FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
1000th Comment: On The Value of Conflict or if we want to Make America Great Again we need to start raising kids with values we don’t intend them to keep
As I narcissistically checked my profile page to look up old comments, I realized that I was at 999. Being exceedingly sentimental, I thought I should make number 1000 a fun stoned goofball post. So I wanted to return to a vague thesis of mine, something that can bring a lot of disparate trains of thought together for me. For those of you who want to skip straight to telling me why I’m wrong without reading the whole thing, TLDR:
Certain beliefs and practices should only be formed as a result of rebellion against society, and never be taught directly by authority figures. Others make sense only as part of a living communal tradition, and lose their meaning as rebellion. Any belief or movement is inherently understood within social context, and cannot be understood separated from the whole of the political world including its opposition. One is not woke, one is woke to something that exists, the bad dream that is wrong in the world. One is not conservative, one conserves something from someone else. The morass of the current Culture War is the result of the parties trying to replay Theses from prior culture wars, while ignoring the context in which those wars were fought. The solution is for parents and authority figures to assume values with the young that they do not necessarily hold, so those youth can experience the societal coming of age rebellion we want for them, without transgressing the bounds of good taste.
((NB: I’m going to use the Hegelian triadic structure of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. I’m aware that Hegel himself did not use these terms in his work, but I think it’s the best way to represent the concept of the triadic and the dialectic in Hegel’s work, and it is how it’s been taught in every Phil101 course for decades so we’re sticking with it.))
I’ve never had a problem with atheists who became atheists, who were raised in a faith and ultimately turned against it, but I’ve rarely liked atheists who were born into their faith (or lack thereof). I find them so often to be missing some essential mode of human experience, totally incapable of comprehending the idea of religion. They lack the experience of even trying to believe.
Similarly, I’m a bit of a sexual libertine in my own life, but I find the spectacle of kids being taught libertinism disgusting. The idea of “sex positive” parenting strikes me as neither, kids should discover these things on their own. I value my own youth, when at 12 my friends and I sneakily “discovered” DVDs that had brief nudity in them but that our parents didn’t pick up on, and pushing boundaries resulted in experiencing our sexual lives on our own, without too much direction or interference. That kind of freedom should be found for oneself, in a struggle against the putative powers that be, not given as gospel by a middle school teacher.
At the same time, I’ve never had a problem with traditionalists who were born traditionalists. Those who embrace a living tradition from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. They wish to live their lives in accordance with what they were taught growing up; but I’m frightened by those who wish to restrict themselves further, by those who imagine themselves in communion with a distant fantasy of medieval Chistendom or further back to a pagan past, the reactionaries.
I’m at heart, a conservative, in the pejorative sense of conservatives as the coalition of the comfortable. I like the world the way it is, more or less, and I want it to stay that way for my descendants. Both my biological descendants, my children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces; and my ideological descendants, the students at my alma mater, at my high school and my college, future Americans whose parents might not even be in the country yet. The problem for me and mine, is that the tradition I want to conserve is one of struggle. My father and his cohort, their golden age was the 1950s-1970s, it was a struggle against repressive social norms towards teenage freedom and self expression. The great music, movies, books of his era are all about striking out against social norms. How do I return when the very dynamic of the era militates against itself? One side of the culture war wishes a full return to the 1950s, to Make America Great Again by adopting its values wholesale, the other wishes to institute a paradoxical permanent revolution, a forever struggle towards an unclear goal. Neither will succeed.
I’ve argued the definition extensively on the motte in the past, and I’ll just quote myself rather than reinvent the wheel, regarding Chesterton’s Fence.
That is as good a definition of Conservative policy as any. The Progressive, the overaggressive reformer, wishes to tear down the fence, because the world we live in is horrible and surely the fence is part of the problem, therefore tearing down the fence can only improve the world. The Reactionary has found archeological evidence that once there was a fence at this location, and because the world we live in is horrible and fallen and surely tearing down the fence was part of what made it so, we should build the fence forthwith. The Conservative opposes both these policies, believing that the world we live in is doing a pretty fine job thank you very much, that we should be grateful for the fences that have been built and those that have been torn down by our ancestors, and that without a thorough explanation of why fences should be built or torn down we should avoid overly hasty changes in pursuit of fantasies futuristic or historical.
The problem is that the fences I’ve outlined above are all themselves struggles, and the idea is that we must preserve the struggle. The greatest moments are those of struggle for freedom and autonomy, actually having the freedom and autonomy isn’t nearly as good as struggling for it. How do we understand this psychology? We return to an ignored root of most modern philosophy, we return to Hegel.
Hegel taught two concepts that were relevant here: that the part is incoherent without the whole, that everything must be in place for anything to happen; and the triadic structure of thesis-anithesis-synthesis that produces growth and change. Hegel, of course, taught enlightenment, taught a futurism that seems almost too optimistic for our world today. I propose not necessarily that Hegel is correct in that history must march onward to thought knowing itself, but instead that Hegel’s thought is descriptive of how to produce a world that might be called the Enlightenment World. We can’t produce Enlightenment Man by enacting the policies Enlightenment Man advocates for, rather to recreate Enlightenment Man we must create a whole world that is similar to what Enlightenment Man experienced and the oppositional dialectics that he grew on. From his Encyclopedia:
In philosophy, the latest birth of time is the result of all the systems that have preceded it, and must include their principles…
Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself…The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles.
We have to consider not just one side or the other of American midcentury greatness, but both sides working together and against each other, forcing each other to adapt. We need the political “other” to define and refine the “self.” The great mainstream philosophical filmography on the topic of “relitigating the 50s/60s” between the 1980s and 2001, think Grease American Graffiti Field of Dreams and Forrest Gump (which I may return to in more detail later), the Boomer generation thinking about itself, all operated on this Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis system. The great era of America was built on struggle between opposites. Grease gives us Danny the rebellious greaser, who wants to love Sandy the moralistic prep, but they are driven apart by their values dissonance; each changes to charm the other, Danny letters in varsity sports while Sandy shows up in sewn on leather pants he “shapes up, because [she] need[s] a man”, they come together and the resulting synthesis is better than either was to begin with. American Graffiti is the story of two 18 year olds about to fly off to college, small town thesis college antithesis, who explore the good and the bad sides of their small American town that they loved and hated, and reach synthesis: one chooses to go to college, the other to stay home with his high school sweetheart, they have switched positions. Field of Dreams, for those paying attention, isn’t about Baseball, it’s about the 1960s, and a generation reconciling with their fathers, Kevin Costner’s character doesn’t just love Baseball, he finds peace after rejecting his father when he was younger, returning to the land while also retaining a sense of freedom and whimsy that was the positive byproduct of 1960s rebellion.
1/2
I'm going to go back to my theory that Conservatism is returning to what things were like in your lifetime or your parents lifetime, and Reaction is pushing back before living memory. I've argued it extensively here before.
The net result is that where before you turned 40 and got comfortable and started to say "Gee, I'd like the world not to change too much, I like it the way it is..." there was a party you voted for. Nixon, Reagan, Dubya all won elections in the US promising less change, keep things the same. I'm not sure that much of the modern Right Wing today promises keeping things the same, keeping them how they were when I grew up. Many seem to urge us on towards change, towards tearing up the social contract I grew up with, towards Retvrn to something I don't know, something new and scary. When I was a kid abortion was legal, my elementary school principle was Black, my dad's best friend on the charity board was gay. If you try to abolish the policies that allowed those things, or if I am convinced that you will even if you won't, my natural conservatism won't help you, it will hurt you. At times, there is no conservative option on the ballot in American politics.
I think this jibes with your Brexit theory of young Brits: traveling the EU and working or partying as they pleased was their birthright, it's what they grew up with. You can't sell conservative to them and say, oh we're going to destroy the world you grew up in. That's a contradiction in terms.
