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
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Feminism has no Scalable Answer for Female Promiscuity
The apex of consumerist-choice-Feminism just dropped: this product review disguised as a slutty memoir-thinkpiece in New York Magazine’s Strategist section (typically for product reviews and recommendations, I go there to find good sheets or sheet pans). The piece traces the writer’s life by the backpacks she uses: an overnight bag that she used to cart her things as a side-piece to various jerks for emotionally empty sex, to a laptop bag that held her work when she tried to ignore men altogether, to a small purse that was appropriate to her newly traditional role as a formal “girlfriend” to a “nice” guy. It’s the romanticized and thinkpieced arc of the feminist career woman, which I’m sure has already been “react”-ified and shouted down by various Red Pill commentators online. I’m not particularly interested in the woman-cum-backpack-reviewer at the center of the story, but rather in her portrayal of her new boyfriend, the “nice” guy she worries is too boring, and how he is portrayed as reacting to her actions. It raises the question for me: does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?
The author of the piece describes her relationship to her new boyf:
This new guy is single — a.k.a. actually available — hot, and nice. I used to think “nice” was an insult, or that if someone were “nice,” I’d grow tired of them, but with him, it excites me even more. [NB: She also states that she has been with him for FIFTEEN DAYS making the boredom question a little…strange]
I don’t know what’s going to happen with this new man. In fact, my past year of dating has made it hard to feel like anything good will happen. I’m pretty convinced I’m still destined to live a life jumping from affair to romance to affair. I’m self-sabotaging. I tell this new man about all of the men I’ve fucked over, who have fucked me over. I name drop. I body count. I say things with the screaming subtext of: Why would you want to be with me?
But this time, I realize what I’m doing. Sorry — this time he realizes what I’m doing. He says hearing about all of the guys I’ve slept with hurts his feelings and asks me why I continue to do it. This kind, goofy man makes me feel like I can apologize. Like I can tell him I lied. Like I can tell him that what I’m doing is obviously me trying to blow up whatever good thing we’re beginning to create.
The author presents her sexual and romantic history to her boyfriend, and he engages in heroic acts of self-abnegation to comfort her for hurting him. He reacts to her efforts to harm him with love and care. This is ideal partner territory, someone who loves you unconditionally and will react to any action with affection, totally unrealistic after fifteen days. This isn't any kind of scaleable solution. And I’m reminded of one of the great artistic works of consumerist-choice-Feminism: Sex and the City.
SATC gets unfairly scratched from midwit lists of great TV shows because the Chapo Trap House types who get excited about TV shows love unrealistic “masculine” fantasies of violent crime stories, and not romantic sex comedies. But SATC was critical to the birth of high concept TV, was a key tent pole that kept HBO making shows like Sopranos and The Wire, and presaged so much of modern culture that it’s a crime to miss it. My wife and I watched the whole series together just after we got married, late at night after studying or working, we joked that arguing about the characters was our “Post-Cana” sessions. What SATC was good at was asking really interesting questions, over and over my wife and I would argue late into the night and over coffee in the morning over which character was right and what one should do in that situation; what it was bad at was pussying out when it came time to face the answers. The characters would always be put into interesting situations, then saved from the consequences of their own actions in a way that sort of neutered the original dramatic/philosophical tension.
In a season 3 episode trenchantly titled “Are We Sluts?”; Big-Law attorney Miranda gets diagnosed with Chlamydia and has to list her sex partners so that she can call them and tell them that they might have gotten it from her. My wife and I counted the lines on the second sheet of notepaper, assuming it was a regular legal pad (and one man per line) she had sex with ~42 men. The character was 33 at the time, so using Slate’s handy slut calculator she is in the 96th percentile, so, yeah, up there. Miranda is naturally…concerned...by this realization, and how her boyfriend Steve will feel about it. Much of the episode is the characters debating the value of chastity and promiscuity, telling the truth, should it matter, etc. There’s a lot of tension around will this ruin Miranda’s relationship. She tells Steve and, guess what? Steve just laughs; I’m a cute bartender, my number is much much higher than that. Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved: Steve’s fucked a ridiculous number of women so Miranda having fucked a huge number of men is a nothing burger.
