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
25d ago
So I have no sympathy for them if that monster turns on them now - but they would underestimate its power at their own peril.
Who said anything about sympathy?
Nonetheless, they can resist. Just not as the thing they are now.
There's a Unitarian Church down the road from me in a beautiful old building, and a mile away a Lutheran church in a crappy 1960s building. The beautiful building used to be the Lutheran church, until the minister wanted to convert it to a Unitarian church. The Lutheran church has the unofficial motto: "We kept the faith, they kept the furniture."
Columbia University, the concept, can't be forced to do anything, except maybe close its doors.
I want people, even the ones I disagree with, to stand up for what they believe in.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
26d ago
Exactly. The entire trans-sports debate needs to be reframed in those terms: the debate isn't really whether MTFs can be allowed to compete, it's whether they be allowed to win.
Which is what's so frustrating about the dishonesty of the debate. Athletics are great, I'm a big advocate for them, but formal competitions aren't a necessary component. There are plenty of hobbyists across many sports who never compete, will never compete, and still get a lot out of it. Most rock climbers never compete. Most golfers never enter a tournament. Most Yogi aren't even aware of the idea of a tournament!
Most of the people at my BJJ gym will never enter a formal comp, and while the girls tend to stick together at need the rolls are co-ed. If a trans girl joined the gym, she'd have every opportunity to advance at the gym, and if I had to roll with her (though I'd probably avoid it if I could) I'd treat her like anyone else weaker than me, and she'd be expected to treat other women the same way. It's only once you start talking about a comp that there's any possibility of real trouble, and most people never enter comps. Hell, my good friend is a black belt, entered one tournament in his life, broke his collarbone, and immediately said "never doing that again."
Trans advocates, taking them in good faith, are giving trans girls terrible advice when they send them to join the track team, where they'll be constantly hounded. If a trans girl has interest in athletics, she should just pick up hobbyist athletics without the expectation of winning medals in anything.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
26d ago
If you ever go door to door in local politics, you quickly learn to avoid greeting people by their first name, even if they know you could know their address-name connection, and know vaguely that you looked them up in voter records to know they are regular voters, they still get freaked out by being greeted that way.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
26d ago
Fair play.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
26d ago
Thank you for the write up. I never would have had the patience to wade through all that university politics myself, your summary was much punchier.
It's amazing how impactful the Vietnam War was on our culture, and that we never really dealt with it. Dave Barry once said that untangling Vietnam is impossible in America because of the conflicts between two groups: draft dodgers who didn't fight in Vietnam but supported the war (George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Joe Biden0, and veterans who served in and opposed the war (John Kerry, Al Gore, Tim O'Brien). Twenty years after he wrote that, most of those people are dead, but we never got any closer to really figuring out what we thought about it. American society has never really come to grips with what we did in Vietnam.
Who was right between the Kill 'em All Caucus who thinks that We Didn't Lose We Left; and the protestors who said we never should have been there in the first place?
Forrest Gump is an entire film devoted to relitigating the boomer generation's trials and tribulations, and of course Vietnam is a major plot; but when Forrest has to get up at the national mall and say what he thinks about Vietnam, they cut the mic.
The protestors were objectively correct about basically everything they said: Vietnam was a pointless war, Ho ho ho Chi Minh did in fact win, the dominos didn't fall, and fifty years later a Vietnam run by the same Communist Party is a close Capitalist trading partner and just on the border of becoming a direct military ally against Red China. It's hard to see how the destruction of several million Vietnamese and the incineration of billions of dollars of treasure made the world today better in any way, compared to a counterfactual in which the United States simply let North Vietnam reunite with the South without outside interference. One has to posit a lot more hypothetical counterfactual moving parts to get there, and I don't think that justifies the costs.
On the other hand, the establishment won, The Man still stands. The institutions survived and thrived, Nixon and Reagan came back. If the pinko protestors turned out to be right about everything they said with regards to Vietnam, they turned out to be wrong about a lot of other things, and anyway their tone was considered a national shame. I grew up hearing these horror stories about returning veterans being spit on in airports, and so much of the GWOT era of "Support Our Troops" and our subsequent combination of distance from and lack of criticism of the military stems from this era. The colleges and police departments that crushed the campus protestors changed their politics, but they never fell. The direct institutional heirs of all the people who committed the crimes of the Vietnam era are in power today, running the same institutions that did committed those crimes, mostly without any formal apology or real effort to avoid such mistakes in the future.
And they never really squared up what it meant to be the President of Columbia University: the campus protestors of the Vietnam era were right, they were correct, especially according to the liberal leading lights of Columbia; but what does acknowledging that mean to an ordered institution that cooperates with the same US Government that dropped the Agent Orange?