Millennials won't, can't!, become conservative if you don't put conservatism on the ballot.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
So my wife has been watching a ton of Desperate Housewives* lately while doing filing and billing and Christmas cards. It's got that classic Five {Wo}Man Band structure, with the characters representing different archetypes of modern womanhood: Bree is the uptight and upright right wing Christian, Lynette is the career woman feminist trying juggle job and kids while still being feminine for her husband, Gabby is a super hot materialistic slut, Susan is retarded, and Mary Alice is dead. I caught bits and pieces on our TV, it's not a complicated show you pick up on it fast, so we're vaping weed after work and she asks me Ok, which one of the women am I? I thought about and answered that she wasn't really like any of them, but Gabby is your id. Gabby is the devil on your shoulder telling you to buy shoes and get your rocks off. So she looks at me and says, ok, who is your id, what character? I looked at her, took a hit, and said Sam Bankman-Fried. We both burst into laughter as we realize what a brilliant choice that was. SBF really is my worst reflexes made flesh, me if no one slapped me and told me to shape up, I would have become a fat schlub doing drugs and playing a lot of video games and trying to hustle bullshit, though probably not as rich for however brief a time it lasted.
I think that's true for a lot of people on themotte and in the broader SSC-verse. We're fascinated because he's a failure mode we could have fallen into. And there's a broader thing I think about all the time, that born at most other times in history I would have been useless. I'm a bad farmer, a mediocre mechanic, a physical coward, but I think good and that pays these days. As we more and more highly reward thinkers, our villains will be the failure modes of thinkers.
*It's interesting to me that Desperate Housewives is mostly forgotten as a program, while the various Real Housewives programs live on. Originally the Real Housewives shows were take offs on the popularity of the Desperate Housewives phenomenon: this was going to be just like the show, but real. Now the reality TV show genre is dominant over the forgotten sitcom, young viewers of the reality show forget the sitcom it came from.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
What you're saying is interesting and a good interpretation, but an alternative:
According to our data, almost half of HR people and recruiters got laid off, as compared to 10% of engineers and only 4% of salespeople.
You don't need recruiters when 10% of engineers have been fired across the industry. That's Marx's Industrial Reserve Army in action. When unemployment is too low, when good engineers aren't available, you need recruiters and headhunters to find people. When 10% of engineers are out on the street, you just post the job and you get applicants.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I first remember hearing the term to refer to a variety of Right Wing thought that rejected the more staid conservatism of a Romney or a Bush II, and particularly that did not center either Libertarianism or Evangelical Christianity (as most of the more extreme right-wing movements to that point tended to do). So "Right wing" in whatever sense, without being married to either Pat Robertson or Ayn Rand philosophically, and with an aesthetic that was more rude mix of 4chan and "punk rock" than suit-and-tie George Will.
During/After the 2016 Trump campaign the term came into popular use in the media, and self application by supposed adherents, to mean something more like what other posters have talked about. Too nebulous to ever really be a useful descriptor, it has fallen out of favor. But in many ways, Alt-Right is more like asking where Hipsters went: we're all hipsters now, and the whole right is Alt-Right now. The idea of a Republican politician doing what Desantis does in terms of both tone and content was unimaginable in the Bush years.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
Is it reasonable of me to assume that any straight man who describes himself as "demisexual" is pulling exactly the same kind of long con, but more subtle?
I would say that the vast majority of people who describe themselves as Asexual but have sex/relationships have simply found an identity-based way to navigate chastity in a sexual world that frightens them (largely based on media). All personal boundaries must be identity based in liberal society, or else they are very difficult to defend. A woman who says she doesn't want to have sex right away is a prude, a woman who says she is asexual is valid. A man who says he doesn't want to have sex all the time is a lying loser, a man who says he is asexual is valid.
I'd compare it in my own life to the years I spent between 13 and 17 listening to a ton of Minor Threat and Youth of Today and Earth Crisis and claiming to be super into Straight Edge punk philosophy. I had an Out of Step poster, and scribbled "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't fuck, at least I can fucking think!" on things in Sharpie. I think I even put X's on the back of my hands when I went to concerts a few times.
Not to invalidate anyone who really was Straight Edge, I met some of them, but as a loser teenager it was cowardice. I was afraid of girls, and couldn't get a date anyway; I was afraid of booze and drugs and breaking laws around them, and didn't get invited to parties anyway. Straight Edge was a way to claim I was making a principled stand. I doubt it achieved much, I was an apparent loser, it was mostly something I said to make myself feel better.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
5mo ago
I will take a stand here: if they are under the impression that a 1460 SAT on its own is impressive enough that it is notable that it did not get them into Cornell, they are not an ivy league caliber student. Just flatly, they do not understand the system.
-- A 1460 SAT isn't really that impressive. It's just...not that big a deal. Even looking at the medians at schools isn't enough, because most of the students at those schools will have a whole pile of other stuff in their resume. Good High School GPA, good extracurriculars, good essays. Any given student might have lacking extracurriculars, a weak GPA, or have written a meandering poorly reasoned essay about how superior he thinks he is to the hoi polloi. He might have put down Stormfront Juniors as his extracurricular and written his essay about his admiration for Rudolf Hess. You just don't know.
-- Admissions are pretty random anyway. Any individual student getting rejected from any individual school isn't notable. At all. Personal story: I applied to all the T14 law schools. I only got into one, waitlisted at the rest. That one offered me a full tuition scholarship. Which makes no sense, because I didn't even get into the schools they were trying to buy me out of. My point being not only was my admissions result random, the admissions team at my school (who presumably know a lot about that kind of thing) didn't expect that result and tried to bribe me not to go to the schools that didn't admit me. Further, HYS all waitlisted me, effectively indicating that I was marginal as a candidate but on balance I was "good enough" for HYS, I was of the caliber of student they were looking for. Georgetown flat rejected me! Georgetown! You never know where you will or won't be admitted on an individual basis, at best it's a probability.
-- Not knowing the above indicates to me that the people involved aren't plugged into the gunner universe of students who put together Ivy League resumes in high school, and therefore probably didn't put together an ivy league caliber resume, and therefore didn't "deserve" to get in. Whether that is the system we want is irrelevant, it's the system we have. It's not about being white, it's about not being a gunner.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
5mo ago
My honesty index for where I live: the Wawa app order pick up rack. I go to my local Wawa locations an inordinate amount, and very frequently I order a latte, matcha, or some other fancy drink. If you order on the app, at almost every location I've been to and every location I go to regularly, they just put your order on a big rack of takeout orders identified only by the three digit number on the receipt taped to it. Customers come in, take their order, and walk out. Most frequently, if I've ordered on the app, I don't speak to anyone in the store unless it's to say thank you to someone for holding the door; I walk in, take my coffee off the rack, walk out.
They put absolutely zero effort into making sure that you take your order, or even that you have an order at all. Naively, assuming perfect honesty on the part of all customers, I would guess an error rate around 1-2% of people taking the wrong order, just because they misread the receipt. My experience across hundreds of wawa app orders is actually below that, I can't think of a single time my order has been missing (though I can think of several times it's been wrong). Nor, in all the time I've spent in Wawas, do I ever recall witnessing someone complain that their order was missing.
Every day, thousands of times a day, each Wawa location takes $5-25 worth of food and drink, puts it out for anyone to take, and by and large only the people who paid for it take it. That's, when you really think about it, a ridiculous record of honest and law-abiding citizenry. Nor is it purely the small town local yokels I live amongst, my Wawa is only two minutes from a major interstate, nothing stops anyone driving by from pulling in, grabbing a coffee, and being halfway to Jersey before anyone even notices.
My Wawa index for honesty is my theoretical bellwether for when I'll get concerned about society. It indicates that either our society is so honest that no one steals, or that our society is so rich that it is cheaper to simply let a few lattes get stolen every day than it is to take any effort to prevent them from being stolen.
Turning this into my Wawa appreciation post: if you live in Eastern PA, a remarkable thing about Wawas is that the customer base cuts across classes completely. Work trucks and vans and beat up Hyundais share the parking lot with brand new Porsche and Tesla electrics. It's universal.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
7mo ago
Killing this president does even less. Never forget that Bin Laden specifically instructed Al Qaeda to spare Biden, because he thought Biden so incompetent that putting him in charge would be advantageous.