Similar plots are wasted later: protagonist Carrie cheats and ruins her relationship with her fiancé, only to have her adulterous partner actually chase her down years and partners later, champion-slut Samantha ultimately only settles down because her man puts in unrealistic efforts of understanding and care and loyalty. The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy. Smart enough to know there is a problem, not smart enough to come up with a satisfying realistic solution.
And this is what connected in my head reading that bullshit little dialogue in this advertisement-cum-confessional: Feminism knows that a sexual past can be a problem, but can’t imagine a realistic solution. Like so many wasted episodes of Sex and the City it is smart enough to understand that tension exists, but not smart enough to come up with a real solution. The only solutions presented are either Christ-like acts of self-control on the part of the male, or for the women to marry a man with an unrealistically high partner count himself. The supply of Christ-like and mega-player partners will never meet the demand, particularly as those men are not similarly limited. It simply will not scale: the solution to female promiscuity can never be greater male promiscuity except through fuzzy math. And those waiting for the one really good man who really loves her may be waiting in vain.
I’m not sure what a Feminist-compatible solution is, beyond rejiggering the entirety of masculinity and sex-positive culture to accommodate for it. I can’t imagine anything New York would print that would be a realistic answer, rather than a scolding “get better, men” that would achieve nothing but catharsis for angry women. A solution to this problem seems outside the Feminist range of imagination. 20 years after Sex and the City aired, promiscuous New Yorkers are no closer to an answer to that age old question: “Are we Sluts?"
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.
Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos” contest
I can’t resist commenting on how the ongoing freakout over the Kansas City Chiefs making the Super Bowl perfectly encapsulates everything that has gone wrong. Taylor Swift may have endorsed Biden in 2020, but as Max Meyer pointed out after attending one of her concerts, everything about her aesthetic and place in the culture is implicitly conservative. Her fans want to be attractive and meet men. They’re not interested in changing their sex or cheering for urban mobs looting the local supermarket. If you simply give them some semblance of normalcy, they’ll be on your side and vote in opposition to the left and what it has become. But instead of that, they get conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl being rigged so Swift can then endorse Biden.
We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.
There’s something deeply poetic about this freakout centering around football, the sport that has always served as a symbol of wholesome American normalcy. The old mantra of “the personal is political” always reflected a major electoral weakness of the left. It revealed an inability to have any thoughts or passions that aren’t part of an ideological agenda. Most people don’t care about politics all that much, and feel more positively inclined towards whichever tribe doesn’t try to make them feel guilty about that fact. If you’re watching the AFC Championship game and try to steer the conversation to which players are vaxxed, most sports fans aren’t going to want to talk to you anymore. For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.
As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:
I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.
Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!
The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.
I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.
The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.
Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.
AND YET
I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.
So when Richard says:
For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.
He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.
*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
23d ago
Freddie De Boer and the Limits of Anti-Classificationist Discourse
Typically in my life my views on racial law have tended towards the Anti-Classificationist rather than the Anti-Subordinationist school, or I suppose to represent all sides on the Motte to the Hierarchical or Purity schools of thought. In my mind, discrimination and group conflict follow naturally once you define groups, and therefore the best thing to do if your goal is to avoid discrimination is to avoid formally classifying groups. Religious denomination used to be a very heavily classified, tracked, and studied American demographic. We used to have a Catholic Seat, and then a Jewish Seat on the SCOTUS; now we have only a single Protestant on the Court, with seven Catholics and one Jew. And forget anyone being able to tell the difference between a Presbyterian and a Babtist; I once completely tanked a job interview lunch by asking a woman who had just told me she was on the board of her local Methodist church what exactly the "method" was and she couldn't tell me. Ketanji Brown Jackson was widely celebrated for increasing the Diversity of the court, but almost no mainstream news outlet mentioned that her appointment was striking a blow against Hebrew and Papist over-representation, nor has the decline of the Jewish justices from three seats to just one sparked a series of hand-wringing op-eds about rising antisemitism. Other contrasting examples include Hutus and Tutsis, where the colonial creation of the categories cemented existing divisions and created conflict. Or how people with Norman surnames still out-earn other Englishmen. While the Norman descendants have faced group conflict on terms of social class, modern Britain did not face a large racial clash, because it was not a classification used by English law, and so you don’t have the congealing of the identity groups that creates conflict.
