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
4mo ago
It's highly likely. Young wrestlers who cut weight too aggressively suppress testosterone levels in season, and former high school wrestlers have reported permanently fried endocrine systems (though this may be complicated by seeking medical treatment in the form of TRT).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
There was a time not long ago when the USA was expected to not just win the Olympic tournament, but would have been favored against a combined rest of world team. Now the USA would be iffy against Yugoslavia, and in the last Olympics relied on a starting C who, really, shouldn't be on the USA basketball team.
There's layers of irony. Sailer type HBDers have long offered the NBA as the thin wedge to argue that we accept ethnic differences in some fields, and "evolution doesn't stop at the neck," so we should be willing to accept the reality of differences elsewhere. And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
I mean, that's exactly my point. It's all downstream of cultural or economic questions, of interest and the availability of a strong culture of training, you need the right economic mix of availability of training with desperation to succeed. This is obviously visible in sports, but there's no reason to think that it's less true of other human endeavors.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
Are you going to lavish this attention on disproving the load-bearing quotes? Do you also think that I'm misquoting Bear Bryant and Cap Anson and the NYT editorial board? Or was it just the fun little joke that caught your ire?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
I'm currently listening to George Patton's war memoirs on audible, so far he's gone through North Africa and Siciliy and each place he goes he judges the peasants to be even worse than the last bunch. After judging the Sicilians to be even worse and more ignorant than the Moroccans, he travels to Egypt and says:
The Egyptian peasant, who abounds in large numbers, is distinctly lower than the Sicilian, whom I had previously considered at the bottom of the human curve.
The context you're offering is very much accurate, but it goes to the general problem: we always assume that traits displayed today are genetic or inherent, but we've turned out to be wrong about which traits inhere to which groups in which quantities nearly endlessly as contexts and conditions change.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
What does your profile consist of here? I'm really lost on what could be missing or contraindicated within what we know.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
Few people hate the fat guy in the gym doing his damnedest to bench 1plate. Everyone hates the fat guy on the couch who thinks he's too good to Suck and so makes excuses or does some newfangled get-fit-quick fad diet or workout routine instead of putting in the hard work and humbly submitting to the Suck.
I feel like this is some real guidance counselor morality for the motte.
Most people will laugh at people who suck in the gym. It's normal, it's natural. Hierarchy is the basic element of human activity, and that extends to exercise. They might know it's wrong, and might be polite, but pretending people aren't looking down on you when you suck is ridiculous.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
A majority of those running athletic institutions at the time believed that it would be physiologically dangerous for a woman to run a marathon. They were literally banned from events for that reason. It's not weakmanning to point to the institutional position of the time, it's rather odd to pretend that "everyone" knew women could run marathons except all the people involved in marathon running.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
The fall of African descent athletes is actually pretty interesting. I think there's a good chance it's downstream of the increased professionalism (in both player development and optimization of tactics) of sports and the scouting pathways starting younger and younger.
I agree, it shakes a lot of deeply held Uncle Roy assumptions I was raised with! There's a tendency to always see whatever obstacles have already been done away with as resulting in a "final product" of a society, and it keeps turning out we're wrong. The same assumption is made about class in every society: the current upper class tells myths of a prior class system that was unfair and stupid that put them at the bottom, but the current system that puts them at the top is justified and logical. It's hard to critically examine assumptions about the world.
My guess is that we're also seeing assimilation, with black teens acting more like white teens. I've seen it argued that much of the purported drop in teen sexual intercourse in America disappears if looking purely at whites; the white rate has remained the same while the black rate has converged with the white rate. Life paths are probably converging in other ways as well.
Even the UFC which is still pretty chaotic in terms of development pathways and truly global doesn't have any black champions at present.
Notably we're writing about five minutes after Jon Jones retired, but it's actually notable that the UFC is pretty dominated by a really tiny global minority of central Asian athletes. I'm sure there are people who assume it is genetic, as they previously did with every other ethnic minority that has dominated a sport.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
With and Against Yarvin on Cults, Racism, Gaza, and the Danger of Being Wrong
TLDR: Cults and related extremist groups arise when the Commanding Heights of culture and intellect are wildly and obviously wrong about something, opening space for less respectable and reputable groups to be obviously correct. In a healthy example, the Antithesis is quickly synthesized into the mainstream; in an unhealthy example the Thesis stands rigid and refuses to budge, and a as a result the antithesis grows in power and control. Seeing that the Antithesis is correct about one thing, people buy into the whole program, and pretty soon: there’s the Flavor-Aid.
My wife and I have been on a big kick of cults lately. She’s been watching a done of documentaries on cults, running from Heaven’s Gate and Synanon through NXVIM* and Gwen Shamblin. I, meanwhile, have been listening to Daryl Cooper’s extensive podcast on Jim Jones and The People’s Temple. Cooper does a great job of contextualizing Jones within the broader left* and the culture of the time. Cooper gives us the loony fringe left of the time, and how People’s Temple fit into that cultural movement. The insane things the Black Panthers would say, and the credibility they were given. The Weathermen taking over SDS, and actually going out to start a revolution. How insane everyone was, that Angela Davis would endorse People’s Temple, and call Jonestown in some of its last days to talk to Jones and encourage his people to hold the line against capitalism/racism/etc.
But what Cooper also does a great job of is showing the racism that the Panthers and the People’s Temple and their supporters active and passive were all reacting against. He starts the work quoting extensively from Isabella Wilkerson on lynchings in the South, the resulting Great Migration to the North, and the racism faced by blacks in Northern cities like Chicago. The violence in Cicero against a college educated father trying to move his family into a better neighborhood, where he could pay lower rent and have room for the piano they bought for their daughter.** He movingly talks about MLK and Selma, and the violence that lead to the rise of SDS and the Black Panthers.
I never realized how much of People’s Temple’s work was devoted to race issues, and how much of the congregation was black. Which, in light of recent conversations, has me thinking about how People’s Temple and similarly insane groups were enabled by American racism. They were handed a public issue, in which the mainstream was quite obviously morally wrong by its own standards and factually wrong in its claims. This enabled a malignant narcissist like Jim Jones to be correct about one thing, which caused a lot of people to listen to him about other things. I think people don’t appreciate this, on either left or right, because they don’t remember that…
Racists Really Did Believe in Racism
Curtis Yarvin in a recent podcast appearance talked about recent studies published in Nature indicating significant genetic contribution in sub-Saharan African genomes from an unknown hominid species, theorized to have diverged from modern humans before Neanderthals. Yarvin strongly implies, though he does not outright state, that this contribution indicates that sub-Saharan African populations are other than or less than other humans, and then moves on from the point quickly. Yarvin jokes that:
It's strange because it reminds us of our racist Uncle Roy and inevitably reminds us of our racist Uncle Roy who is not a reader of Science magazine. How did he get this information? How did he know? That's the question we have to answer.