Update to prior CW topic, in another round of America's favorite game Everyone Has a Sex Scandal Eventually: Vice reports that Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation
From Vice's reporting:
Tim Ballard’s exit from Operation Underground Railroad earlier this year followed an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct involving seven women, according to sources with direct knowledge of the organization.
Sources familiar with the situation said that the self-styled anti-slavery activist, who appears to be preparing for a Senate run, invited women to act as his “wife” on undercover overseas missions ostensibly aimed at rescuing victims of sex trafficking. He would then allegedly coerce those women into sharing a bed or showering together, claiming that it was necessary to fool traffickers. Ballard, who was played by Jim Caviezel in the hit film Sound of Freedom, is said to have sent at least one woman a photo of himself in his underwear, festooned with fake tattoos, and to have asked another “how far she was willing to go,” in the words of a source, to save children. These sources requested anonymity because they fear retaliation. The total number of women involved is believed to be higher than seven, as that would only account for employees, not contractors or volunteers.
OUR states only that:
Tim Ballard resigned from O.U.R. on June 22, 2023. He has permanently separated from O.U.R. O.U.R. is dedicated to combatting sexual abuse, and does not tolerate sexual harassment or discrimination by anyone in its organization.
The Mormon church meanwhile chips in to scold Ballard as well:
Last week, a spokesperson for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement to VICE News that contained a pointed rebuke of Ballard. The statement accused Ballard of inappropriately using the name of a church elder, President M. Russell Ballard—the two are not related, despite sharing a last name—“for Tim Ballard’s personal advantage and activity regarded as morally unacceptable.” The church did not specify in its statement what activity it regarded as “morally unacceptable.”
Prior thread on Ballard's film here; My own prior comment here
My read on all this is that it is a human psychological tragedy, Ballard got lost in his own masculine heroic fantasy. Good men nearly all carry the fantasy of, as they say, wishin' a nigga would. We want a reason to give our World of Cardboard Speech. We have the urge to engage in violence and adventure, but we want justified violence, righteous adventure. We want to fight, but fight for the right. Ballard found it in child trafficking investigations. He got to play James Bond in real life!
And what does James Bond do? He sleeps with every woman he sees, "as part of the mission." One can see the logic, if these OUR operatives were in an undercover role pretending to be a couple, that making love would be important. Blowing their cover could cost their lives, could endanger the children they are there to rescue, so whether they want to is irrelevant, they have to! But that was also part of the fantasy for him: he wanted to have to, he wanted an environment where he just had to sleep with these women, which he would then enjoy. No doubt, in his mind, the women involved shared the same fantasy. After all, while else would they join OUR and put themselves in these operations?
Ballard never meant any harm to anyone, he never meant to take advantage, he just thought he had found a moral loophole, an opportunity to enter a morals-free zone for a good cause. Apparently the women involved, the rest of the organization, and the Mormon church disagreed.
We should be wary of our fantasies of righteousness, as men. Engage in self-criticism, when we want to have a reason to use righteous violence, sometimes we just want violence. Which itself isn't necessarily a fatal flaw, there is value in harnessing masculine urges in positive ways, that can be seen as the basis for all social function. But we can't let our fantasies obscure our real mission, or harm those around us.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
The plan wasn't to have him win the primary and take a dive in the general, it was to have him enter the Republican primary, force the "serious" Rs like Bush and Rubio and Cruz to take ridiculous unpopular positions and look silly arguing with Trump, ultimately lose the primary, and then HRC crushes a Bush or a Rubio who took absurd positions in the primary campaign. The early Trump campaign was intensely flamboyant, and seemed highly unserious by contemporary political standards, everyone assumed the establishment would rally and knock him down.
What happened then was some combination of
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Trump's "absurd" positions turned out to have a massive following among everyday Americans. He started winning. He knocked out like seven serious R contenders one after another, and at first knocking out Jeb Bush and Chris Christie was helpful for HRC, but he got addicted to it, and pretty soon there weren't any R contenders left.
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Bannon, who in this theory was a patsy they all thought was a nut who wouldn't achieve anything, the equivalent of the director they hire in The Producers, took it seriously and was extremely talented. Springtime for Hitler was hit!
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Trump realized he liked winning, and would give it a shot. He started drinking his own kool aid, buying his own sales pitch.
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Clinton (et al) tried to puncture the Trump surge by attacking him personally and leaking info on him. Trump took offense at this, and said OK you're gonna try to hurt me, I'm not taking a dive. He was willing to take the L, but the other guy has to pull his punches in that situation, if you make it a survival problem the Tomato Can has to fight back.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
And In Today's Round of America's Favorite Game: Is There Any Group That Doesn't Eventually Have a Sex Scandal?
A Right Wing hanger-on of Milo and Fuentes, Ali Alexander (nee Akbar) appears to have propositioned 15 year old boys for nudes and sex, using access to his "network" of right wing activists and donors as a lure to get budding right wing boys to fuck him. Thoughts on Sammy Diddles Jr.'s little sex scandal:
-- Ali appears to be a victim of the demand for extremists outpacing the supply, with left wing outlets hyping him as a major figure, while I've never heard of him before. I'm not that into the online DR, and he does seem to have had enough friends to hang out with Fuentes and Milo, and to get outed by Milo on his podcast. Milo stated that he chose to out Ali because Ali had used Milo's name as part of his pitch, Ali was telling young (presumably queer?) Republican activists that they could get introductions into Milo's circles if they boned Ali. He is cited as having "founded" Stop the Steal, but I'm not clear on exactly what that means. It's not clear to me that, eg, Donald Trump or Kelly Conway let alone Ron DeSantis had any idea who this guy was. Milo and Fuentes are themselves way overhyped, being fairly comic and unimportant clowns. Predictably, when a political activist gets embroiled in scandal he is always listed by his enemies as the single most important member of their opposition, representative of the entire category. And when one group is under pressure, they tend to target the outliers among their opponents to take off pressure. @HlynkaCG 's theorem that when you get a lot of flak you're over the target, as the Groomer accusation becomes ever more prominent. The problem being that no one has actually ever run the numbers to my satisfaction to show who does it more, and if someone did it would be No True Scotsman'd or "That's just what is reported on"'d into oblivion anyway.
-- Ali Alexander's entire career appears to be further proof that nowhere is Affirmative Action as aggressively practiced as among Right Wing political groups. He was a convicted felon, with no notable academic or business achievements, who somehow became a prominent enough conservative voice during the Obama years to get the attention of activists and donors. Be Black and a conservative, you only have to be about as clever as your average twitter ReplyGuy (let alone your average Mottizen or SSCel) to make it to the Big Time. Clarence Thomas, the Hermanator (RIP king), and Candace Owens are the big dogs; but the tendency runs all the way down to the college Republicans, where every school I ever attended had one Black Conservative who made his whole personality being Black and conservative. It was enough of a gimmick that at 21 it would invariably get him included in every student delegation to meet Newt Gingrich or whichever other red potentate was visiting the school that day, where a conservative white guy would have to win an SGA election or publish a law review note to get that same spot. The sheer rarity of Blacks in conservative circles mean that if conservatives choose to care about representation, they gotta take whoever they can get. The result is that the conservative critique of affirmative action is most true among conservatives themselves: never trust conservative Blacks, they have high odds of being morons or grifters because they need almost no qualifications. Being Black and conservative is the single easiest grift in America.
-- Does any organized group avoid child sex scandals over the long term? I'm a Catholic, and I've been enduring the pedo jokes for most of my life flung against my church. Only to watch as Babtists, non denominational groups, men high in academic and artistic circles, and of course politicians and teachers get consistently caught up in the same scandals. What is the solution to all this? Disapproving of homosexuality doesn't seem to work. Disapproving of all sex doesn't seem to work. The kinds of protections that need to be put in place to keep kids from ever being in positions of risk undermine youth mentorship, they force kids to lean purely on increasingly disjointed and "mixed" family lives when they have no male leadership outside the family. I grew up with older male role models all around me, from Scoutmasters and Priests to coworkers and bosses, in addition to my father. How would I have grown up if I had been isolated from those men by barriers of propriety, and if like so many boys I grew up without a father? How do we raise kids when we must protect them from virtually all men? The only solution that occurs to me is to avoid all organized structures, avoid giving men power, but that seems too pat an answer, an anarchist panacea that works in a smoke filled dorm room.
