, just read my post about it.
All the Light We Cannot See Doerr — A well reviewed WWII book about a blind French girl and a German boy escaping allied bombing at the end of WWII. It started out well, but the ending was totally limp. And, to be honest, I’m not this guy normally, but one of the things I really liked about the book was that it kept the atrocities mostly off-screen, but then at the very end it goes into a very unnecessary explicit gang rape scene of the Red Army and German women. Which was just such a weird change in tone that it bothered me a lot. I thought it was good that he didn’t turn the WWII story into a Holocaust centered story, which too many authors can’t resist, but then to turn around and focus in on anti-German atrocities while avoiding German atrocities sets off my crypto-Nazi alarm bells for a book that isn’t that. Skip this one, not worth the effort.
On The Marble Cliffs Junger — Junger’s Animal Farm, his allegory mythology of the rise of Hitler. Junger was always a right winger, but Junger hated Hitler, Ernst Jr was killed by Nazis for involvement in a plot to overthrow Hitler, and Junger himself was only spared because Hitler was a fan. I’m not sure I really got it, I keep meaning to take some time to go back and read interpretations of it to see if I can really get into Junger’s feelings and values within the work. Probably read it if you are a fan of Junger, but not otherwise.
JFK Jr An Oral Biography — I never really knew who JFK Jr. was, only knew him from references from others. This book was a fascinating dive into a very interesting person. How would you move through life if everyone wanted to make love to you? Everyone. The female speakers in the book that don’t want him are so up-her-own-ass about being just frineds that you can tell that not sleeping with him is a weird kind of active choice. The beautiful man that everyone wants, the son of a martyred president who in turn was famous for fucking starlets. Literally everyone wanted him. Women wanted him, men wanted to hang out with him to play the MAC system off his scraps. It’s fascinating. Among other anecdotes: JFK Jr. once had an intervention for a friend, and invited his cousin RFK Jr. to come to share stories from RFK Jr’s own addiction struggles, RFK Jr. proceeded to share stories so harrowing that JFK Jr.’s friend decided that he himself didn’t have a problem at all because he was nowhere near RFK’s. Read it if you like the Kennedys, like Mrs. FHM.
Coup d’Etat Luttwak — Luttwak’s original provocative how-to book on taking a government by Coup D’Etat. Not as good as I expected it to be, I liked all the Luttwak I’ve read, but when I finally tracked this one down, it kinda fell flat. It’s interesting, but all felt kind of obvious, like one of those self-defense manuals that say things like “don’t walk home alone.” Maybe if you want to read it, try to find the original, I had the updated reissue with modern interpolations which kinda ruined the flow. Gets a don’t bother from me.
The Sun Also Rises Hemingway — Maybe the best book I read this year. Hemingway is probably my favorite author of all time, the greatest to ever do it, numero uno, the best combination for my money of being a readable masculine author who is also a brilliant and important literary mind. The book itself is all about conflicting visions of masculinity, the big question is who is the cuck? The idiots who read Hemingway and see a simple view of masculinity have never read this book or understood it. Read it.
To Have and to Have Not Hemingway — And of course, as soon as I get on a kick of wanting to read Hemingway because I love him, I run into a terrible one, the worst of Hemingway. Commercial, racist, derivative, flat, unrealistic. A mediocre noir about a Key-West smuggler and his fat wife. I’ve got plenty of stomach for period-appropriate racism, but this one was a step too far for me, the main character seems to be willing to betray chinks just because they’re chinks, and Cubans just because they are Cubans, there’s no moral logic to justify his actions except his racism. I get an unlikeable protagonist but this guy is so annoying and bullshit-tough-guy-hard-times that I actively root against him and for the rich guys forcing him out of Key West and the Cuban revolutionary gangsters shooting at him. Skip it unless you’re a Hemingway completionism.
Ride the Tiger Evola — My first introduction to Evola’s thought. I’m fascinated by his self description at his trial after the war, when asked if he was a Fascist he replied “No, I’m a Super-Fascist.” His doctrine of internal resistance without external action is interesting, but ultimately it might be too esoteric for me to actually understand what’s going on. If we have any Evola-heads on here, feel free to DM me and explain it to me. I’d recommend it, but I don’t know that it’s for everyone anyway.
Cry Havoc Mann — A memoir supposedly written in an African prison by a British mercenary leader. A series of stories about overthrowing corrupt African regimes, written seemingly by a character from Cooper’s Rivals, an upper class Englishman of the Old-School, in a regimental tie and full of the old times. The last gasp of the colonialist. Read it because it’s fascinating, but don’t take anything he says too seriously.
Portnoy’s Complaint Roth — The first person account of a Jewish man to his therapist, describing his struggles with his sexual mania over his first thirty years. Oedipal doesn’t even begin to cover it. At times it seems uniquely Jewish, at times it uses the Jewish experience to universalize to the male experience, but when I identify with Portnoy it makes me nauseous. It makes me want to read more Roth. Also a good example of a book where it was widely recommended, but the anecdotes that people pull out of the story are all from the first 30 pages, so the idea you would get from the reviews of what the book is about is wrong, it’s not about a teenager it’s about a 35 year old man. Absolutely read this one, and DM me to discuss what you think of it.