This was the outright expression of something I’ve been thinking about for a while. A pretty frequent argument seen in right wing or putatively trad spaces: our ancestors knew these things, their superstitions were suppressed by a movement of the evil or the idiotic who forced us to pretend that things that aren’t true are, that the emperor had clothes, but we who can notice can look at the facts and the science and realize that they were true all along. But this ends up, inevitably, being an act of sane washing of the opinions of racists of the past. The modern HBDer like Yarvin takes a defensible compromise Motte, then declares Uncle Roy’s Bailey to be fully under control!
Much as atheist materialists try to rewrite history by assuming that all examples of religion are really cynical efforts to achieve material benefit, both racists and anti-racists of today sometimes do the same with racism. They soft-pedal the racist beliefs of American whites circa 1776-last week. HBDers sanewash their predecessors, talking about bell curves and averages and standard deviations. Wokes paint the racists of the past as purely evil, bent only on preserving their own selfish social and economic privileges through a devious and cynical set of schemes to keep the obviously equal (or brilliant) black man down. A certain breed of online dissident rightist will even buy into the woke framing, and try to sell racial segregation as a neutral social technology, that reducing diversity is necessary to conjure up social trust or something.
When the reality was, racists of the past were genuinely racist, they really did believe that the blacks and Jews etc. were inferior. And not just inferior on average within overlapping bell curves, or in specific metrics, or as a result of cultural conditioning. White racists often believed that every black was inferior in every way to essentially every white American. Consider, for a moment, the dialogue on sports pre-Jackie Robinson. The color line in sports is generally presented today as something done specifically to be cruel, to keep superior black athletes**** from getting their proper respect, to keep social lines intact. For the most part, if you ask those who created and upheld these lines, they genuinely thought that blacks couldn’t compete. The goal wasn’t to keep blacks from beating whites, it was to give blacks a League of their Own where they could compete without getting blown out by superior whites.
Before Jack Johnson, the assumption was that the greatest fighter in the world must be a white man. After all, the white man had outfought every other race, had the world in subjugation in 1900, how could it be otherwise than that he would win in the ring? Among the first great African American sportsmen, Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion of the world. He is celebrated for managing to break the color barrier, after pursuing the white champion across countries and borders trying to force him to fight, but few remember that beforehand most white experts doubted he could do it at all. Harper’s Weekly in 1910 argued that “The superiority of the brain of the white man … is undisputed by all authorities… [A] white man fighting with a negro … ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.” The same logic lead the Washington Post to argue about a hypothetical meeting between black champion Jack Johnson and white hope Jeffries “If Jeffries ever meets Johnson and is in his old trim, experts believe that ‘Texas Jack’ will not last more than ten rounds.” Jeffries and Johnson did meet, after years of intrepid effort by Johnson to bring him to the ring, and Johnson won despite a ruleset that allowed for up to forty rounds to be fought. The Grey Lady must have been worried sick after, the editors at the New York Times had openly speculated before the fight that "If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors.” The editors had set the stakes, and Johnson had delivered. Uncle Roys across the country wept, gnashed their teeth, and searched for a Great White Hope (the origin of the phrase) who would set things right by winning the heavyweight belt. They would mostly be disappointed until the millennium, outside of Sylvester Stallone movies.
Baseball, America’s pastime, was next. I’ve written before about how important Jackie Robinson was as a civil rights figure. Today he is mostly remembered as a social hero, but much more than that he was a baseball player, a true talent hall of famer with the WAR and the .400 OBP to show for it. He was great and his greatness proved the doubters wrong. Fred Lieb felt that Black ballplayers lacked the stamina to hold up to a 154 game schedule, or the refinement to handle the professional game at the highest level. Grantland Rice said the negro couldn’t handle the mental aspect of Major League ball, while Hugh Fullerton and Cap Anson often stated they lacked the discipline to stand the strain of the big leagues. Joe Williams in the New York World Telegram argued bluntly that: “Black players have been kept out of big league ball because they are, as a race, very poor ball players[,]” and would go on to say that "The demands of the Negro often bulk larger than his capabilities.” In the Sporting News J. G. Taylor Spink said of Jackie Robinson when he was in the Dodgers minor league system that “at 26… were he white and a polite college player, [he] would be eligible for a trial with one of the Brooklyn B farm organizations[,]” while Dan Daniel said “[Robinson] wasn’t of International [minor] League caliber.” Jackie Robinson would go on to put up a purely statistical Hall of Fame career and finally lead the Dodgers to the World Series. Robinson’s performance disproved
Despite the rise of the black athlete in mid century America, one spot where whites held out until recently was at quarterback in football. Bear Bryant, arguably the greatest college coach of all time, said that “The quarterback has to be a leader, and I don’t think a colored boy can do the things we need done at quarterback;” while Fran Curci of Kentucky told the NYT that “They’re great runners, but when it comes to reading defenses and passing, I don’t think the coloreds can handle it; and an anonymous NFL coach as late as 1978 felt comfortable telling Sports Illustrated that “The quarterback position requires more thinking than running, and that’s why you don’t see many blacks there. They’re not thinkers.” There wouldn’t be any black QBs in the pro game until the 80s, and they would remain a curiosity until the 2010s. Only in recent years have we seen black QBs break out of the running QB mold (and arguably seen teams overrate black QBs perceived as Athletic over white QBs perceived as statuesque pocket passers).
I’m sticking with sports because they’re easy, and the results are statistically obvious on the field. I hope I won’t be accused of consensus building when I say that we could dig up innumerable Uncle Roys saying Thurgood Marshall could never make it as a lawyer or judge, that there would never be a great black novelist or musician, that no black man would ever reach the rank of general in the US Army, or perform heart surgery. But that would be exhausting and boring. The sporting examples are enough to prove the point: our racist Uncle Roys, or perhaps Uncle Roy’s racist great uncle Roger, weren’t of the opinion that there were mostly-overlapping-bell-curves with different averages, they were of the opinion that blacks couldn’t compete with whites in any field.