-- The whole thing strikes me as so sordid, precisely because the boys targeted were so close to being of age. I just can't understand it. Why risk literal federal prison soliciting lewd photos from a 17 year old? It is beyond understanding for me that Ali Alexander couldn't wait a year if he was so very enamored of the boy. This goes in general, I can sort of understand when Pedos or "MAPs" (vomit) say they're attracted to minors in that I can imagine being attracted to things I'm not attracted to, after all lots of people are attracted to things like men or fat women or instagram face that I am not attracted to, I can't understand when they say they can't resist the urge. How is "just don't!" not an effective solution? Maybe I'm speaking from privilege in that I haven't had trouble dating in so long (thanks honey!) that I'm not familiar with the feeling of a dry spell anymore? Maybe we need to work not particularly on why fucking minors is bad, but instead on building willpower. Maybe we just need to work on teaching people to delay gratification and pass the marshmallow test, so that people get "tempted" and just say no. That also seems too pat an answer, willpower seems like it will work on a bodybuilding forum but not in real life.
2/2 Continued
Over here on this shelf we have the phone an amazing mood organ all by itself. Spotify playlists are set for workouts, long and short, intense and recovery. My primary workout playlist is songs I like to sing along to, with a good helping of comedy because nothing makes me push through a pump like laughing at Imagine What I Could Do To You. But there’s also a 10 minute snatch test playlist, that contains only songs with no intros or bridges, all killer no filler. I play instrumental deep house or prog rock when I’m typing, classical or jazz when I’m relaxing, and a big Cole Porter songbook playlist for romance. That’s just the music. Headspace gets me to sleep every night, and theoretically has a bunch of other features I don’t use. There’s also podcasts, which can inform me or entertain me, distract me from boring tasks; infuriate me with Culture War bullshit or make me feel superior dunking on my outgroup. TikTok is a unique mood organ, it both reflects and stimulates moods, but ultimately all it does is pin me to my seat and waste time, the mood of inspiration that Roman History guys try to create is fleeting and false even by digital standards. I won’t get into theMotte and what it does for me. If I’m horny or I want to be, snapchat and telegram beckon with partners current and recorded, available at a moment’s notice. And Netflix offers me thousands of options for moods from tragic sorrow to optimistic inspiration to comedic soothing.
Beyond that, we have the mechanical and mnemonic tools I use to control my mood. My accupressure mat can relax me, can put me to sleep for a 30 minutes nap reliably. Some of my clothing, I’m a big believer in look good feel good play good, when you put on a sharp suit it’s a mood, when you put on your lucky shirt you hit a PR. My rosary beads produce a mood, so does carrying my ccw, so does the art on my walls and so do the shoes I wear. Candles, soaps, massage guns, even just knick knacks and tchotchkes that make me remember great moments in my life.
Now you start adding all this together, and it really becomes possible to dial up moods, and I do it all the time. I wake up and have a big day at work, I’m putting on a sharp clean suit and drinking a double espresso, listening to The Economist podcast to feel informed quickly. I’m stressed and want to hang out with my wife, I’m putting on comfortable clothes, lighting a candle, turning on a Tribe Called Quest playlist, loading Blueberry Kush into the vape, and watching a comedy. My wife and I are having a "special guest star” over, we’re pouring wine and putting on Cole Porter, I might surreptitiously pop a Tadalafil Citrate for confidence and top performance. I’m getting psyched to hit a big total in the gym, I’m dry-scooping pre workout and blaring Amon Amarth and Bolt Thrower.
I’m dialing up a mood every single day, maybe a little more laboriously than punching a number into your Penfield, but how different is it in principle, ethically? Let’s return to Deckard and Iran and compare. Is he right to ask her to dial up the mood he wants rather than what she wants to dial? What does it mean to tell someone to change their mood, is that overriding their natural emotions? If it’s horrifying for Iran to dial up a depression, is it horrifying for my wife to re-watch The Office for the umpteenth time? Alternately, if we say that’s what Iran wants so she should be allowed to do it and it is horrifying for Deckard to try to stop her, is it wrong when I criticize my wife for re-watching The Office when she’s upset on the basis that a show that shallow and over-done won’t snap her out of anything but just allow her to wallow? If it’s depressing and unnatural for Deckard to dial up a business-like attitude when he needs it, is it depressing for me to drink a coffee and put on a suit to get myself in the mood for work? If the idea of a woman dialing up erotic abandon artificially is dark and sort of ruins the point, how much Cole Porter and white wine and tadalafil ruins the point in the real world?
Some would probably answer yes, and some would probably answer no, to each of these questions. I’m not sure how I answer them! But, (and this was a side effect of dialing up “Open Minded and Creative” at the wrong moment, right?) it’s a question I’ve been thinking about ever since it first occurred to me. Part of me thinks that this is enhancing me, making me more human, making me more of a tough lifter guy when I need to be, more of a lawyer when I need to be, more of a lover; work hard and play hard and relax hard. Campbell cites the idea that we’re all always playing roles, and speaks of a courtly Japanese affectation of referring to all actions as play: “I’m playing at running the company” “He is playing at driving” even “I heard your father is playing at being dead.” Maybe this is just one more prop to help me play my role every day.
And part of me wonders if I even know what real is any more. My world is so mediated that I can’t even recognize it. Facing the world without caffeine would be honestly unrecognizable some mornings; I realize that for others that is a world without weed, a world without alcohol, a world without prozac or nicotine or dmt. At some level it horrifies me, but I don’t know what that level is. I can’t find the limiting principles.
And then the problem of others. Let’s say we’re all playing our role, who is the director? Who gets to tell who that they aren’t trying to play their role right, that they shouldn’t be dialing up anomie and empty pleasure but ferocious ideological aggression? What right do I have to tell people they should or shouldn’t have what feelings at what time, or what tools they can use to induce those feelings?
I’m curious to hear the answers of others, and to hear what’s in your Penfield Mood Cabinet.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Robert Moses, Ronan Farrow, and the Role of the Dilettante in Society
To this purpose there goes a story of a Lacedaemonian who, happening to be at Athens when the courts were sitting, was told of a citizen that had been fined for living an idle life, and was being escorted home in much distress of mind by his condoling friends; the Lacedaemonian was much surprised at it, and desired his friend to show him the man who was condemned for living like a freeman. So much beneath them did they esteem the frivolous devotion of time and attention to the mechanical arts and to money-making. -- Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Lycurgus
TLDR: Dilettantes, independently wealthy men who do important work not because they need money but for personal satisfaction, are sometimes uniquely situated to achieve goals that careerists are incapable of reaching. We should be encouraging wealthy dilettantes in our society to do something cool with all that freedom they can afford, rather than trying to get them to grind away at 9-7s that anyone else with their IQ could do.
Two of the best non-fiction works I've read recently have been Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow and The Power Broker by Robert Caro. On their face, they couldn't be more different. One is a weekend beach read of an autobiographical journalism book, a Nancy Drew mystery of the intrepid reporter who tracks the lurid scandals of Hollywood despite the personal risks, a year-end bestseller. The other is a multi-volume monstrosity that goes into minute detail on the legislative process of getting parks legislation passed in the early 1900s, covering the life story of a man so ingeniously powerful that FDR at the peak of his strength couldn't dislodge him, widely considered one of the greatest non-fiction works of all time.
Yet there are a strong similarities between the two Farrow and Moses: both men came from wealthy families and attended Yale, Oxford, and had obvious nepotistic and parental support that allowed them to bounce around jobs in their 20s. Family money and connections meant that they didn't worry about supporting themselves like ordinary men, instead they caught the big fish.