However, reading Freddie’s latest has me noticin’ a little. The core of the piece is asking why the liberal media tolerates Tyson while continuously reviling somebody like Woody Allen:
The question is, to whom do those rules not apply? For the record, I don’t have any particular beef with the hosts keeping Woody Allen at arm’s length. If they have moral objections to a filmmaker and want to express them when talking about his movie, that’s fine. The trouble is that this sort of moral work needs to be undertaken with the most basic requirement of morality, consistency, the understanding that moral rules must apply to everyone equally. And it’s not just the Ringer podcast network that has a problem with achieving that consistency but media writ large.
Well, I can still complain. We’re living in a landscape where Mike Tyson has not only been credibly accused of domestic violence and rape but made statements that seem clearly to admit to them, has become a folk celebrity with a jolly reputation, and nobody cares.
There will be, I hope, at least some effort to apply the old rules to him. Still, many who spent the 2010s hanging every apostate they could find will simply nod along. You can’t really call it a redemption story because people have largely avoided acknowledging that Tyson has done things which would require him to be redeemed. And I’d love to be able to ask some central authority of Yelling Social Justice why people discussing Annie Hall on a podcast feel that they have to fill painful minutes of airtime with awkward throat-clearing about Woody Allen, while Mike Tyson gets to rest comfortably in kitsch.
And the difference seems so blindingly obvious that it’s punching me in the face, and that’s sort of ruining my anti-classicationist plan. Ctrl-F-ing the article: zero hits for White, zero hits for Black, zero hits for Religion, zero hits for Jew, zero hits for Ethnic-, zero hits for African. Freddie doesn’t mention the possible role that race would seem to play, even to refute it. And in my mind this would be perceived as a failure by either side of the political spectrum.
If one views the media as broadly anti-White, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because he is white, while Tyson is forgiven because Tyson is Black, and PC society demands that we forgive the Black criminal and celebrate Black Excellence. Or, at the very least, that weenie turbolibs at TheRinger are uncomfortable criticizing Black celebrities in ways that might code as racist if taken out of context and uncharitably, and that in an abundance of caution the hosts at TheRinger choose to criticize white rather than Black celebs, softer targets.
If one views society as broadly anti-Black, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because Allen’s victims are white, while Tyson is easily forgiven because Tyson only committed violence against Black women. That the act of forgiving Black men for violence against Black women is itself Anti-Black, it is the failure to provision public goods for Black communities; the protection provided by legal and social sanction against those who commit crimes against Black Women, who if only for reasons of proximity will always be primarily Black men. Hence Bill Cosby eventually got his, he drugged and sodomized white women in between as well.
But neither side will see much logic in DeBoer’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge the obviously relevant facts around the cases he is comparing.
Personally, I find it definitely relevant. Tyson is forgiven thanks to a particularly grim version of the soft bigotry of low expectations, combined with racism against his victims by race and by class. Black celebrities are allowed to act in ways that turbolibs won’t tolerate in white men. White feminists love to start panics around college campus rape or similar problems, while ignoring that women in the college age-range who don’t attend college are more likely to be victimized. The prime targets of Feminism are men like Brett Kavanaugh, while they ignore the much more numerous and more violent men like Chris Brown, because for your average Wesleyan Critical Theorist she is under very little threat from men like Chris Brown and much more from men she actually interacts with. Your media or academia or twitterati feminist will never hang out with anyone who looks or acts like Mike Tyson, she does hang out with people who look and act like Woody Allen or Brett Kavanaugh.
It's all making me question some of my anti-classification bona fides.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
I've been on the record in the past stating that most Right Wing consumer boycotts will not be effective, either due to lack of follow through on the part of conservative consumers or because many corporations lack a conservatively oriented base of talent to run their businesses. I was under the impression that the recent Bud Light trans kerfuffle would be similar. As one tweet put it, "Kid Rock makes music for people who know how to steal catalytic converters;" and the ad itself was so obscure that I never would have heard of it without the internet megaphone around it. (Despite being exposed to an unfortunate degree of Bud Light content through sports broadcasts etc) If the boycott ever got off the ground, no way it would have stamina. A couple suits would be fired, but six months from now people will still drink Bud Light.