Turn again to the same topic with regards to women. I’ve often seen it said on here that until the rise of Feminism and then of TRANS, everyone intuitively and obviously knew that women were about 35-40% weaker than men, that they would never come within 20% of men’s performance in sporting events. This is, again, sane washing history. When Bobbi Gibb tried to run the Boston Marathon in 1966 (when, for context, my father was in college), race director Will Cloney rejected her on the grounds that women were “physiologically incapable” of running 26 miles. Other observers theorized that her uterus might fall clean out. This year, the difference between the men’s and women’s winners in Boston was less than fifteen minutes in a total time of just over two hours. This is not what Uncle Roy predicted, and to pretend that fifteen minutes is closer to “her uterus falls out” than it is to equality strikes me as odd.***** The famed tennis Battle of the Sexes is often derided today, don’t you know that he was out of shape and old, that Serena and Venus in their primes couldn’t take some minor league nobody in tennis, etc. What this ignores is that the Uncle Roys of the world really believed that Billy Jean King didn’t stand a chance, that any professional male would slaughter her. The result was genuinely shocking to a great many people at the time.
This brings us back to the man himself, Curtis Yarvin. When imagining a coup-complete solution to the problems of the modern United States, Moldbug pictured the key tool to destroy his nemesis The Cathedral as an alternative truth telling service he labeled the “Antiversity.”
If you identify this as a case of circular reasoning, you are right. More precisely, it is a case of game theory—even more precisely, a coordination problem. The only way to break this cycle is to create a Schelling point: a credible and precise alternative. A red button. So this is the strategy. What, exactly, is this mysterious device? In the First Step, we do not replace all of USG. We just replace its brain— the University. With a new device we call the Antiversity, which is pretty much what it sounds like it is. Here is a summary: The Antiversity is an independent producer of veracity—a truth service. It rests automatic confidence in no other institution. Its goal is to uncover any truth available to it: both matters of fact and perspective. It needs to always be right and never be wrong. Where multiple coherent perspectives of an issue exist, the Antiversity must provide all—each composed with the highest quality available...The power of a truth service is its reliability. It may remain prudently silent on any point; it must err on none. The thesis of the Procedure is that if we can construct a truth service much more powerful than USG’s noble and revered ministry of information, we will be able to use it to safely and effectively defeat USG. Indeed, I can imagine no other way to solve the problem. Once this device of great veracity, the Antiversity—expressing not only razor-sharp analytical intelligence, not just exhaustive learning, but also great prudence and judgment—is fully armed and operational, it is straightforward to ask it the question: chto dyelat? What is to be done? What is the sequel to the coup d’état? What is Plan B?
His core idea is that the Antiversity would present all facts, including the ones that are inconvenient for the NYT or for Harvard, the Antiversity will be correct in its statements and predictions while The Cathedral will be wrong, and that as people recognize this they will notice what is going on around them and this will bring down The Cathedral and bring in a more sane regime. I’ve always found this a compelling argument, as I find many things Moldbug said. The conflict lies between Yarvin’s prior Moldbug arguments, and his current championing of your racist Uncle Roy, in that Uncle Roy and his arguments lost his credibility by more or less exactly this process. Uncle Roy predicted that Jack Johnson would lose, that Jackie Robinson lacked the discipline to play in the majors, that women couldn’t run 26 miles, that no woman could beat any man in competitive tennis. He was wrong every time, lost his credibility, and was dismissed as a crank, his views ignored or reengineered into imaginary social boundary keeping or capitalist exploitation.
But in the process, a lot of people became extremists or joined cults. The People’s Temple, Synanon, The Weathermen, the Panthers, the Red Army Faction, SDS. Their best recruiting tool was the purported racism of the establishment, this issue on which the establishment was obviously incorrect, being proven incorrect regularly. Cult leaders like Jim Jones used the racism of society as a recruiting tool, as his most powerful recruiting tool. Jim Jones used the obviously incorrect stances of millions of Uncle Roys to convince his followers that they should look for alternate sources of truth, sources like Jim Jones. That they should trust Jim Jones in all things, and even when Uncle Roy points out all the weird shit going on with Jim Jones he lacks credibility because he was wrong so many times, and Uncle Roy isn’t even around to ask what’s in the Flavor Aid.
The cults were the flower of this phenomenon, but the fruit is our modern world, where people genuinely think that men and women are physically equal if women only tried harder, and citing simple statistics and repeatable studies is verboten, for fear of sounding like Uncle Roy. The modern absurdities are born of overreaction to the absurdities of yesteryear. We must be careful not to overstate our cases and produce yet more absurdities, circling a Hegelian drain.
Which brings us to the other great recruiting tool of the 60s-era cults: Vietnam. Vietnam was a botched abortion of a colonial war, born in deceit and confusing esoteric doctrine, carried on in lies and half measures, brought to an embarrassing defeat after extended flailing and extensive murder of innocents. The establishment was always wrong on Vietnam, and always obviously wrong, and it destroyed the credibility of the establishment when Nixon’s conversations with Kissinger made clear that the establishment itself knew that they were wrong. Nixon knew the war was lost when he reached office, and continued it out of a strategy of achieving a “decent interval” before surrender, or occasionally bombed Laos or Camdodia in a half-hearted attempt to turn the tide.
Today’s absurdity is Gaza. A carnival of cruelty, with no obvious exit strategy. Israel has never had a real theory of victory, no one has yet offered a real plan for Gaza going forward, a few Israeli cranks on the right wing will at least attempt to forward real plans for genocide or ethnic cleansing, but mostly everyone still talks about a two-state solution that will obviously never come to be. Israel will not allow any group that could govern Gaza to govern Gaza, will neither absorb Gaza nor let it go, will neither integrate the Palestinians nor murder them in numbers significant enough to achieve population reduction. Gaza is kept in desperate famine, but not exterminated; it is kept miserable but not destroyed. And the vast majority of US politicians stand with Israel, and are more concerned with campus no-no words than with ongoing physical cruelty to no obvious end.
But what the lessons of Uncle Roy and Jim Jones should teach us is that being wrong for a long time in public is dangerous. It can destroy your credibility, it can overthrow regimes, it can lead to a reaction much worse than the problem ever was to begin with. The dynamic of truth-telling as revolutionary act that Yarvin purports to espouse, is most dangerous when the regime chooses to be obviously wrong.