Moses would try to take on a job rewriting the civil service rules for New York City, lose the ensuing political battles with Tammany Hall politicians who used the civil service jobs as patronage to maintain power, was forced to move out of state to find any job at all. Moses wouldn't find a "real" job until 1927 when he was 29 years old, he wouldn't support his own family financially until he was in his 40s, relying on support from his mother to make his (rather fancy) ends meet. Rather than major (or even take a minor) in making money, Moses focused single-mindedly on accumulating power. He took unpaid or poorly paid jobs, and attacked them with all the energy and creativity of a small-business owner or a start-up founder, worked like his life depended on it, harder than anyone. Where typical political appointees to these low paying jobs either treated them as the part-time work they were paid as, or used the powers of the position to make money selling contracts and jobs; Moses used the powers of the office purely to accumulate more power to the office. He bootstrapped the authorities into funding and bond juggernauts, dominated NYC construction, built bridges and parks, decided the course of Long Island development, all well into the 1950s. But none of that would have been possible if he had been forced to compromise his vision in the 1920s and the early 1930s so that he could feed his family.
Farrow, meanwhile, attended Yale Law and briefly practiced at a corporate firm, but found he didn't enjoy law and quit. Right there, the vast majority of law school grads cannot afford to simply decide to skip out on law, but for Farrow it was just a hobby. From there he worked in the Obama administration state department for a few years in various big-title sinecures for Yale grads with famous names, stuff like "Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO Affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan." Farrow left government service at the same time as Hillary Clinton, his patron, and moved right into hosting his own show on MSNBC for just one season; Farrow would say that more people would come up to him at parties after it was canceled and say they loved it than ever actually watched the show. From there Farrow would get a job producing features for Today, which would lead to him and his partner stumbling on the Weinstein story.
What's clear in the work, and from the way that Weinstein accusations would come up over and over in media, is that journalists would regularly stumble over the Weinstein story and be scared off. And boy, howdy, did they ever try to scare this ol' boy Farrow off. NBC tells him to drop the story, repeatedly, he ultimately is forced to leave his NBC job to pursue the story. No one will take his calls, none of his stories will get published in any outlet on any topic. Hillary Clinton won't talk to him and dodges their planned interview for a totally unrelated book. Israeli spies hired by Weinstein* begin tracking Farrow, trailing him, and in multiple cases posing as representatives of non-profit Feminist organizations interested in his work on Weinstein and asking to have him in to talk about what he has on Weinstein. Farrow's partner drops out early on, citing his family and his career. It is unclear at times if Farrow will be able to get any job in journalism if this doesn't play out, and it isn't clear if Farrow will be able to produce anything publishable as sources disappear or clam up under pressure from Weinstein's goons. Professional journalists dropped out under this pressure, which is the logical response to the threat of having the career by which you define yourself, by which you feed your family. Farrow don't care. For Farrow journalism is a lark, a distraction after Yale Law School, between the State Department and before the PhD from Oxford. Tell him he'll never work in Journalism again, fine, he'll move on to some other rich-kid sinecure.
And it makes me think, there's a lot of value in having men like that in the world, in our society. Men who can pursue a goal without concern for day to day things. Think of Darwin and all the gentlemen scientists of yore, the Royal Societies, men who wanted to advance knowledge with no concern for tenure or for monetizing their discoveries. Farrow and Moses needed nepotism and family support to get where they got. But they just as easily could have done nothing interesting with that family help. They could have wasted away as party boys, done nothing useful with it. They could have done something uninteresting with it, become bankers or corporate lawyers and added to their family's wealth and produced a bunch of kids who would follow them to Yale and produce more bankers and lawyers. But instead, they chose to do spectacular things. To leverage their intelligence and their freedom to do what they dreamed of, to change the world.** It's admirable, we should encourage our privileged rich kids to do more fun stuff, and less "steal a billion dollars from investors in the magic beans business" stuff.
*Hired for Weinstein by Liberal-Hero Super-Lawyer David Boies; keep this fact in mind whenever the Dershowitz-Boies saga comes up. Another Weinstein ally in going after Farrow was Matt Lauer. It's all molesters all the way down.
** Depending on your opinion of Moses, maybe not for the better. Farrow probably deserves some demerits as well for whatever the hell he was supposedly doing with youth in Afghanistan and Syria when he was with the state department, but to be honest I doubt he did much of anything while he was there.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinweizu?wprov=sfti1
Nah dude, the book is not The posters work. Unless that is him, in which case that's hilarious and awesome and we should welcome him with open arms.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
This is just a bigger version of the weird shit Amazon was already doing. A couple years back my wife and I got stoned and watched half an episode of The Pack. I've talked about our occasional love for reality TV competition shows before. If you can, watch the first episode. It is basically unwatchably bad, but holy shit the production value and cost! It's a dog competition show, and they got three helicopters, two location changes, and two sailing ships for the episode. The budget on just the first episode struck us as feeling about equivalent to a full season of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of X; for comparison sake.
The beauty of reality TV is the low budget. You don't pay writers, you don't pay actors, you don't really create sets or special effects, you just film a bunch of crazy people who you can underpay because they want fame that badly. Bachelor contestants are famously unpaid, while the lead only makes about $100k, and almost all their locations and stunts are sponsored by tourism boards and whatnot; for a show that is a consistent ratings juggernaut.You don't spend tons of money on huge set pieces to sell a competition that's going to be all about A) Cute doggies doing stunts that they're already trained for B) the Best in Show type weirdoes who train them. The helicopter adds nothing!
As soon as I watched it, baked off my ass, I thought to myself: when they write the book about the rise, decline and fall of Amazon this is going to be the opening scene of the decline. This is going to be the decision they talk about as making it obvious that the company that once put old doors on sawhorses instead of buying desks had lost its way. It turns out I was wrong, Rings of Power was still coming.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?
I'm starting from the equality of opportunity assumption, not the Kendi assumptions.
Racism is primarily bad in that it reflects class assumptions made permanent. The problems of the Black bourgeoisie are relatively uninteresting to me, both because they're already more than adequately addressed by other actors and because they're uneconomical. My concern is for Black proles who are stuck in a cycle of generational poverty, unable to break into the middle classes because of racist assumptions they face or a lack of opportunity and connections that a white individual might have. So pro-social-mobility and anti-classist policies are the best way to combat racism, if the same policies benefit the odd white person on the way that's a feature not a bug.
Minimize credentialism, encourage promoting from within and offer training and advancement opportunities to lower level employees, aim to market your product to underserved demographics.
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Minimize credentialism to the extent legally possible. 40% of White Americans 25 and older have bachelors degrees, while only 28% of Blacks and 20% of Latinos have completed a Bachelors. College is expensive, and college-tracking is largely a matter of parents/relations guiding you and high school quality. Whenever you make a bachelors a soft or a hard requirement to get a job, you are massively advantaging White (and Asian) applicants over Black and Hispanic applicants. Be willing to use alternative credentialing methods, or thorough skill-based interviews that give everyone a chance whether they spent those years at college or not. Ditto advantaging prestigious colleges over Community College or outlying state school campuses that have better diversity numbers.
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One way to substitute for credentialism is allowing entry-level employees to advance to higher level positions based on their work history. You have more information on your current employees than you have on raw outsiders, so you don't have to rely on things like degrees to vouch for intelligence and conscientiousness. Encourage managers to take note of employees who might be capable of taking the next step, offer them training opportunities to advance. Black employees who are smart and capable might be less likely to have had the wherewithal to go to college at 18, but once they're working for you you'll find them just as well, give them the opportunity to grow and they will.