Soul on Ice Cleaver — The letters and essays of a Black Panther in prison in the 60s. I picked it up because I’d seen it cited so often by Darryl Cooper, and everyone else on the alt-right internet citing Cooper or learning it from him, about Cleaver writing about rape and isn’t that terrible that leftists loved this guy. I quickly found that those quotes were taken pretty far out of context, as is typical for any gotcha meme like that, and there’s a much more interesting conversation to be had about what is going on in Cleaver’s writing, and Cleaver is kind of interesting in his own right. I’m thinking of diving into the leftists of the time a bit. Read it if you’re interested in an “of its time” period piece.
The Naked and the Dead Mailer — My least favorite book I read this year, a semi-autobiographical fictional account of an island hopping WWII Pacific battle. This book was terrible. It somehow managed to be boring despite being a short book about WWII jungle warfare, it managed to be testosterone sapping in its maudlin vignettes of miserable American lives left behind despite being a war novel, despite following only a half-strength platoon of men the characters still managed to be repetitive and unnecessarily boring, despite its pretensions of grim realism it uses too many confusing literary narrative innovations to have any immediacy. Skip this one unless you want to read it to commiserate with me about how terrible it was.
Glorious Exploits Lennon — A fun Classical Historical novel, set in Syracuse after the failure of the Athenian invasion, two buddies set out to put on a prisoner-cast production of Euripides Medea to preserve the art in case Athens is destroyed and the work lost forever. It reminds me a lot of the vintage Chris Moore novels I loved in middle school, showing we can still do that kind of thing if we want to, even if I’ve been disappointed by Moore himself lately. Mostly funny, written in a modern Irish vernacular rather than trying to do the stately or pseudo-accurate Greek idiom thing, some moments that will make you feel or think. Does a really good job of writing about prisoners of war without caring about who was right or wrong in the war itself. Read it, it’s a fun little book and won’t cost you anything in time or effort.
Comment below with what you're reading this week, what you read this year, or any thoughts on any of these books. Feel free to DM me or get my TG if you want to discuss any of these in more depth than makes sense on a forum post.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I can't stick to anything, but what I've seen results from when I use them in between:
-- Creatine will make me put on ten pounds of mostly muscle instantly.
-- Nutrafol, with persistence, has got my thinning hair looking less thinning. Might not reverse altogether, but I feel like it's buying me time to get to 40 and just shave it all off before it becomes really problematic.
-- Collagen supplements reduce finger strain when I'm climbing a lot
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.
I feel that way not infrequently on the internet. There are times when I really don't want to hear the opinions of people who aren't American about American politics, or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania. I feel like I'm getting opinions from a low-level LLM, foreigners have half-absorbed cliches about party primary politics from reading reddit, but have never actually voted in an American primary election. People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.
I'm increasingly blackpilled about what actual internet discourse would look like if we excluded all the foreigners from talking about American elections. But would there be any internet left?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I'm curious, did you have actual churches around you in mind when you wrote this? Have you been through this process, or been to churches that have been through it, or is this occurring within your mind?
I have not personally been through it, my church baptized me and it exists today, and has in fact grown as it has absorbed some outlying parishes. But this kind of thing is very common over time in my area of Pennsylvania countryside, and if you look this dynamic really does exist. I'd suggest if you want to develop the concept further, and I think there's some meat on that bone, you could endeavor to find examples of this and even to speak to people who have been through it. The Northeast is riddled with historic protestant churches that have changed denominations over time.
And I think you ignore one of the most common scenarios that you see:
Church Five A traditional mainline Lutheran church, with a beautiful building built by loyal families in a long tradition, gets a charismatic preacher, who reads and thinks extensively about theological and philosophical questions, and the beloved charismatic young preacher convinces the congregation to change to a new doctrine, and the beautiful old Lutheran church becomes the Unitarian/Moravian/Mennonite/UCC/etc. church, and it has the same people in the same building following the same preacher until the same congregation, until a new preacher comes in to the new doctrine to the same congregation in unbroken succession.
Sometimes, a breakaway remnant that actually cared about doctrine founds a new Lutheran church across the other side of the valley, and that church inevitably in my experience, from Maryland to Maine, will make the same joke: We Kept the Faith, They Kept the Furniture.
Over time, both churches thrive as the region grows. The Unitarian church in the beautiful old building remains the church for the old families around town, who have become Unitarian over time, and those interested in joining those circles or becoming Unitarian join that old church. As additional migrants come to the town, the Lutheran church thrives off of Lutherans who drift in, and as a general sort of church, but few of the original old family members are prominent.
Which is Church Five?
I do like your post, and I think this is one of the most underanalyzed aspects of politics. Not be too Freudian about, but I think it can be summarized simply as:
Do you think that you make your (Founding) Father(s) proud of you?