We need solutions in Gaza, however brutal they may be they must be logical. We need to stick to facts, to stick to truth, to stick to principles. To do otherwise creates openings for things that are worse than we can imagine.
Footnotes
*While Cooper spends a lot of time denigrating groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, people who try to deride Cooper as a simple racist clearly haven’t consumed much of his content, where he’ll quote pages of Isabella Wilkerson or James Baldwin at you. That said, I warned my wife before recommending the work to her, the one thing Cooper did that was in poor taste: he should not have tried to do various blaccents when reading primary sources, it sounds ridiculous and embarrassing.
**Places like Cicero would provide some of the inspiration to the play A Raisin in the Sun which I saw performed locally a few months ago. The play was extremely well acted, the plot orients around a similar black family who put a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, only to be approached by the Clyburne Park Improvement Association with an offer to buy them out of the contract at a higher price than they had paid originally. The conflict over whether to take the money or not results in a moving soliloquy from the male lead, in which he imagines his conversation with the whites who want to keep them out:
MAMA Baby, how you going to feel on the inside? WALTER Fine! … Going to feel fine … a man … MAMA You won’t have nothing left then, Walter Lee. WALTER (Coming to her) I’m going to feel fine, Mama. I’m going to look that son-of-a-bitch in the eyes and say— (He falters)—and say, “All right, Mr. Lindner—(He falters even more)—that’s your neighborhood out there! You got the right to keep it like you want! You got the right to have it like you want! Just write the check and—the house is yours.” And—and I am going to say—(His voice almost breaks) “And you—you people just put the money in my hand and you won’t have to live next to this bunch of stinking niggers! …” (He straightens up and moves away from his mother, walking around the room) And maybe—maybe I’ll just get down on my black knees … (He does so; RUTH and BENNIE and MAMA watch him in frozen horror) “Captain, Mistuh, Bossman— (Groveling and grinning and wringing his hands in profoundly anguished imitation of the slowwitted movie stereotype) A-hee-hee-hee! Oh, yassuh boss! Yasssssuh! Great white—(Voice breaking, he forces himself to go on)—Father, just gi’ ussen de money, fo’ God’s sake, and we’s—we’s ain’t gwine come out deh and dirty up yo’ white folks neighborhood …” (He breaks down completely) And I’ll feel fine! Fine! FINE! (He gets up and goes into the bedroom)
This was a small theater, a black box set up with maybe a hundred people, so I was only a dozen feet from him as he did this. Excellent actor. But, and this actually did make me reflect on white privilege as a concept, I couldn’t help but reimagine the play as a comedy. In the script, they tell the whites to go stuff it and they move in anyway, with the consequences good and bad obvious to the audience. But in my mind, if I put money down on a house, and someone came asking to buy me out for more, I’d do nothing but ask for more money, there’s some price at which I’d absolutely take the money. Obviously if I got a really good deal to start, they’d have to really pay me out, but I’d absolutely sell to them at some price. And I’d be trying to convince them that I didn’t want to sell, and that they really really didn’t want me to live there, to pump up the price.
And this is where it ought to be a comedy, Walter Lee imagines himself getting on his knees before the White Man, degrading himself, calling himself nigger, begging; he imagines this is how he will be able to take more from the white man. When that’s the opposite of what he ought to do to get more money out of the Clyburne Park Improvement Association! When the CPIA shows up, they should be blaring the most obnoxious Negro music they can find in 1959. Walter Lee should be telling them that while he appreciates the offer, he is really looking forward to having the house in Clyburne park so he can have all his friends over for barbecues, and that he just couldn’t accept their number. Meanwhile, Walter Lee ought to be inviting all his blackest friends over to jump in and out of the apartment at random to “talk business” while the CPIA is there, hinting darkly at how the house in Clyburne Park will be perfect for their “business” and how all the customers will be able to find the house easy and park all over the neighborhood. Beneatha and Ruth should dress like whores, hell have the grandmother wander in half dressed and drunk. Beneatha’s African boyfriend Asagai*** should show up in a loin cloth with a spear yelling unintelligibly in gibberish, while Beneatha’s rich respectable colored boyfriend George will bring over a car load of his black fraternity brothers, all drunk on malt liquor, and start a fight with Asagai. In the midst of all this negro ruckus, the respectable suburbanites of the CPIA, terrified of this kind of family moving into their neighborhood, double their offer to Walter Lee, who sighs and accepts it. The CPIA YTs scurry out, and the blacks collectively break character and laugh together at how they hoodwinked the Man.
The fact that this is the obvious way the story should end, says something about my relationship with racial pride as a white person.
***I imagined Asagai in all his appearances as Barack Obama’s dad. Chicago university in 1959 is about when he would have been around. It added spice to the dialogue if you thought about Asagai later marrying a white bitch and leaving town, ditching her with the baby Barack. This isn’t strictly accurate, but Asagai as an archetype is literally Obama pere.
****Black American superiority in athletics is also rapidly being revealed as a myth. The various race scientists proclaiming it are too numerous to discuss here in my fourth footnote to an already overly verbose comment, but Jimmy the Greek has turned out to be wrong in addition to being rude. Black athletic dominance was a fact of life in the late 90s, but it peaked around the early 2000s and has been in decline ever since, across all major American sports (other than Hockey, which never had any black players). When I was a kid, it was basically understood that there would never be another white heavyweight champ outside of Rocky movies, never be a star white halfback in the NFL, never be a dominant white NBA MVP. As with the ascent of the black athlete, the decline started in boxing, moved to baseball, and has since started to show up in football and basketball. Russian/Ukrainian fighters have mostly dominated the heavyweight championship since the fall of the USSR, with the odd Irish traveler or Mexican thrown in. The percentage of black (African American) players in Major League Baseball peaked in the 80s at around 20%, and now sits at 6-7%. The percentage of black NFL players peaked in the early 2000s at 70%, and now sits just over 55%, with notable recent white stars at traditionally black skill positions like RB, WR, and CB popping up literally for the first time in decades. The NBA, of course, remains predominantly American black by numbers, but the rise of slavs like Jokic and Doncic has punctured myths, and the Serbian team took the US olympic team to the brink without a single black player. Racist myths are being punctured, here. Were I Ibram X Kendi, I would be trying to get Cooper Dejean and Christian McCaffrey on a podcast. We desperately want athletic success to be ethnic in nature, genetic in nature, but we’ve gotten it wrong every time. Basketball was once thought to be a great sport for Jews because it offered so many opportunities for trickery and deceit. But, of course, the Jews among HBD believers argue that Uncle Roy was right about the blacks, but wrong about the Jews.