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Look for underserved markets to sell your products to. Black people loooove Cadillacs. In the 1930s, Black people saved Cadillac:
General Motors was on the verge of shutting down the division when Nick Dreystadt, German-born service manager at Cadillac, persuaded the company to try promoting its cars to Negroes. “It was company policy not to sell Cadillacs to Negroes,” he said, because it wanted the “prestige” buyer. But affluent white customers were disappearing as the economy sank. Dreystadt knew the car was already doing well among wealthy Negroes, mostly entertainers, boxers, doctors, or realtors, who often had to have a white friend or manager buy the car for them, and persuaded his bosses to actively court the African-American consumer. The company ended up selling enough cars “to make the Cadillac division break even by 1934”…
Affluent Black buyers bought Cadillac cars because they could buy a luxury car (even if they needed a white straw buyer) and drive it around, where they couldn't get into tony neighborhoods or exclusive country clubs at the time. Think about how different demographics interact with your product differently, and how you can serve those demographics in a way your competitors aren't.
I'm not sure there are opportunities as obvious today, but be looking out for them!
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
How familiar with his work are you? Did you ever read Kitchen Confidential?
I ask because when you read the book that made Bourdain famous, it rapidly becomes obvious that he was troubled long before he was famous. He was the Samurai Sword kid at a liberal arts college before he dropped out and headed into the world of cooking. Much of the charm of the work comes from Bourdain's hard partying, booze and drug soaked world. He dropped in and out of cooking jobs and drugs over the years. His personality before fame was self-destructive.
The problem with finding causes for suicide is that you can always find someone who suffered something as bad or worse who didn't kill themselves. Some people kill themselves over seemingly minor slights, others suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune well past the point at which I would have cut bait.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
Thoughts on Consumption, Ethical and Otherwise
TLDR: As costs have changed with automation/globalization/etc the status implications attached to items or forms of consumption have changed, despite the costs reflecting less or even opposite directions of status. Why have the implications persisted beyond the mechanical reasons for it?
A discussion elsewhere since lost, and that acid-trip TEMU ad at the Super Bowl, had me thinking about a statistic I saw in a WSJ article that has really stuck with me.
American’s average spending on apparel has declined from 14% of expenditures in 1901 to 10% in 1960 to 4% in 2002. For the most part, we can see that as early industrialization in 1901, when many things were still tailored, to full factory industrialization in 1960, to early globalization in 2002. In 2023, with full globalization, expenditure on clothing declined all the way to 2%.*
My wife and I are probably a little fancier and more enthusiastic about clothing than the average on the Motte, if asked I would say that I spend more on clothing than I need to and own too much and too expensive of clothing, but we were absolutely blown away by the idea of spending 10% of our annual income on clothing. We agreed that we could probably do it, and have fun doing so!, for one or maybe two years, but after that the budget that would create would just be insane. The idea, as an upper-middle class professional couple, of spending something like $30k-$40k on clothing per year every year is insanity! Buying the best and starting with nothing, I don’t really see how a man in my position could spend more than $10k on clothing, once, with less than $1k/yr spending after that to maintain/freshen, unless one gets deep into really truly strange and expensive frivolities. Yet we still talk about clothing items as status symbols in the same way, despite clothing making up a decreasing percentage of spending, despite the obvious fact that if a lower income American spent like a 1960 American they could easily afford to look like a modern upper class American. Clothing just isn’t actually expensive anymore.
And this got me thinking of how many status symbols have changed so thoroughly in their cost, while remaining essentially the same in their perception. I own a 25 year old BMW 3 Series, which had a $27,000 msrp when new, which I like driving around casually; I also have a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche which I drive for work, which had an MSRP of $48,000 new. ((For those of you following along at home, I never got around to actually buying a new-er manual car to replace it)) Persistently, people will give me “rich kid” jokes about the BMW, while the Chevy is treated as working class. Not only that, guys driving new pickups that retail north of $60k will give me the same guff about the BMW! The branding still gives credibility or prestige, even long after the relationship of cost has evaporated or reversed. Small “sporty” BMW = rich, pickup truck = blue collar.
I’m utterly confused as to how people around me spend their money, and I’m fairly certain they are equally confused by how I spend mine. I have friends with similar incomes to mine, who are in credit card debt, but also don’t have the things I would expect a person with my income who is also in credit card debt to have. The money seems to evaporate into nights out, travel, concerts, and house renovations. They look at things I “waste" money on, and I can’t say they don’t have a point: I could probably reduce my clothing budget significantly, I own too much expensive assorted strength training and fitness crap, I could reduce my grocery/food budget considerably if I cooked more from scratch. But then I equally look at their spending, and they invite me to go on a trip, or out to a bar, and I look at the price and say I’m not spending $2k on travel, or $100 on a night out. Though I’ll equally admit that my own travel habits are extremely cheap, and my own tastes in food and especially alcohol relatively light and plebeian.
We’re factually in the same social class, we make similar money in similar positions, but our consumption patterns are different. And what fascinates me is that one set of consumption patterns is judged as normal, even blue collar, while another is judged as fancy, bougie, aristocratic. And the meanings of these symbols of upper-class taste have endured beyond and transcended the actual cost-balance of the activities. The expensive microbrewery play-acts as industrial space. Expensive travel is normal, even treated as normative. Housing, education, healthcare are ruinously expensive but treated as normal, invisible even. I’m not sure I know who is right and who is wrong, or even if someone is right or wrong, in terms of what form of spending will lead to The Good Life. But I’m sure we’re both going wrong in reading into status symbols in the way people once did, when the meanings are so twisted and confused.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
5mo ago
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE?
Sure, a great example is to look at people who hear of the DKE once on Reddit, and never shut up about how they see it everywhere.
I suspect that the average dumb (human) person does know they're a bit dim, so it confuses me how this finding can even arise.
I think something we don't think about enough is how dumb people use heuristics to help them navigate a world where they are vaguely-aware that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to participate.
My wife and I argued for a whole drive to Philly about a tweet she saw that went something like: If you're more intelligent than your partner and better at arguing logically, winning every argument with them by arguing logically is abusive. She thought it was retarded, I said that while the use of the term "abusive" was rather florid, the point has some validity. Picture a couple, one a well-educated motte-ian wordcel able to deconstruct and reconstruct a logical argument about anything at any time, the other a nice and well intentioned imbecile who can't string two sentences together. If they agree on logical argument as the way to settle things, the motte-izen will win every time, and the imbecile will never get what he wants, even if the imbecile happens to be right. One side getting what they want every time is bad for the relationship in the long term, even if the imbecile agrees that they lost the argument, they will notice not getting what they wanted later, and they will resent it. They may resent it incoherently, unable to logically explain why the outcome is unjust, but they will resent it nonetheless. This will be deleterious to the relationship.
The idiot moves through life thinking that salesmen are evil, because he knows that a good salesman can talk him into something he'll regret, it's happened before. I will never forget a waitress at my parents' favorite restaurant, telling them about how she needed a new car, and she went to the dealer intending to buy a used Jeep Liberty (a bad car, but a small and economical one) and wound up getting talked into buying a brand new Jeep Commander (a $50k seven passenger monstrosity that FCA's CEO would later call "not fit for human consumption" and state should never have been sold). She had no kids, she had no outdoor hobbies, she had zero need for a seven passenger SUV, but she got talked into it. On a seven year loan at a crazy interest rate.
The dimwit chooses tribalism, because the black skin good white skin bad is an easy meme to keep track of. He'll only benefit modestly, if at all, by his tribal champions being elevated, but it's easier than figuring out actual policy questions, and it avoids the salesman problem again.
The moron assumes that everyone is out to get him, because he has precious little ability to defend himself if they are. Everyone has an angle, he intones sagely, because he has been fooled so many times. Paranoia is adaptive, like a skittish rabbit.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
7mo ago
Let's Make the Regular Season Great Again: Contra Freddie De Boer on Why the NBA Sucks Now
Freddie De Boer posts on why players demanding trades is making NBA fandom unsustainable. I was shocked to see how spectacularly Freddie missed the point, and bought into the very frame that is itself destroying the NBA. TLDR: Dame Lillard, star guard in Portland, demanded a trade from his hapless team to Miami. His team did ultimately trade him, but to noted metropolis Milwaukee instead. Freddie uses the occasion to talk about how it makes no sense for a fan to root for his home team if he's in a second tier city, because his team will probably never win a championship.