Well so far, it looks like I was wrong, The WSJ reports. {Link may be paywalled, I read it in print, I can send you a scan of it if you need it} Major points:
-- Bud light's weekly sales have dropped 21% compared to last year since April 1, on a steady downward trajectory. Coors and Miller's light offerings have gained 20% during that time. This near perfect replacement (IDK how much other light beer brands matter here) indicates that one of the early criticisms of a potential boycott, that drinkers would replace bud light with another AB INbev corporate product, was wrong. Miller-Coors is a different company, even if it is another giant corporate brewer and not my preferred local choice of Yuengling. Other AB products are dropping sales as well, even those with very separate marketing like Michelob and Busch Light. 20% sales drop for Bud Light has a huge effect on the US beer market. Bud light accounted for as much as 17% of total unit sales of beer in America. If the "Right wing boycott" can bring down Bud Light, damn, these guys are loaded for bear. That is a pop culture, business, and media juggernaut, that is the best selling product of the biggest brewer. If touching trans issues in a mild way can bring sales down 20% in one go, for any brand, that will change the game.
-- What I thought was a weakness of the Bud Light Boycott (that essentially no one was going to see the ad organically), has turned out to be its strength. Similar dynamic to how very clearly bad police shootings cause less controversy than police shootings that really weren't that bad. The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it. Right wing influencers successfully made this into a much bigger deal than it was.
-- A major force pushing Bud to change course was the middlemen. Wholesalers and distributors are a key part of Bud Light sales, they move the beer from the brewery to grocery stores and bars etc. Because they are independent of AB Inbev, and often small family owned businesses, probably small c conservative local business owners, they aren't beholden to corporate woke hierarchies and need to protect their own businesses not their future corporate careers. Without those businesses Bud Light cannot function as a brand, and their anger forced corporate to do something. That gets back to the point I made in my prior post: Conservative here have found an industry that isn't beholden to woke talent the way media is, isn't beholden to woke capital the way public companies are, and targeted it. Good work.
-- AB Inbev is apparently promising distributors, in addition to various little trinkets like a free case of Bud Light for every distributor employee, that it will spend "multiples" of its original planned marketing budget on Bud Light. AB thinks they need to come out in force to push back, they clearly think their business in general is threatened. Lose Bud Light and the whole company will shrink.
-- I was wrong about this one. I thought this was a tempest in a teapot, it could have legs. It would be literally impossible for me to reduce my consumption of AB Inbev products, I don't know the last time I drank a Bud heavy or light. My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke. Go buy a case of Yuengling instead, their family ownership supported Trump and got shit for it. Bud Light Delenda Est.
Fresh Moms For Liberty Scandal Just Dropped
Clarice Schillinger, a former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, is facing charges of assault, harassment and furnishing minors with alcohol, including vodka and rum, in connection to a September party she hosted in her Bucks County home, according to a police complaint obtained by Newsweek.
From what I can gather from reading the newspaper on the topic, she appeared to be running the local Party House. Police reports state that they had been called to her house for underage drinking multiple times in prior weeks. She threw a birthday party for her daughter, perhaps larger than usual?, and things got a little out of hand. Schillinger and her boyfriend provided both liquor and beer. Schillinger drank with the teens, including playing beer pong and pouring shots. Schillinger and her boyfriend, separately, punched different teens while trying to restrain them from leaving the party. Schillinger supposedly yelled "THE ONLY THING I ASK IS THAT YOU DON'T LEAVE."
While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States, Schillinger appears to have been attempting to do so responsibly. She wanted her kids to drink at her house, under supervision, and to keep them there until the morning when they had sobered up to avoid drunk driving. Kids drinking under parental supervision are obviously safer than kids drinking in the woods or in an empty house. Kids who drink and don't drive home are safer than kids who drive. The altercations alleged seem more like (politically motivated?) throw ins than serious assaults, no allegations of serious injuries, more like horseplay than violence.