*****Though this may be just be a case of appropriate username. I’m pretty sure my uterus would have fallen out if I had one.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
I used to join some boxing and Muay Thai trainings a long time ago...I would like something where I can train against other people with some force without getting concussions...
Are you literally me? I followed exactly that course into and out of fight sports (I quit after a bad concussion in a car accident, knowing that cumulative concussions would be bad) until I took up BJJ recently. Obviously, I'm less than a year in, so take this as the zeal of the recently converted or newbie enthusiasm, but:
Given your stated constraints, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is literally the exact thing you are looking for.
You say you want the fitness benefits of regular high speed sparring
nothing ever got me as fit as regular sparring so I really would like to pick up a fighting sport again.
but don't want to get hit in the head or kicking anyone
I would like something where I can train against other people with some force without getting concussions (so no more boxing, I used to have bad headaches after sparring rounds..) and without kicking (very injury-prone in my experience, also some orthopedic problems making this uncomfortable for me).
which is basically sport jiu jitsu. It's the closest you can get to simulating a fight against a resisting opponent without striking. You're going live, struggling close to full speed against an equally interested opponent, every single class from day one to age seventy unless you choose not to. The typical classes at the four schools I've visited all follow the structure of warm up -- technique -- live rounds. It's the closest you can get to a fight with minimal risk of concussions, and that seems to be an even harder line for you than it is for me. I'm not trying to get into an argument about fighting theory, but any other martial art you try to practice is going to be bullshit if you can't go live with blows to the head, you're either going to be doing some kind of tai-chi where you're moving so slowly that it isn't teaching you anything for timing, or you're removing head shots from competition which seems like a much bigger problem in terms of muscle memory and timing. Basically, to the extent that you think BJJ is bullshit because it doesn't involve striking/gouging/whatever, you can't take up any striking martial art that isn't more bullshit without getting hit in the head which you don't want. So I'd say take up BJJ and hit a heavy bag or get somebody to hold focus mitts for you once a week to keep your timing on your punches, and you'll be 99th percentile in a fight.
What I love about BJJ is that, if my schedule lines up with the classes and my (w/l)ife allows it, I can go live basically every day, in a full speed more or less full power setting against another adult male trying his hardest. I typically aim for ten to fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside, of live rounds after every class; this puts me at an average of around an hour a week of live fighting. If I were getting punched for fifteen or twenty minutes a day, multiple days a week, sometimes multiple days in a row, I would not be able to keep up with it. I've actually found that BJJ allows me to train at a higher intensity more regularly than most other workouts period, I couldn't lift heavy or climb project grades or run three days in a row at a high intensity with no rest days.
I will say that my gym is more sport focused, small built around several prominent tournament competitors, so in my training week a lot of time is dedicated to stuff that has no realistic self defense application. I frequently joke when one of my coaches talks about what would happen with a given technique "in the street" that if I'm in a fight with a stranger and he hits a De La Riva guard on me, I'm going to stop and say "hey where do you train? Tenth planet, no shit, my buddy Dan trains there, do you know him?" and the fight will probably fizzle out as we realize we share a hobby. But that's the natural consequence of going live, in every martial art there's a tradeoff in "realism" between actually trying with full speed/muscle/effort to win and putting in rules to prevent "unrealistic" strategies and behaviors on the mat. Some of the modern BJJ "dive for his shoelaces" leg lock techniques seem like they would be useless off the mat, but if you institute rules to ban them, you end up with so many rules that the sport becomes more restricted and less "real."
And anyway, the focus on sport BJJ versus self defense varies between gyms, and between coaches at the same gym. Actually between students. Every gym I've been to had a few cops, several veterans, and a few guys that are more into the combat jiu jitsu aesthetic/concept. Seek those coaches and fellow students out and you can practice in a more realistic rather than sport based way, they'll be happy to have another guy to practice with and on. Combat jiu jitsu rules are a popular way to include slapping strikes to keep your opponent honest on the ground without too much damage being done, and I've seen people bring out training knives or other weapons to practice self defense strategies with. What you need to do if you want something different than what your school is teaching is take control of your own training, ask the coaches for help with what you need.
Personally, I still hit the heavy bag every now and then, as I did before I started BJJ. In a fight, I'm probably still sticking to the plan of throwing straight punches and keeping my distance, though I'm much more comfortable in a clinch now, and I'd imagine that my timing is better as a result of so much time spend in competition with other full grown men. If I chose to use any BJJ, it would be sticking to stand up techniques like throws, arm drags, russian ties, which would allow me to control my opponent without going to the ground. If I found myself on the ground, I would aim to hit a sweep or reverse or otherwise disengage and get up, which we learn a lot of ways to do.
More broadly from my experience taking it up
Pros of BJJ
-- Live competition with a resisting opponent with minimal risk of injury.
-- Cardio, there's no motivator and no pacing like a 200lb wrestler on top of you who you have to stop from choking you.
-- Practical to train as a middle aged guy, there's older guys in their 40s and 50s going live at our gym. Can be a lifetime hobby.
-- Built for the mottizen/autist. John Danaher is the greatest BJJ coach of the century, he started training while taking a PhD in philosophy at Columbia. Chris Wojcik, a well known coach and competitor, is somewhere in the SSCverse having cited HPMOR in interviews as influential on his life. An infinite universe of techniques to learn and apply. It's the closest thing in the real world that delivers on the nerd martial arts dream of learning something and winning a fight.
-- Allows for a large number of styles for different body types and preferences. You can be a speed-power guy who shoots single legs all day, you can be a slow grinding technical old guy who fights from bottom half guard, you can be a flexibility and creativity guy who loves inversions to obscure subs.
-- Great community. Everyone wants to hang out, broad range of people from blue collar and cops to white collar tech kids.
-- You owe it to yourself to learn it, at least for a while, at some point in your life. Pure BJJ might not be something you see a ton of in MMA anymore, but techniques originally developed in BJJ are a core part of training for MMA fighters and armed forces, so even if you move on to something else it's worth taking time to study it.
-- The control and submission techniques you learn offer ways to fight without doing serious damage to the other person, which is good for situations where you may be in a fight but not want to overdo it. We have a lot of paramedics who train with us, and when they get crazy people in the ambulance they say its great to be good at keeping them in safe positions and neutralize them or force compliance without hitting them which creates more problems. At the same time, a kimura ends with a broken arm, and if you do it in a hurry it takes less than a second from locking it in to snap, so you can end a fight very quickly compared to throwing a lot of punches each of which is unlikely to end the fight. So you get a spectrum of violence to pick from.