While Freddie does notice that Dame got traded to Milwaukee, he failed to notice that Brooklyn assembled three superstars who all demanded trades to: Philadelphia, Dallas, and Phoenix. And the Knicks over in Manhattan have been hopeless for decades. Player empowerment isn't about moving to big markets, it's about moving to superteams where players get the best chance to pad their resume with a championship.
Freddie buys entirely into the very frame that is destroying the NBA: that the championship is the only thing that matters. When we rate players' legacies entirely by their playoff success, and when fans only want to root for teams that have a "shot to win a championship." In a world of perfect parity, theoretically, each team would win a championship ever 32 years, reach the championship every 16, and the semifinals every 8. Of course, there will never be perfect parity, so every time a team wins a second championship in less than 32 years, another team gets shuffled back to the end of the line. If fans only want to root for teams that win championships, they won't root for most teams.
And of course that idea is clearly silly if you look abroad. In Europe, soccer teams buy players from each other all the time, and in most leagues there is a price at which teams are forced to sell against their will. Literally every European soccer team outside of maybe a dozen doesn't have a shot at ever winning a meaningful championship, yet so many of them have fans that will literally stab each other over team honor. Fans of rich teams win, fans of poor teams know they never will. Both still have fans. How do we explain that?
How do we make it worth rooting for the Pacers if the Pacers are as likely as not to never win a championship in your conscious lifetime as a fan? By creating things the Pacers can win. The NBA is already doing their best to make the regular season count more in the minds of fans, but it is already so far gone that I'm sure that won't be enough. Honestly, I don't even care enough about the NBA regular season to know how the regular season is structured, so my examples will be from the MLB or NFL.
So I have a proposal for all American leagues, not just the NBA, for how to astroturf some fan engagement in the regular season, even for teams that don't have a shot in hell: create public trophies for rivalries that are displayed in stadiums prominently after rivalry match wins, and the absence of which is displayed after losses. Basic idea runs like this. At a prominent area near the entrance to every stadium, each team would be required to erect a display area for trophies. Enormous, gaudy, awful trophies. Both the display and the trophy will be designed specifically for two things: so that fans will be tempted to take photos there for social media, and that fans entering the stadium will notice the presence and even moreso feel the absence of these trophies. You could have trophies for specific rivalries (Yankees would have the Red Sox and the Mets), or you could have trophies for division rivals (Eagles would have Dallas, the Giants, and the choke artists formerly known as the Redskins) or you could have both. The team that won the last match/series gets the trophy, publicly displayed in their stadium for fans to take photos with before games. The fans of the team that loses have to walk by the empty plinth before every game, the blank space reminding them that the trophy is in Boston/Dallas/New York, filling them with rage at the enemy having the trophy. Foment rivalry and hatred, force official channels and associated press for both teams to cover moving the trophy, make placing it at the winner's stadium a public event.
How will this help? Even in a down season, an otherwise mediocre team can sometimes sneak in a win against a hated division rival.. Now, rather than just playing spoiler, fans of down teams have pride to play for: we might not win the championship but if Any Given Sunday this game, we still get to keep the trophy, and more importantly keep the other guys from having it.
The other change, to discourage tanking, is to alter the draft order system. Sprinkling top talent among weaker teams is good, I like parity, but teams being as bad as possible is an awful spectacle. So I like the proposal I've seen before: at the 2/3 or 3/4 point of the season, the bottom 5-10 teams get the top 5-10 draft picks, but they are awarded in order of those teams finish to the season. Those bottom feeders are put into a new league table for the last 1/4-1/3 of the season, and the team with the best record gets one, second best gets two, etc. This would discourage teams from fielding anti-competitive teams after realizing their team is sunk, from selling at the deadline for future picks. Hell, teams in the bottom half might be buyers at the deadline to try to get that number one pick! Give teams that are out of the playoff race something to play for in the remainder of the season.
Proposals like that, rather than further complicating roster management or constraining players, will help make the Regular Season Great Again, and that will give fans of every team something to root for.
FiveHourMarathon
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10mo ago
Or people who publicly flipflop on serious ideological issues seem more like psychotics than they do like fair minded thinkers. It often strikes me as arrogance rather than humility.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
And I'm old enough to have friends who were complete shitbirds when we were 19 and who found Jesus at 30 and now won't shut up about it. And while I respect them for their change, I kind of reject their lectures. I stayed at a 5 (semi open relationship with the same girl) all along, you were at a 0 (lie to girls about your career and family to try to trick them into sex) and now you're at a 10 (premarital sex will lead to hell). Maybe take a chill pill, a touch of humility, if you were wrong then you might be wrong now.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
For decades, one could not get a security clearance if one were homosexual. On the one hand this was a "natural" disgust reaction by those who hand out security clearances, but there was also a logic to it that went: I myself might not be homophobic, I might have all the goodwill in the world to homosexuals, but most people hate and despise homosexuality, so a homosexual simply has far too much blackmail material lying around waiting to get got by the damn Reds. You can't trust someone who has secrets that could be revealed to his family and embarrass him. It's too much to expect him to successfully keep this secret forever.
We've since moved past this, homosexuals are perfectly capable of getting security clearances, because exposing his homosexuality isn't going to qualify as blackmail in America in the Year of our Lord 2023. Who are you going to tell, his husband and the other guests at their wedding? We didn't make it ok to have Homos in security clearances by figuring out a way to reliably avoid their perversion getting detected by enemies, we simply decided that we didn't care about the perversion. Expose their sordid personal lives all you want, we knew they were sodomites when we hired them. We didn't prevent their exposure, we transcended the need to avoid exposure. We didn't end liberalism, we expanded it.
Now, as the proverb goes whose attribution I can't recall, there is almost no one alive whose sex life, if fully exposed to public ridicule, would not inspire revulsion and horror. And of course the modern sexual menu is like the Cheesecake Factory in its variety and artificiality. So we don't worry we'll be revealed as fags or fairies or sodomites or Saphists, but we worry about all kinds of other things. Are you some kind of fetishist? Furry? Pervert? BDSM? Like toys? Noncon? Wincest? Power relations? Raceplay? Like 'em a little on the young side? Messaging hot young hung bottoms on Insta? Just having a good old fashioned affair? All that and more is in your browser history for many people.
So TikTok offers a threat of blackmail. TikTok reflects back your own desires, it shows you what you like to see, what you look at. Some of that is various strategies to trick you into watching a video, but much of it is thirst traps. When I first downloaded the app to try it, it showed me some MILF bikini reveals, and while I'm not a regular porn user it's not like I'm not a fan of great tits. But, especially early on, watch a couple of them, pretty soon your feed is flooded with them. Keep watching them, and really who wouldn't keep watching them?, and pretty soon your TikTok app is just a softcore porn button. I didn't really like that, but to get rid of it I had to make a concerted effort to swipe past instantly every time I saw an attractive woman who might be about to take her dress off. If I were a little more interested, like a normal person, in seeing random breasts on a daily basis, I guess I wouldn't have done it. I'm happy to report that now I get nothing but Roman History, pictures of books, and Tedposting Indomitable Human Spirit Memes, along with a smattering of cutesy "I love you so much" poetry and Psycho Girl memes that have cross pollinated from my wife sharing things to me.
If I were a little more desperate, like so many in this alienated and anodyne age, I might be one of those simps who sends messages to thirst traps, who watches lives and sends "gifts" to get her to say your username, I'm sure there are even men who hire sex workers over TikTok though I have no first hand knowledge of it (certainly that happens on Reddit). Listening to Lex Friedman have Aella on his podcast, and feeling him gravitate towards her, I really appreciated the mindset of the simp for the first time. Aella's personality is tailor made to appeal to my autistic demographic in a way most professional thirst traps don't, and I could watch Lex's guard drop and sense his salivation over her. I thought to myself, especially in the altered state I was in at the time, there but for the grace of God go I, if I didn't get lucky and have the relationship I have with my wife, I could see how that kind of parasocial relationship could tempt a man.