So you end up with this generation of students that have been taught that the Protestors Were Right, and that the 1968 Columbia protests were heroic, and it's really hard to come up with a fact-based argument against them; and then you have the institutional heirs to the organization who have the same incentives to restore and maintain order on campus, and the result is this mishmash of actions.
But what's telling here is that the universities completely lack even a semblance of pain tolerance. Nobody, from the president to trustees to faculty to students, seems to be willing to countenance the idea that they can tell Trump "NUTS" and just go on without federal funding indefinitely. While taking a significant haircut in terms of funding, costs, educational opportunities, etc; the Federal Government can't actually force Columbia to do anything. If Columbia really, truly said as an institution: we're a University, we take academic independence seriously, we're not going to let the federal government get involved in hiring decisions or what we teach... Then there's nothing Trump could do about it.
This was the inevitable endpoint of identity politics, a total inability to tell anyone they are wrong.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
26d ago
Don't try to engage with this, it's the right wing version of the periodic calls to end tax exemptions for churches. Neither is going to do much of anything.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
26d ago
May BJJ Notes
— My facial stitches pretty much healed up, and as soon as I got them out I was back on the mats. There’s the start of a nice little traditional German dueling scar on my lip, but luckily it happened after I got married, so I have very little need to look pretty anymore. I am, if I”m honest, deeply embarrassed by all the outpourings of affection from the other members at the gym. I considered the whole matter vaguely shameful and stupid; everyone is way too nice about it, going out of their way to ask me how I’m doing when I come in to the gym. I guess the pictures coach posted to the gym group chat when I got injured were pretty amusing, me smiling with my face slashed open. The scar seems to be healing up fine, my only real concern is making sure it doesn’t reopen or become a weak point that could reopen easily in the future, which I think is a thing but I’m really not entirely sure? I was too nervous to shave while the stitches were in or freshly out, so I grew the worst beard of my life while all this was going on. The most frustrating advice is that I should keep it out of the sun, just as the weather is getting to the point where I want to be hiking and swimming and golfing. We'll see how I do with that.
— My buddy talked me into signing up together for private classes with the head coach, once a week in the mornings. The classes themselves are good fun, but the biggest revelation so far is that I understand the entire business model of the gym much better than I did before. Up until now I’d really wondered at how they offered such a good deal: I pay a little under $150/mo for unlimited classes, which are offered for adults 15 times per week with about a dozen instructors, and range in attendance from just me and maybe another guy to 30+ people. It seemed to me like a great deal for me personally, but a tough business to run even with the cash cow of kids classes and at any gym constant supply of people who sign up and never attend. At the same time, while BJJ pedagogy is a whole fucking category of debate I don’t want to get too far into, while I was pretty satisfied with my rate of improvement I did notice that the classes weren’t necessarily structured optimally for learning. Then I signed up for the 2:1 private classes, which on a per-hour basis run $60, and a lot of things made sense. Turns out they book a ton of private classes, with a lot of people who I didn’t realize were booking private classes; where initially I thought of the standard classes as the main thing, and the privates as an incredibly fancy add-on which maybe a dozen people who were really rich or really serious might book, turns out the public classes are the budget tier and the private classes are premium DLC that probably 30-40% of the students are booking. Cynically, it almost feels like the gaps in the pedagogy are intentional to sell privates, by working on a semi-random assortment of moves in the public classes and then gating those fundamentals behind additional cost you sell your product. Given, I don’t begrudge them that, the public classes are a real deal, part of the reason I was talked into signing up for the privates was because I didn’t mind putting some money in the coaches’ pockets it’s still not an easy business. And while now I’m happy to pay extra and show up at 6am for a private class where we just drill precise details on the armbar, the public class format was way more engaging for me early on because I got to jump right into learning a move and rolling with it, even if as a result I only half learned the move. Swings and roundabouts.
— The biggest thing I think I need to work on to improve at this point is mindset. Pretty predictable if you knew me, I lack some level of necessary killer instinct. Hell, it’s a problem I have as a mechanic, that pretty often I’m unwilling to be hard enough on the machine to get a bolt loose or a clip out for fear of breaking something. I tend to categorize too many of my partners at the gym as either way better than me, so that I’m trying not to lose too badly and unwilling to be rough with them when they’re being kind to me by going easy; or as way worse or weaker/smaller than me and hence I don’t want to go too rough and be a dick to them. Part of this is a sense that I’m a big strong guy, even in the context of the gym, and I don’t want to have the rep as a big dumb moose that spazzes out and hurts people. But sometimes I get the distinct sense I’m stuck at 75% effort, and that if I could just get out of second gear I could start beating some of the guys I think are better than me. I’m thinking maybe the solution is hitting up more open mats at other gyms, so I’m a bit more shuffled. I’m reasonably pleased with my progress in defense, guard retention, and lately I’ve been having some luck with sweeps and guard passes. But I can’t seem to get finishes, and at times I feel like I’m just stalling in the round maintaining mount or side control without getting the finish.