-- The sense of masculine pride you get from defeating a resisting man in a physical struggle, knowing he is trying his best to subdue you but you subdue him instead, is incomparable. It is available nowhere else at this price in physical damage and danger, and never this frequently. When you win, it feels so good, and losing motivates you to try harder. Outside of any technical self defense ability, you will walk into that situation with the confidence of a wolf knowing you can beat another man in a fight because you have beaten other men all week.
Cons of BJJ
-- While BJJ is in practice the best weapon for the small guy against the big guy, because of the full-send nature of training, it's much more size dependent in training than boxing was for me. In a boxing sparring session, you're mostly going light, and against a little fella you just go lighter. In a BJJ round, you tend to go full power, and even if you don't the weight you are carrying around makes a difference. Little guys can just get smashed all day unless they're much better than the bigger guys. I'm lucky to be about the size of an antique heavyweight champion so it's not too much of a problem for me, I can go against basically everyone in the gym without problems, even the guys who are 250lbs I just do my best and figure I'm big enough that I don't get to complain. I don't know how you're built, so this may or may not matter to you, but if you're on the smaller side you're going to have a longer distance to travel in technique before you start getting wins.
-- You will get injured eventually, as you would in any intense athletic training, and especially in any real physical struggle. I don't see injuries any more frequently in BJJ than I do in rock climbing gyms or crossfit boxes, curving for intensity, but they do happen. You will need to personally take responsibility for preventing your own injuries, proactively tapping early, recognizing when you're hurt and should skip class or rolling, etc. There are some opponents I limit my rolls with to certain positions, because every time either they hurt me or I hurt them. A more "fake" training environment with fewer and less macho live rounds, like a krav maga self-defense class for women, is likely to have less of a "rub some dirt in it" culture and lead to fewer injuries.
-- You will feel ridiculous for an extended period of time. Boxing pretty much feels like boxing after about a week, you put your hands up and you punch and you just get better at punching, you put any guy in a boxing ring and he can fight. BJJ didn't really feel like I was doing BJJ for months after I started, I was just trying to survive and not hitting techniques, and I got pretty depressed at some points that I just sucked and would never get anywhere with it. I got past that, and now at least occasionally feel pretty good, but it's also the case that...
-- It's extremely training partner dependent. Our gym is pretty disorganized, mostly working guys and we show up when we can, so I never know who is going to be there any given week. One day this week I show up and I'm the only white belt, or I'm smallest guy there, and I'll just get smashed all day, just trying to avoid losing too quickly, taking pride in slowing the monsters down. Another day I might show up and be the assistant coach for the day because everyone else who showed up is newer and doesn't even know the positions we're training, or I'll happen to roll with guys I can beat on for one reason or another when we go live and rack up wins or work on new techniques I'm less comfortable with at full speed. Your fitness and skill levels, and those of the people at your gym, will determine your experience at the gym, in a way that isn't the case in lifting or climbing or running for me. When I lift the weights are there, regardless of who else shows up or doesn't. At BJJ, my experience is determined by the human terrain.
-- At times, BJJ can get way too meta. There's one coach I like a lot at our gym as a person, but when he's running class he teaches techniques that are too complicated for me, designed to counter techniques occurring at a level that I'm not operating at yet.
-- It can turn into an obsession very easily. Which was tough for me for the first six months when I REALLY, sucked, because I didn't want to talk about it. But you might find yourself making excuses to go to the gym more than you can spare the time for, or spending time and money on instructional videos or private training sessions or seminars and camps, and it is easy to get sucked in because you want to keep up with your peers at the gym.
Overall, I think BJJ is exactly what you are looking for at this stage in your life.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
It's a personal choice.
I lift weights practically silently, except maybe when attempting a max effort when I will occassionally WOOOO in triumph after hitting it. I make no noises when lifting, and I put away the bar as gently and quietly as possible, as though it were made of porcelain.
Mrs. FiveHour, by contrast, lifts half as much weight as though she's trying to make as much noise as possible. When she took up lifting, I finally bought decent squat stands, because the rickety old ones I had been using for ten years weren't equal to her abuse.
On the other hand, when I was in grad school, I got lectured by the woman running the girl's lifting club in the school gym about dropping the bar. She said the noise intimidated the girls. I pointed out that the bumper plates were meant to be dropped from overhead, and that I only dropped the bar when doing so was the safest way to get out of the position, or occasionally on warm ups to a max to get in the groove, and that noise was part of the gym experience and that I didn't criticize them for any noises they were making.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
The unfree villein population of England pre Norman conquest was around 60-70%, and they required the permission of their lord to possess or carry arms.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
I would imagine that would depend very much on the combatants, right? There's a lot of combinations of guys where I'd bet on A with a shovel over B with a broadsword.
I'm more getting at the fact that at many points in history, a peasant who walked about with a real weapon of war was liable to punishment under local custom and law.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
I didn't refer to nobles, only to the peasantry and underclass and to class more broadly. While you start by rejecting my point, you then outline exactly what I'm talking about: Only the free, not the enslaved or serf populations; only "respectable" citizens, not the underclass. We can debate how we would sort the participants in this particular dispute into historical categories for the purpose of examining it in a hypothetical Roman or Medieval or Tokugawa legal context.
What I think we agree on is that the statement I was responding to
The open carrying of weapons has been the norm across the world for 99% of human history. It only became banned when modern high capacity states gained the capacity to suppress vigilantism.
Fails to take into account class as context. It was nearly always the norm for someone to be allowed to carry weapons in varying contexts, an upper class that can variously be called citizens, nobles, knights, respectable, bourgeois, free men, as the case may be. It was nearly always the case that there also existed classes of people who were not allowed to carry weapons in varying contexts, and who could be punished by the law or directly by their betters for doing so, whether we call them slaves or serfs or peasants or untouchables or the poor or foreigners or children or what have you.
It's not the case that one can say simply or easily that everyone carried weapons all the time and it was no problem before the rise of the modern state.
Hell, even in America, even in the wild west, the shootout at the OK Corral starts because there's a rule in Tombstone that you couldn't carry guns within city limits, and Wyatt Earp was on his way to enforce that law.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
It was also fairly common for anyone to have a cane/walking stick/cudgel with him at any time.