And that's not even getting into the weird and socially frowned upon politics or CW issues one might find on TikTok. One could equally be exposed as a racist, a misogynist, a virulent hater of Christians/Jews/Muslims/Hindus/Blacks/Atheists/Baseball/America/France/Books/TV-Watchers/Weightlifters/Gays. And you don't see it because you set out to see it, you see a racist joke and you laugh at it because you find it funny, maybe you watch the video again, pretty soon you are flooded with racist joke videos, your whole feed is nothing but CoonTown, without ever making the conscious decision to set it up that way. TikTok caters to our basest desires, whether they be sexual or cultural, and our Id is not what we want exposed to the world.
The nightmare scenario isn't hard to picture: a politician rises who is a huge China Hawk, and then he is exposed by his TikTok, or threatened to be exposed, and his power is undermined. He was messaging Twink 18 year olds and buying them gifts during Lives, he was favoriting trashy negro jokes or Black nationalist rhetoric or antisemitism or whatever. ((Honestly, I'm surprised I haven't found out the sex toy habits or viewing history of politicians that publicly go after Amazon yet...)
But the solution isn't to abandon liberalism and ban TikTok, the solution as with homosexuality is to transcend our petty concern with the unimportant moral foibles that we all have but no one admits to. To quote Dan Savage who has written on the topic:
Back in the bad old days - the mythical 1950s, the era social conservatives pine for - most gay men were closeted, which made it relatively easy for them to arrange discreet trysts. You could rely on the discretion of your sex partners because they were relying on yours. It was the era of mutually assured destruction, both in terms of nuclear warfare and gay sex. Your partner couldn't reveal your secret without revealing his own.
His theory a decade ago was that we would hit a similar point with sexting and leaked nudes, we will reach a point where everyone has them and so no one cares when they are revealed because we did it too. I would guess that a supermajority of sexually active people under the age of 35 have sent noods at some point in their lives, and better than that number have sent otherwise explicit texts waiting to be leaked. But we haven't seen acceptance of it.
The way we beat TikTok and every other spy ring foreign and domestic isn't by abandoning Liberalism, but by expanding it, by accepting and addressing that what our Id enjoys in a six second video doesn't say anything important about our moral worth. We're all doing it, why not just accept it. Fuck you, CCP, show everyone that I love MILFs with great asses or Twinks with great asses or racist toilet humor, it doesn't mean anything about how I do my job. I think we should have taken the same attitude to the damn balloon! The Joint Chiefs should have given a press conference where they said: China, Mr. Xi, Generals of the Red Army, if you have questions come ask us! We'll take you on a tour of all our military facilities, so you can see just how powerful the United States Armed Forces are, how thoroughly capable we are of crushing any threat on any notice. If the Chinese want aerial photography they can just take it from a sat photo anyway, why piss ourselves about a fucking balloon?
TLDR: Don't end the first amendment to fight blackmail, end a culture that shames normal people for liking things that normal people like.
I would highlight @FiveHourMarathon (I don't recall his reddit username) as a great representative of themotte's ability to attract intelligent right-wingers. We've had some strong disagreements, but I always appreciate his input. There are certainly ways he deviates from the conservative mainstream, but in most ways I think he's representative of who
It was an honor just to be nominated, but I can't help but feel that naming me as your favorite right-winger is rather like an MSNBC fan naming Joe Scarborough as her favorite Republican. That is to say, I can't fight off right-wing as an accusation, but I certainly couldn't claim it as a laurel either given my generally degenerate morals by right-wing standards.
Scott Alexander, for all his criticisms of the left's approach to the culture war, is a polyamorous atheist living in the Bay Area; of course his allegiance is to the blue tribe, even if by their standards he's a heretic.
What is widely perceived as right-wing tolerance of left-wing heretics is more just right-wing retreat. I recently attended a local Republican candidates event, and it is immediately obvious that the conservative morality police are in full retreat; orderly retreat to a greater or lesser extent for each issue or individual. One of the proposals being forwarded over and over was that all public school LGBTQWERTY issues should be shuffled into an elective course that students could take with parental permission. This is a reasonable, and fairly libertarian!, compromise position: people who want their kids to learn this stuff can have them take the class, people who don't want their kids in that class can avoid it. But I'm old enough to remember the Republicans on the school board when I was a young teen trying, repeatedly, to ban the Gay Straight Alliance club from the high school. Two decades ago the position was that students outside of class should not be allowed to talk about Gay issues on campus; now that the war has been lost, they're just hoping to keep it out of English class.
Out of the handful of people there, we had multiple open (married) homosexuals, and Hispanic candidates. If one has a longstanding commitment to a certain format of gay rights or racial tolerance, then as Chicano activists in Texas used to say: We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.
Oh man I have thoughts on Gilmore Girls. ((Weirdly this is "Chick flick analysis on themotte" day for me)) My wife watches it all the time, it's her anxiety blanket of a show. Which is weird because she kind of hates it too.
The whole series is fascinating when you consider it in light of the reboot. To summarize for the vast majority of straight men who have no idea what I'm talking about: Gilmore Girls tells the story of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a mother and daughter living in Connecticut, and then to a lesser extent Rory's wealthy grandmother Emily. Lorelai got pregnant as a teenager and ran away from home, despite coming from a wealthy family she worked her way up through service industry jobs at hotels because she cut contact with her rich parents after getting pregnant, raising Rory as a single mother with virtually no contact with the father and no long term partners (iirc); Rory is a brilliant child and always presented as destined for great things, going to a fancy private high school before going to Yale. As Dag said, the core of the show is the mother-daughter relationship, and to bring it back to my original diagram it fits right in! Emily is the thesis, staid, stubborn and traditional, a controlling DAR matron; who uses her money to control the lives of her subordinates and family. Lorelai is the antithesis, she chooses to cut all contact with her wealthy parents and work low-class jobs rather than put up with her mother's controls. Rory is the synthesis, the star-baby, contrasted with every other character that must choose a side she is all things to all people, she is able to bring peace between the prior generations, she is comfortable with the commoners and with the aristos, she can walk with Kings [but not] lose the common touch. Her graduation from Yale with plans for a sparkling journalism career is the culmination of the first run of the show, all is solved and all is golden, Rory will avoid Emily and Lorelai's mistakes while hanging on to their positive qualities.
Then Netflix came along with a truckload of money to run a brief reboot Gilmore Girls: A Year in The Life which ran four episodes, and revisited everyone's favorite characters. (Except Melissa McCarthy, who they could only afford for a cameo after she was a side character for the original) A bunch of irrelevant shit happens, but the main points are (spoilers ahead) Rory is unemployed and broke and moves back in with her mother, having failed to have a sterling journalistic career or to succeed in any other field, has no long term romantic partner while having a series of flings, and in the climactic final scene reveals to her mother that she is pregnant. Which sets the entire prior point of the show on its head: Rory isn't the starchild after all, she is instead trapped in a cycle of failure and single motherhood. Rendered incapable of forming real romantic commitments by the lack of a father figure or a strong male presence in her early life, she allows herself to be used as a side piece, convincing herself that her refusal to commit is her freedom, when in reality it traps her and those around her in an endless cycle of slavery. The first seasons of the show are tragic in light of this conclusion, knowing that Rory won't make good makes her journey through Chilton and Yale Sisyphean rather than Herculean, the ultimate destination is right back where her mother started: single, jobless, and pregnant in small town Connecticut.
At a meta level, this is the difference between late Washington Consensus/End-Of-History plots (Gilmore Girls debuted in 2000), and post-Obama plots. The first seven seasons hope to reconcile the family, to bring everything together in a hopeful conclusion. The Netflix reboot tells us all of that was nonsense, we're all trapped in a cycle of failure, nothing matters or will ever get better. The characters that come out of the reboot looking smarter are those who didn't try: Lane and Zack "tend their garden;" they have kids together, they still play music, and they're happier than the Faustian characters like Rory and Paris who were supposed to be their natural betters. The best Rory can hope for is that her mother's journey will bring understanding to her journey with her own child...but how much fucking understanding do we need before one of these girls can father a baby in wedlock for a change?
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