— In the weight room, my Philadelphia Eagles posted a hype video of the guys doing back squats in the offseason. Among monsters like Jordan Mailata and Saquon hitting 6 plates, Grant Calcaterra came in and hit 405. My first reaction was: poor Grant, why did they have to do him like that? He seems so weak compared to the rest of the players! My second thought was: that’s not far past my PR in back squat, and really close to my implied PR from reps, with a little effort I could say I back squatted as much as an Eagles Tight End! So I’m trying to get back under the bar for a couple months after this weekend, when…
— Murph is coming, and I’m gonna fucking die. I’m doing it with the vest, because it doesn’t really slow me down all that much, just makes everything suck more. Will report back if I’m alive.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
27d ago
This was why deadlift was my favorite lift initially, prior to inevitably injuring my back...
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
27d ago
The whole legal concept of publicly available information needs to be radically reimagined.
I can get a copy of the deed to someone's house in minutes in most cases, for $2.50 online.
That info being publicly available if I went to courthouse, dug through a pile of books in the basement for hours; versus that information being publicly available via app on my phone. I'm not even sure those are the same concept.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
I'd put it under the broader virtue of Adaptability in the same way I think that having an adaptable diet is a virtue.
Be vegan or Paleo or keep keto or bread and water. That discipline is a virtue. But so is being the kind of person that can eat something anywhere without being sick. When your diet causes you to not to be adaptable to being out of your comfort zone it ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice.
In the same way, being able to pack light is a virtue, even if doing so in every case isn't the best choice. Only being able to travel with multiple checked bags is bad, so is being the kind of person who comes to a formal wedding in cargo pants because you refused to pack anything else.
Idk I'm working on it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
People have become convinced they need all kinds of stuff to get through a vacation.
The old timey Jersey Shore slur for a lower-class tourist is a Shoebie, which comes from a time when working class people would catch a bus or train to the beach with everything they needed for the day in an old shoebox tied with string. You don't see people traveling light like that anymore.
I've noticed it in myself, I nearly always drive to my vacations, and I overpack because why not? Pretty quickly I'm packing for a weekend trip to my in-laws as though I'm going to shit my pants three times, work out three times, go to church twice, and have absolutely zero opportunity to do any laundry even in an emergency.
If you limit yourself to packing less stuff, and wearing your clothing multiple times without washing, you don't need so much bag space.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
Good point! I didn't think about the introduction of geological time into the mix.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
Isn't this largely a case of democratization?
Luggage before wheeled suitcases didn't look like wheeled suitcases without wheels. You had the small suitcase and the sailor's duffle bag, which were have hand mobile and held a change of clothes or two that an ordinary traveler might pack for a trip, and then you had the steamer trunk an upper class traveler would pack which was designed to be moved and stacked primarily by porters and maximized for durability when stacked in a luggage car or the belly of a ship.
The value of an individual traveler moving a large bag by themselves really only comes into play recently, with the democratization of middle class travel and the disappearance of porters. Along with people having the expectation of packing more clothing!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.
I bask in your praise.
Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace. Navy SEAL, Green Beret in GWOT? And enlisted? I dunno ... those guys can get into some shit. Again - I firmly believe these are the most pure form of "warriors" we have on the planet today. But the archetype model I started with above doesn't want that, they want Romance Novel Ready Warriors.
Perhaps there is an advantage to service being a normal, expected thing of men of a certain class: it allows us to have the benefit of having veterans in leadership, without those veterans being likely to be freaks. War is a good activity for a man to be exposed to, but men who maximally choose war as a profession are bad choices? At a smaller scale you see that with combat sports, where some exposure to them is a positive for any man, but the men who devote their lives to it are...different.
It wasn't at all necessary and, mostly as you pointed out, the product of the lack of concept of real consequences for multiple generations of a family who had grow up as the elite of the elite of the elite.
Sure, but then you look at the other examples. Clinton certainly wasn't royalty, but he was the only president to run a federal budget surplus since Nixon, and he fucked like an irresponsible rabbit. Eisenhower was a professional military man his whole career, he kept a mistress. I'm sure the accusation of "Cargo Culting" can be made here, but odds are when you talk about your heroes before the millennium, they had a mistress (the best odds remaining that if they didn't they were gay, or completely bizarrely sexually terrified). So I'm thinking it means something!