But the size, shape, and type of tools/weapons/accoutrements allowed to ordinary folk was heavily regulated and violators harshly punished in urban areas throughout European history.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
This is another example of how the modern right has erased class from their view of history. It was not normal in almost any premodern society to allow just anyone to open carry weapons of any kind. The carrying of weapons was nearly always carefully prescribed according to class-status concerns, and the carrying of weapons served as a denotation of class. The peasantry and urban underclass were almost never allowed to openly carry weapons without punishment.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
The pure example of the Baridan's Ass sort of problem I'm talking about: it's good to have a sacred day of rest each week. The best way to achieve this is to have it as part of a religion, a dictate of said religion, that one does not work on the sabbath. It's really irrelevant whether your religion picks Sunday, Saturday, Friday, or Wednesday for that matter. But society has to commit to it, and not welch on it, or it doesn't really work.
But there's lots of cases where the quality of the advice is much less important that dedication to following the advice. I know a lot of people who are very out of shape who would benefit from doing any exercise, even a stupid program. Who would benefit from implementing any diet, even a bad one, versus eating whatever junk they see. Who would benefit from religion, even if they don't pick the exact type of Catholicism I happen to prefer.
Because not moving also has drawbacks.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4mo ago
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Standard American redneck brand loyalty. One guy is convinced that Jeep makes reliable vehicles, like the grand Cherokee.
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there's a guy who literally didn't believe in oil changes. He has bought a long series of PoS $3k cars that all inevitably quickly break down irreparably within a year or two. Oil changes are a ripoff! The mechanic just wants you to throw away good money for no reason because the car is going to break down in a year or two anyway!
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On the opposite end, some truly poorly modified civics and f150s
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Some awful and idiotic ways to rip off your insurance company or auto repair shops.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
And on a lot more than BJJ at that.
I realize I'm doing that annoying thing where I tell a story and then add details to it in a later reply, but you'd be very wrong to do so. The amount of absolutely horrifyingly bad advice on divorce, real estate purchases, finances, and car repair...it's actually shocking.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
You can't make all advice part of yourself, though. For the same reason that you cannot be every class at once in an RPG game.
Agreed, you can't be universally naively trusting. You can end up following really bad advice, or you can end up endlessly switching paths as you are persuaded by new advice. In an RPG, if you never specialize down any skill tree, you never reach the higher level skills that make the whole thing work.
I don't entirely disagree with negative traits of modern people, but resisting submission does make sense from one perspective. Think of it like an immune system.
What do we call someone with an immune system that attacks vital organs? Sick or healthy?
Most people who preach something merely want your money. Most people who do speeches merely want you to invest in their cause. Most charities are scams. Everything competes for our attention and uses advanced techniques to manipulate us for the sake of making money.
Was this less true in the past, or is it merely that the grifters of yesteryear have mostly been forgotten?
It's perhaps true that much of the clergy was cynically parasitic on the medieval body politic. But that's a different question from whether they were net positive!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Advice works poorly because of attitudes like those evinced in this article.
Or maybe we can just blame Martin Luther, if we don't want to pick on my friend @greyenlightenment. Possibly Bruce Lee.
People generally don't follow advice, even obviously good advice, because doing so would conflict with their ego. Taking advice, really taking it to heart and following it, requires a radical act of submission foreign to the modern mind. To truly accept advice, one must first place oneself below the advice giver.
Most people fail when implementing advice because they fail to truly implement the advice. They give it a half-effort, they don't persevere long enough to see results, they don't really feel the advice. Because they don't really respect the advice giver. You have to start by submitting your own will and intellect to the superior, to the rabbi or the guru or the priest or the professor or the doctor. And that act of submission is radically antithetical to the modern mind. We want to pick and choose, Jeet-Kune-Do style, take the best of all aspects of all advice and combine them, rather than take the advice of our superiors. Every one of us is trying to run our own custom set-up of values and cherry-picked advice, our own unique choices. Not to pick on @Pitt19802 but this is emblematic, saying the adulthood is all about realizing:
no one is going to walk you through life. It's on you to pull out the bits of advice that resonate with you and decide to try those out, then decide which of those you want to keep trying, which of those you want to stop trying, and what you want to try out that no one advised you to do.
If you are always keeping a part of your mind detached, observing, assessing whether the advice is working or not, then you're never really following it. At the first sign of failure, you are ready to jump ship, you have the lifeboats already inflated, you're already writing your clever comment about how the unsinkable advice sank.
When you look at cults like People's Temple, Synanon, NXIVM, or Gwen Shamblin; ok yeah they end up drinking the kool aid or murdering journalists or stealing money or abusing kids. But first, they work as self-improvement. Every cult story is full of people who join the cult, submit their will to the leader, and they get off drugs, they work hard at cult activities, they become functional members of society, they lose weight. They did all these things easily, like it was nothing, no big deal. And the key element is the submission, the surrender of will to the leader. This is why any effective advice program, like Crossfit or TRP, starts getting accused of being a "cult." When we see progress coming from submission, we defensively call it a cult, rather than question our own determined independence. I'm guilty of this myself: I disdain basically all self-help books on the principle that the person writing it doesn't impress me enough, and I giggled at Evola eviscerating the existentialists as pasty philosophy-professors who lacked real world experience while citing Nietzsche of all people.
Let's talk about fitness examples, since those were used in OP, and are also my favorite.
In the OP:
Even the best advice will still be constrained by one’s innate limitations. In my post “Individual differences of metabolism are real and matter” I give a real-life example of someone who despite only eating 1,800-2,000 calories/day, which he carefully tracks, and doing cardio, is still overweight at over 200lbs at 5’10”.
Genetic limitations are real, genetic limitations are an infohazard that prevents you from making progress. Both these facts are true. Once you are aware of and accept the idea that your genetics might be special and unique and prevent you from progressing based on basic advice, particularly where information on "slow metabolisms" or "hardgainers" is presented without a percentage-rate of the population, everyone wants to jump ship on the simple-but-difficult advice in favor of anointing oneself a hardgainer or having an unspecified and undiagnosed thyroid or metabolic problem. Some people are harmed by trying to follow advice that won't work for them because of their genetics, vastly more are harmed by not following basic fitness advice because they've given up and decided they are a special snowflake who can't follow basic advice.