I think the split between small-c conservatives of either tribe and radicals/reactionaries of either tribe. The conservative believes that the founding fathers love him and that they would be proud of what America has become. The reactionary believes that the founding fathers would weep to see America today, and that we must RETVRN to values that they would be proud of. The radical believes that the founding fathers would hate America, and that's a good thing actually and we should move even further from that. This is almost universally projectable from the personal to the political, as to the man as to the polis, the conservative is a person who has a good relationship with his father and thinks his father is proud of him.
There is a long running strain of American leftism, from Frederick Douglass to Lincoln to Teddy to FDR to JFK to Barack Obama, that operated under the assumption that the Founding Fathers would be proud of the continued progression of America to the left. This is embodied in the classic musical 1776, and it's overhyped successor in Hamilton. In most ways, I can buy into this. Some, anyway, of the Founding Fathers would be proud of what America has become. But more than anything, this is embodied in the genre of Boomer Re-litigating the 60s Movies. Forrest Gump, American Graffiti, but most importantly for the father-relationship: Field of Dreams.
People miss that Field of Dreams is about the 60s, because that aspect gets squeezed into a monologue introduction, but the break in the boomer-child and traditional-father relationship is when Kevin Costner goes to college and "majors in the 60s" and washes up in Iowa , along with his favorite author J.D. Salinger (explicitly in the book, implicitly in the film). Certainly MLB doesn't bring up the idea of uniting the ideals of the counterculture with the basic chthonic Americana joy of Baseball when they play their annual Field of Dreams game in the middle of a cornfield! But that is the subtext of the film, both Kevin Costner coming to terms with his father, and Kevin Costner coming to understand that his father loved him and is proud of what he became.
I have a close relationship with my own father, and I think he's proud of me. We talk a freakish amount for adult family, and while I have different hobbies and interests than he had, we respect each other's thoughts. I can explain my interests to him, and understand his. And in my imagination, that relationship translates. I watched 1776 so many times with my mother growing up that if you threw me into a production of the play tonight, I wouldn't get every line in every song right off-book, but I'd be able to hack through every scene and every tune well enough to put on community theater. When I imagine sitting down to lunch in Philly with John Adams and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, I imagine those portrayals, and I imagine explaining my own America to them, and I think they'd be proud of it. I'm not sure they'd be proud of every part of America, but I think they'll be proud of Wawa.
And I think that's a different way to look at the whole question. The Church is still the Church as long as the founders would be proud of what it has become.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I just finished The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. And I didn't like it. It was well enough written mechanically, and at times the plot threatened to be good but relented before arrival. It was too weird and contrived, too much effort put into elaborate personal backstories for characters I never quite care about. It never quite managed to get there. Maybe it's a Seinfeld Isn't Funny thing where some of the edginess is just boring to me, but was cool in 1950?
But I realized midway through that Norman Mailer occupies a unique place in literature for me. I don't like him, but I consistently confuse him for an author I like. I've bought several books of his when browsing used book sales, his biography of Picasso, TNATD, his book about the Rumble in the Jungle, I think a couple others over the years. The only one I even marginally liked was the boxing book. But I keep buying them thinking I like Norman Mailer. He's constantly mentioned in the same sentences as authors I like ("Manly man authors like Hemingway and Mailer", "Hard boiled gonzo journalists like Thompson and Mailer") or by authors I like (Eldridge Cleaver calls him out as a great author in Soul on Ice and Alex Perez loves him). But when I tried to think of things of Mailer's that I like I realized I was getting him confused with Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) or Carver or Updike or Gardner. Every story I could think of that I liked about Mailer, even the personal details, I had confused with somebody else.
Does anyone else have somebody like that? An artist who you don't like, but who you repeatedly forget that you dislike and vaguely think you like because it seems like something you'd like.
Look forward to me posting this again in five years when I pick up a copy of The Executioner's Song that I find in an AirBnB and slog through it in a weekend only to remember I hate it.
Yes
But I don't think the shock at this case is based in a good model of who Bannon and Chomsky are. Bannon has always been, or had pretensions of being, a real serious intellectual, who reads widely within academic texts, which means reading a lot of leftists any time since, what, Aquinas? Steve Bannon has definitely read and admires Noam Chomsky's work. Bannon has expressed his admiration and desire to imitate Lenin, you think he'd draw the line at Chomsky?
Chomsky and Bannon share a lot of analytical agreements about the nature of the political establishment, and about American foreign policy over the past hundred years. Their disagreements are actually a lot more minor than the disagreements between either and other Epstein buddies like Larry Summers or Bill Gates. If the guest list at that party was Bannon, Chomsky, Summers, Gates, Clinton, and Epstein; it's pretty obvious that Chomsky and Bannon would get along better together than with anyone else at the party.
Rather I think twitter turbolibs who are surprised about Chomsky and Bannon getting along are shocked because they haven't read Chomsky and just think of him as a harmless mascot of the generic academic left, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is; and they haven't read Bannon and assume he's just a MTG or Boebert style airhead, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is.
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