The seduction of the Hot Young President gives way to the ugly truth. Goldwater wins in '64 - running on an even stronger "morality" platform.
I disagree, if LBJ made Goldwater look ugly and unstable, Jack Kennedy would have trounced him even harder. Goldwater was a bad candidate for the time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
RE: JFK Jr.
Your writeup is more accurate, I simplified what was an extensive discussion in the book because my comment was already far too long.
But I think you also have to look at getting into that plane in terms of a broader pattern of behaviors. He came close to death on cockamamie adventures like that several times before. He was still recovering from broken bones sustained when he had crashed another aircraft, he was still using crutches immediately before the flight. He had a history of doing things like kayaking into the open ocean and being blown miles from his intended route. His wife begged him not to fly, saying it was too risky, and he insisted. It's within that context that making a reckless decision to fly a plane in bad conditions goes from iffy to pretty stupid and symptomatic of his himbo lifestyle to that point.
RE: RFK Jr. Sex Diary Entries
RFK Jr. listed each woman with a scale of 1-10 with "10" being "full intercourse." Given that ten steps is a lot of intermediate levels to get to before intercourse, "1" must have been a relatively mild transaction, perhaps a kiss or even a flirtation. So all the women he listed interactions with each day weren't necessarily women he had sex with at that time. Perhaps my wife will finally succeed in locating a scan of the diary, and then we can do a better investigation without the NYP in the middle!
RE: Physical Stamina
The Coolidge Effect probably does a lot of work to get you to stand at attention when you're constantly rotating through many partners. That and the expectations he was playing to were very different: fuck a refractory period, Jack got one into the secretary and rolled off and went back to work. The idea of going many times with the same woman each night was for freaks or the French. I find the contrasts of what we call normal and what they call normal fascinating.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
I feel comfortable in putting him among the goats when dividing out presidents, whether any particular story is true he clearly belongs among the philanderers like FDR and Clinton, not among the sheep like Dubya and Jimmy Carter.
We'll never know the real truth in any substantive sense, 20 years from now or a century from now. At the same rate that tempers cool, memories fade.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
(OTOH, I think Caro probably does hate Robert Moses.)
Much of my criticism of Caro in his work on LBJ comes from a sense that he could have done better. Given The Power Broker is arguably in the pantheon of great non-fiction books of all time, so it's an unfair standard to hold him to. The Years of Lyndon Johnson series is brilliant, but I notice repeated tendencies to show LBJ's enemies in soft focus. He takes great care to puncture every myth ever told about LBJ, in minute detail; if LBJ lied about what he ate for breakfast Caro is there with the diner menu saying he couldn't possible have ordered eggs AND oatmeal. On the other hand, LBJ's rivals are often given maximum charity. Coke Stevenson was the first eye-roller for me, he gets this "honest country lawyer who studied by lamplight on the trail next to his ox-cart" thing, with not a scandal in sight. RFK is the next, with his "devotion to truth" or whatever it was. And I'd just love to see an author like Caro, who clearly has room to run in terms of pagecount, explore that kind of thing! I want to know LBJ's scandals, and ALSO the scandals of the men he ran against.
The Power Broker worked so well because it followed a track of "Robert Moses as Hero," "Robert Moses as God," "Robert Moses as the Devil" through the three volumes. His LBJ work, by contrast, seems to throw periodic episodes of heroism in among endless incidences of cupidity. So I get what you're saying that...
Caro cares a lot about politicians' politics, and not so much about them screwing around.
But I want to hear Robert Caro, brilliant writer, justify that philosophical choice! Because I think such an examination would be interesting and have a lot to say about the world, and I can't seem to find it anywhere. The coverage of the sainted martyr Kennedys run into either hagiography or hit piece, with little balanced intelligent effort to understand the fullness of their characters. Robert Caro may be one of the few writers who truly could explore that contrast between RFK, pious Catholic fighter for truth and the little guy and devoted family man, with RFK, philandering unserious dilletante scion of a corrupt political dynasty.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
I disagree on both counts.
You can find vague rumblings about something like free markets for thousands of years, we don't tend to find a fully fleshed out theory mostly because of what texts survive and what and who was politically effective and powerful throughout most of human history. It took centuries for merchants to be powerful enough to write important texts, and for enough writing to be preserved that we could read them, but you find evidence that people understood the idea of market pricing forever.