This is why there is so much fluff in so many popular fitness programs. The actual program could be communicated in a spreadsheet; why do the authors give us treatises on physiology that don't matter, or stories about the athletes or champions or movie stars or secret-commandos or Soviet scientists that built or followed the program. Sometimes you get a mad-libs pile on: JALEN HURTS followed a workout program developed by SPETZNAZ COMMANDOS using hitherto ignored SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES that were discovered by EASTERN BLOC COMMUNIST SCIENTISISTS. And you get 20 pages about Jalen Hurts performance in the NFL, how badass the spetznaz commandos are, the intense scientific research sponsored by the USSR to develop athletes, how revolutionary these scientific principles are...and two pages with the actual program you need to follow. All the fluff is designed to get you to buy in, to actually follow the Program as written, to swallow your ego and accept that the Program and its creators are better than you and you need to follow their advice.
It's easy to dismiss the fluff as unnecessary, just give me the program, but it is probably the most necessary thing. A theoretical program with zero fluff, just sets and reps with no testimonials and no confusing pseudo-bro-science arguments about why it is effective, is unlikely to be followed by many people, a program offered with no story will not persuade people to try it. The story is necessary to convince people to do the work. A perfect program with no story probably has no adherents, or if anyone tries it they quit lacking a reason to continue when they start to dislike it or it gets hard or something seems to go wrong. A workout program that is distinctly sub-optimal, but with a narrative attached that convinces everyone who reads it to commit to doing that sub-optimal program with 100% compliance and effort, would deliver huge results.
This is all an act of self-criticism, Pride is a flaw in myself that I am struggling with in my efforts to improve in life and to find my way back to religion.
Learning jiu-jitsu has required me to radically submit, at age 33, to people I would normally avoid going to for advice on other topics. The head coach/owner at our gym is a Puerto Rican guy with barely a high school education*; though at least he has the job title "BJJ coach," most of the other upper belt teachers are blue collar by day, factory workers or in construction or government social work. They're not, broadly speaking, people I would normally seek out as my intellectual superiors. But in the gym, they know vastly more than me, and trying to exercise my own intellect, to pick and choose what I think will work, is a road to nowhere. Luckily, the demonstration of superiority is frequent, rapid, certain, violent, and kinetic. And at that point, if I can soothe my ego past excuses like "bjj is stupid and gay anyway" or "I'm [genetically weak/too old/unique and the advice won't work for me;" then I can make progress if I accept that the guys who beat me up probably have something to teach me, even if I'd smoke them on the LSAT. And without that respect, I probably won't learn anything. But even within the gym, we see the same narrativizing, the same devising of stories and lineages to techniques, used by the professors to hammer home that this move works. It was a favorite of Marcelo, or Renzo, or Gordon Ryan. It's the oldest trick in the book, or it's the brand new meta-game solution that's taking the competitive scene by storm. Because they need to convince the students to study the move diligently, and apply it with confidence, or it won't work, and will be discarded as useless advice.
Because as the Buddha tells us there are:
“Three kinds of wisdom: wisdom from hearing (suta-mayā paññā), wisdom from thinking (cintā-mayā paññā), and wisdom from development (bhāvanā-mayā paññā).”
And while I might have wisdom from hearing, or even wisdom from thinking, until I reach their level I will lack their wisdom from development, the true understanding that makes the advice part of my being.
*Though, realistically his education level does not reflect his genetics. He has two sons, one just became an anesthesiologist, the other is teenage but seems very bright, gets good grades, and is a nationally competitive BJJ phenom. Evidence that ethnic minorities are still working their way through the Great Sort?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Only commiseration here. The worst is when the sleeves are so slim, I can't even roll them up. That just feels insulting.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Slaves don't need to be used purely as manual labor.
Intelligent slaves offer advantages over intelligent free peers. Our insect owners don't have to worry (for a few centuries at least!) about a high level human slave becoming Hive President.
We theorize about creating self replicating intelligent machines. We are, once properly aligned, self replicating intelligent machines.
You know, funny story
Many years ago now, when I was a skinny lightweight rower in baggy basketball shorts and an honor's college t shirt, at my college gym. I was working on some internet 5x5 system, and these monster powerlifter bros come in and start squatting MASSIVE weights. At least they seemed massive to me at the time, it was probably nothing all that impressive. And in between sets I'm just kind of absent mindedly watching the show, because I'm genuinely impressed by it. And all of a sudden one of these guys turns to me and says loudly to his spotter "THIS WOULD BE EASIER IF THAT SKINNY FAGGOT WOULD STOP STARING AT MY ASS."
Which, to be fair to him, I guess I technically was; but to be fair to me, you're backsquatting three or four plates banging the rack in a public gym, you're sticking your ass out there.
Before I can even get my mind together to say anything, another of the gym regulars I recognized, a big jacked puerto rican guy, decides to stick up for me: "HEY MAN, THAT'S HOMOPHOBIC, MY BROTHER IS GAY, FUCK YOU MAN"
And I'm MORTIFIED now because I'm not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that!, and I'm just trying to get a work out in and fuck I've just been getting more comfortable coming to the gym and now this shit and these two giant jacked dudes are pushing and shoving and I'm just trying to get them to stop it but I don't know how. Eventually they cooled down and I slinked out in shame.
I guess that's the closest I've ever come to being actually actively mocked or shamed in a gym.
I think I phrased my original comment poorly, given the response to it. What I was trying to get at wasn't so much that people will come up and laugh in your face and call you a faggot, I agree you're right that doesn't really happen. This is mostly something that goes on subtly, in people's expressions, or in conversations they have with other people at the same gym. When my wife goes to a yoga class, I know she's looking around the room, she has her competitors she's trying to match, she has the women she CANNOT let beat her, and if she sees one of her colleagues it is ON she is going to hit every bind and balance to show them up. At Crossfit, I know the guys I never get close to, and I know the guys it would be embarrassing to let pass me. When I spend a lot of time in climbing gyms, the regulars know who they climb with, and there's a hierarchy to who is liked and who is ignored. And in BJJ, it's rigidly hierarchical, and we're all super nice and polite to each other, but we all know where we stand. There's the guys everyone fawns over, and the guys everyone tells "hey man you're doing great" after they tap four times in five minutes. I know who the guys are who I target to practice a new sub at an open mat, and I know who the guys are who I need to be soft on and maybe coach a little through the roll.
I don't think it's helpful on the motte, where we're all about ugly politically incorrect truths, to tell people that no one is judging them. But maybe I'm just used to more communal workouts, as those are the only ones I ever do in public gyms.
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