The flip side is, free markets are radically counterintuitive, and almost no one actually understands and believes in them because of their understanding. A bright 17 year old who "understands" free market superiority is just doing so in the way that a 17 year centuries before us "understood" the trinity: they can't work it out from first principles, but they can recite it.
Almost no one actually believes in free markets in the true sense, witness the recent Republican turn against the free market while still claiming to be free market true believers. Every government thinks price controls will work for them, just this one time. Every government believes that just a few subsidies and tax benefits here and there can build an industry. Surrendering fully to the impersonal evolutionary logic of the market is near impossible for most people. When you talk to people, almost no one can truly grok that it's all by accident, they point to designs, to national or international planners, to individual heroes; they have trouble emotionally comprehending the idea that the market is made up of an infinite number of selfish actors.
Similarly with evolution, the belief in micro-evolution may be obvious, but the idea of macro-evolution from single-cell to elephant, is not at all intuitive, and requires an understanding of time scales that almost no one possesses.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
I don't really buy most of the accusations against ol' where-am-I Joe, and at any rate even if we credit the nutcases they accuse him of being a creep, rather than of having a mistress; where the effective presidents I listed all had ongoing consensual adulterous liaisons.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
MAKE ADULTERY GREAT AGAIN
A Man's Review of Rivals by Jilly Cooper and Ask Not by Maureen Callahan, two books my wife made me read after she finished them so we could talk about them walking the dog.
Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles is a famously horny pile of romance novels, the best and most famous of which were published between the mid-80s and the mid-90s. The series is loosely connected by a series of common characters across novels, all members of British old gentry, media, arts, and show-jumping worlds. The primary theme is that everybody fucks everybody. They are constantly fucking their own and each other’s wives, girlfriends, husbands, toyboys, mistresses, daughters, sons, employees, members of parliament, friends, enemies, business partners, bosses, employees, coworkers. There’s always an animating plot around Olympic show jumping, 80s business backstabbing, competitive polo, or some other thing; but the plot just exists to throw the characters into bed in different combinations. In this case, Bad Guy Lord Tony Baddingham's television empire is up for government license, and faces off against a rival consortium of the Good Guy Rupert Campbell-Black’s scrappy band of upper class upstarts for control of the airwaves.
— Bad Laws Make Good Stories: The animating MacGuffin of Rivals is the regional television franchise for Corinium’s fictional region. The byzantine set up of the old British IBA was fairly enough explained in the book, but I had to look it up anyway because I didn’t believe that any country could run a system that tremendously stupid. England was split into regions which each had a single licensed broadcaster. Periodically, the license would be subject to a new competitive bidding process. New television companies are created and bid for the franchise of the existing broadcaster, claiming they could do a better job. Some government commission reviews the applications, trying to determine who would produce the best PBS crap as a sop to the goals of the government. The consortiums in turn put in an application pretending they are going to make all kinds of socially responsible PBS crap for the community, while privately planning to make immense amounts of money off of the limited government monopoly they’re going to be granted. The animating story here is that you have Tony Baddingham, hard charging first generation nobility and businessman, who owns Corinium which has the regional television franchise from the government. A number of Tony’s enemies (his Rivals if you will), who mostly hate Tony for a variety of personal reasons related to business society or romance, lead by Rupert Cambell-Black Declan O’Hara and Freddie I-Don’t-Remember-His-Last-Name, form a new consortium, Venturer, to try to take the franchise from Tony’s Corinium. Around this core conflict, the characters form alliances and betray them, they spend themselves into bankruptcy, and they mate. Boy, do they mate. I’ll grant this: the premise is irresistible. An absurdity of British law in the 80s creates this high stakes, cloak-and-dagger cutthroat business process; and Cooper spins it into a lost world. Eighties upper class England is as foreign and fascinating a world under Cooper’s pen as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Rowling’s Hogwarts.
— When Does Sexuality Stop: Almost every POV character gets through at least two other POV characters. Nobody married stays loyal, for the most part spouses don’t even overly care about infidelity, the jealousy comes when your mistress fucks someone else. At most, revenge for a spouse’s affair takes the form of one’s own affair. And on balance, there’s something charming about it all. The thing I like about Rivals is that it is primarily and unapologetically about adult sexuality. The major characters are in their thirties and forties, and it is their romances that concern us. There are some teenagers and twenty somethings who hook up, some with adults, but the teenagers aren’t privileged as more attractive physically or otherwise except as specific facts about individual characters. This is mostly a book about characters firmly in middle age falling in and out of love and each other’s beds. Maybe I find that reassuring: I’m a thirty something man, so reading about women finding forty something men immensely attractive is speaking to me. Cooper’s characters are scrupulous about consent without being at all annoying about it; the rakes never cross that line, though a spot of domestic violence is presented as bad but no worse than anything else. Adultery and infidelity are bad, but not fatal, at some level they represent vitality and masculine virtue (in both men and women). Review a list of US Presidents, and the notorious philanderers land higher on the list than the prudes. FDR, Jefferson, JFK, LBJ, Clinton, Trump, Eisenhower, Reagan; all effective and important presidents, all had issues with marital fidelity. In recent years Carter, Dubya, Obama, Biden all appeared to be above suspicion with their wives; none were very effective presidents, none left much in the way of a positive legacy. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; adultery affirms traditional values of marriage better than promiscuous serial monogamy or divorce at the first sign of trouble.
— The Phrenology of it All: I've said about critiques of stereotypes in James Clavell’s Shogun that saying Clavell was racist against the Japanese is inaccurate, because Clavell is really a mostly extinct kind of British racist who thinks that everyone who grows up more than twenty miles from London is just a gross stereotype. Cooper is the same. The entire book is built around racial stereotyping within the white British characters, the black characters are arguably the least stereotyped by race. The core trio: Rupert, Tony, Declan are nothing but racial caricatures. Rupert Campbell-Black is tall, thin, blond, elegant. He’s described as 6’2” and 155lbs at his athletic peak. He’s old-old money, his family seat is full of first editions and rare art, he went to the best schools and loves horses and dogs and hunting. One of them probably philandered with Charles II. Lord Tony, his rival, is up-jumped bourgeoisie, his father was the first Baron, and he’s physically the opposite: darker, shorter, thicker, bull necked, muscular, his body built by a “merciless” exercise routine. Disney's casting choices de-emphasize this, most modern American readers probably miss it, indeed Jilly Cooper might not have intended it, but what we’re seeing here is the English racial caste system. Rupert is Norman descended, probably straight from a companion of William the Bastard, from Cavaliers in the English Civil War, centuries of breeding and refinement. Tony is a stereotype of a lower class Englishman, descended from mixed Celts and Anglo Saxons, with the build of a blacksmith, a Roundhead stereotype, and with the chip on his shoulder to match. Rupert’s ease and confidence to the manor born is what makes him so attractive, Tony’s arriviste's grasping need for approval is what makes him so hateful. One of the most fascinating economic studies I’ve read is that Norman descendants remain richer than those they conquered 900 years ago. This insight animates a lot of my intuitions about race, nationalism as spook, and social class. Declan O’Hara, the Irish newsman who is the third pole of the leading tripod, is creative, brilliant, great hearted…but melancholy, moody, alcoholic, incapable of managing his life without the help of his English friends and managers. Where have we heard that before? I recall one day a friend of mine, an actual honest to god Blue-Haired Liberal with tattoos to commemorate her BLM protest attendance, saying that Mexicans were all either tall and hot, or short and ugly; not realizing she was basically talking about more heavily European Northern Mexicans vs indigenous Southern Mexicans. That people who talk about race talk about the US Census categories represents a narrowing of human perception, a reduction of perception as a function of baseline skill. The American audience might not recognize the Cavalier vs Roundhead conflict at the heart of Rivals, Jilly Cooper herself might not even realize it, but it’s there.
— Recursive Attractiveness: Rupert is attractive because he is attractive. He is of course tall and blond and rich, but the women in Rutshire find him irresistible because all the other women in Rutshire find him irresistible. He’s likened to “a bad cold that everyone’s wife catches eventually.” It’s a woman writing a book for women, there’s a certain revelatory nature to it: more than anything what makes him hot is that everyone thinks he is hot.
— The show is good, but the book is better. If you liked the show, you’ll love the book.
— I had a moment of sympathy for #menwritingwomen when I read Rupert think to himself that he needed to lose weight to seduce Cameron, as he was a little soft at 6’2 175# and should diet down to 155#. Here I am at 5’11” 195, thinking, jeez Jilly Cooper must think I’m a real porker! Jilly in general is torn between making her protagonist tall, and making him a competitive horseback rider.
And now for some real life rakes: Maureen Callahan in Ask Not sets out to catalogue the women ruined by the Kennedy clan over the course of generations. She starts at old Joe Kennedy and works her way down to RFK Jr. She plays the classics: Marilyn, Chappaquiddick. She does original interviews with secretaries seduced by JFK, brings out obscure women molested by his father, surfaces accidents and incidents involving cousins that were hushed up or too small to make the historical record at all at the time. While when I read Rivals in bed, my wife noted that I would giggle occasionally at a particularly funny quip or description; when my wife read Ask Not in bed, she would periodically gasp in horror and shock at the things that Kennedys got up too.
— You don’t know how much JFK Fucked. You think you do, but you don’t. His career starts with PT 109 and Profiles in Courage, but he wound up on PT 109 because he lost his desk job in Naval Intelligence in DC after he had an affair with Inga Irvad, a Danish journalist and Nazi spy. He kept giving Jackie Chlamydia, and as a result she threatened divorce, only stepping back when old Joe offered her a million dollars not to break up the marriage. He didn’t just fuck his secretaries, he seduced college girls at campaign rallies then hired them as secretaries then shuffled them off to jobs elsewhere in DC once he only wanted to fuck them occasionally, or transferred them out of town if their fathers were important and kicked up enough of a fuss. RFK meanwhile was the MAC to JFK’s DENNIS system: when JFK was done with Marilyn Monroe and she was falling apart trying to get through to him at the white house, RFK would Move in After Completion and seduce her himself. He frequently did this with JFK’s castoffs. This was in addition to RFK fathering 10 children on his wife, Ethel, so many that they named two of them Mary. When you consider RFK Jr.’s infamous diary (covered at length here by Callahan) it almost feels like it must be genetic. Though at the same time, imagine being the famous son named for a famous father who is both sainted and famously libidinous…it must be a strange way to live.
— The Kennedy Curse: Much has been made of the Kennedy Curse. Joe Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy were wealthy and powerful and had four beautiful and talented and brilliantly educated sons, groomed for power and success from birth. Joe Jr. would die in WWII, blown up in an experimental drone aircraft bomb gone wrong. Jack was shot. Bobby was shot. Ted would be the only one to die in old age, and not without his own tragedies: a dead girl at the bottom of a river, a wife gone mad. The five daughters fared a little better: Kick died young after her husband died at war, Rosemary was lobotomized, but the other three did ok I guess. In the next generation, JFK Jr. would crash his small plane into the ocean, RFK Jr’s wife would kill herself, RFK Jr.’s brothers David died of a drug overdose and Michael in an idiotic skiing accident, Maria Shriver would be publicly cucked by her husband Ah-nold with the couple’s maid, a cousin raped and murdered a neighbor in Connecticut, two of RFK’s granddaughters would die of a drug overdose and a canoe accident respectively, Joseph P. Kennedy II crashed his jeep in Nantucket and paralyzed his girlfriend. So, yeah, a lot of bad shit happened. But when you dig through it, you start to see the seams: half of the incidents were just driving drunk, JFK Jr. wasn’t actually licensed to fly that plane, Michael Kennedy died trying to play football while skiing which they had been repeatedly told not to do, Joe Jr. died while flying an experimental suicide B-17. So much of the curse could have been avoided by doing a little less stupidity.
— How Do You Square the Circle?: I read Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, and a major part of the story is how much LBJ hated the Kennedys, and especially RFK. And Caro hates LBJ, and worships RFK. And reading Caro, I rolled my eyes a lot, at one point he talks about how RFK despised LBJ because LBJ was a liar and RFK had “an essential devotion to truth” or something like that. And I just absolutely GAGGED on that one, because how does Robert Caro of all authors not interrogate that line of thinking? Not ask what it means to have an essential devotion to honesty while also cheating on your wife with Marilyn Monroe? Not ask what it means to have an essential devotion to truth while also covering for your beloved brother’s numerous infidelities? How do we square the two RFKs, Caro’s devoted father who doted on his ten children, with Callahan’s hornball jetting to California to fuck a fallen starlet? I think you can draw a coherent set of values, a classical masculine set of values, that explains how a man can call himself a man of honor, and be seen as a man of honor by his peers, while lying to his wife about sex. This was the norm for much of history. But I’m frustrated that I so rarely find a piece on the Kennedy brothers that tries to square the circle, you have the soft focus Camelot heroic histories and you have the hit pieces. I want someone who tries to do both! We see the same, for what it’s worth, with Trump today so often. You get the turbolibs who view him as a pig-slimeball rapist; and then you get some in the MAGA crowd who will with a straight face claim that none of it ever happened and he’s a good loyal husband.
— Amateurs Talk About Strategy, Professionals Talk About Logistics: Bill Clinton famously wandered how exactly Kennedy got away with it, how he smuggled girls in and out of the White House. And the sheer scale of the operation blew my mind. I don’t have half as responsible a job as JFK, and I can’t find time to golf let alone to keep a half dozen mistresses happy and on tap. Where did he find the time? Given, he was so hot, with so much social proof, that the seduction itself doesn’t seem to have been difficult, but still: keeping them all reasonably happy, keeping track of who they were, finding time to fuck them all? Where did he find the time? And the things he did to buy off Jackie! He exclaimed after a Chanel shopping spree in the thousands “She’s breaking my God damn ass!” But he couldn’t say anything, he couldn’t afford the messy public blowup If she left him. The strategic blow by blow of the operation would be legendary.
There’s such nostalgia for the Kennedys, for that era. I have a velvet picture of JFK in my basement, in honor of my great grandmother who had it in her kitchen for forty years. But it was an era when patriots were patriots, when men were men, when presidents were hot brilliant war hero ladykillers. And somehow, I don’t know how to square that circle. Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect. I’d take JFK over Biden any day. As a president, or a golf partner, or a drinking buddy out on the bay with the sails full and the glasses half empty. But maybe never leave him alone with my wife.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29d ago
Yeah that's what I'm saying.
My point is that there was probably never a point in Europe when an "election" was a foreign concept you'd have to explain to an otherwise educated person. It was always a tool in the toolbox, just not used by those people for that purpose.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29d ago
Has the social technology of voting and elections ever been completely lost?
It seems to me that while we equate modern Democracy with Elections, strictly speaking there was never a time in recorded European history where elections were unknown, there were periods where its use was limited to certain niches, or where the franchise was limited. From Athens through the Roman Republic to the Papal Conclave and the election of the Holy Roman Emperor or Anglo Saxon elective kingship we have a pretty unbroken line through to when we see the first stirrings of modern parliamentary democracy.
I'm not sure what I think this means, but it feels like some kind of reorientation of my view of history. So I'm curious, is there any place and time where the idea of elections is totally foreign in all cases?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29d ago
Thanks for putting this together!
A fair part of the current “rich” are folks who are geeks like me, often from modest backgrounds, who made fortunes in the PC revolution (and to a lesser extent the .com bubble.) There’s a whole host of “fancy services” some of these new rich just don’t care about.
This is the part that I'm really pointing at and asking why. I think a lot of the cost, trust, complication, regulation, and availability would become soluble if there were more desire. If my entire law school graduating class (sub med school, MBA, or first years at McKinsey as you prefer) were looking for nannies, word would get around, there would be a roster of trustworthy women to do that kind of work that my peers would be able to pass to me in the same way they once passed me lists of classes and outlines and apartments to rent.
If there were a desire on the part of the upper-PMC to hire large numbers of domestics, then we would see the market and regulations alter to accommodate their desires.
But I posit that there is a market-irrational lack of desire to hire domestics, or even a desire to avoid doing so that feeds into the cost disease and lack of choice and poor options all around.
Zooming back in to childcare in particular: annual cost of daycare can run north of $25,000 per child per year. Multiply that by 2-3 kids, and you quickly get close to the cost of a $20/hr full time employee!
So there should be more of a market than there is. This is a soluble problem.
But I look around at my peers in Dual-High-Income/Prestige households, young couples that met at a T10 law school and both work high end jobs, and what I'm seeing isn't that they don't want or don't "care about" the "fancy services" of domestic help. What I'm seeing is a weird cultural tendency to lean towards services and daycares regardless of cost, by equating daycare to "school" (regardless of cost); while an antipathy exists towards having a nanny, something like having a desire to have a slave.
To some extent I do think that the managers and pimps of service providers largely act as very profitable sin-eaters of the PMC, taking on the cost of hiring and firing and disciplining employees. But we see that really break down with child care, where providers are paying employees peanuts and charging families gold, and there doesn't seem to be a will or opportunity to cut out the middlemen.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29d ago
Ah. The great problem of producing the modern stoa: getting everyone to coordinate on taste and choice at the same time.
HOLY FALSE DILEMMA BATMAN
The US didn't stop fighting the cold war when China became the PRC, or when Cuba fell, or when Vietnam did in fact fall. Why would the US have suddenly given in because Vietnam went Red?
The time to make a decision in Vietnam was before Dienbienphu. After that Vietnam was always going to be united under a Vietminh regime.
Not expending national credibility on that lost cause would have made the Capitalist American system more attractive on the global stage, not less. We can tell because US prestige declined after the defeat in Vietnam!
The Sino-Soviet split was already happening before the US entered Vietnam.
What would have helped Vietnam develop significantly would have been ending the destructive war earlier, so they could have gotten along with the industrialization process and started selling me cheap workout clothing. You can tell because Vietnam today is where South Korea was 30 years ago, and Vietnam fought a series of destructive wars for 30 years longer than South Korea did.
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