This comes after an earlier scandal involving an OG founder of the group and her husband, the president of the Florida GOP:
...it was reported that an unnamed woman claiming to be a friend of the Zieglers filed a report with the Sarasota Police in early October claiming that Christian Ziegler had come to her apartment and raped her, after a planned threesome between the victim and the couple fell through after Bridget Ziegler became busy at the last minute.
The Ziegler's confirmed in interviews that the pair had a prior history of group sex with the woman involved, but Mr. Ziegler (obviously) denied any wrongdoing. Ziegler was, however, at the woman's apartment at the time alleged. The prior history reduces, though obviously does not eliminate, the odds that this is a politically motivated hit-job. More likely to be a case of sex being a full contact sport, with some degree of hazy consent violation in there. The bigger story than the alleged sexual assault in the papers has been the confirmed threesomes.
Thoughts? Some of mine, disorganized:
-- Everyone, regardless of their politics and their opinions of alcohol or group sex, needs to recognize that this is why laws and social customs that pry into people's personal lives are bad. If Ziegler committed assault, prosecute him, but various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best. When we pass laws that allow people to be prosecuted for actions in their personal lives, we open political dissidents (of all stripes) to these kinds of criminal prosecution attacks. I don't really know any details of this particular case, but rape laws that make proving innocence essentially impossible open political avenues of criminal attack that are indefensibly broad. We've already seen this happen to Assange, where it is physically impossible for him to prove that he used a condom and it remained on throughout the sexual act, and that was leveraged to force him into hiding. Irrational underage drinking laws make criminals of normal, normatively moral American teenagers, and criminalizing "furnishing minors" makes felons out of parents who are trying to engage in harm reduction. Ordinary Americans should not have an adversarial relationship with the cops, where we find that ordinary Americans have an adversarial relationship with the cops it is the law that is wrong.
-- This does bring to mind my general joke about the Moms For Liberty and adjacent content police in public schools: if anybody wants to remove or ban a piece of media from the public school library, their own child first needs to come in for an interview. If it is found that their child knows what "bussy lmao" means or the lyrics to WAP, the book can't be banned. Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?
-- On the other hand, it strikes me that both women were engaging in libertine behavior in what is "generally" a responsible and rational way. Schillinger tried to protect the teens, who were probably going to drink anyway, by supervising them and making sure they didn't drive. Ziegler was engaging in non-monogamy, but in the context of a committed marriage. Maybe the MFL types really do believe that these things are a-ok for consenting adults, but not for minors. Maybe they really do want to teach kids about fraught topics in their own way, rather than by rote in school? Just this possibilty makes me infinitely more sympathetic and amenable to MFL.
-- Does the median Moms For Liberty donor care about this? Is this behavior seen as hypocritical by the people who support MFL, or merely by liberals who are confused about their actual values? Is MFL low-key a Vulgar Wave organization, advocating for tits-and-beer 90s liberalism once kids are of age? Or is this a hypocritical look behind the curtain? Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?
-- The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.
-- On an apolitical note, prominence in literally any field is once again proven to get you fresh trim. Someone commented to me after seeing the movie that it was weird to them that Oppenheimer, a probably-autistic physics professor, was able to have a wife and a mistress. I replied that he was brilliant and recognized as brilliant and prominent by those around him. That made him sexy. We see that over and over with people like Kissinger, Oppy, Falwell Jr. Even being prominent for advocating a return to moral conservatism will get women to engage in wild sex with you, despite the obvious factors.
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.
-- Profound dysegenic effects on the population. I'm not here to argue what the "smart" opinion is, or to generalize to the whole grouping, but the numbers don't lie: and it would be horrifying.
A Kaiser Family Foundation brief from September still showed gaps in vaccination by insurance, education levels and income. Individuals with an annual income under $40,000 had a 68 percent partial vaccination rate, compared with 79 percent for incomes $90,000 or higher.
The discrepancies just get worse as you work into the tails, especially once you correlate with education. We'd lose disproportionately smart, educated, employed people relative to dumb, uneducated, and unemployed people. Simple facts. Fall of civilization level event? Maybe.
-- I think your definitions of Left-Right might be idiosyncratic to mine. One would think that the reaction to such an occurrence would be civil libertarian and a strong enshrinement of bodily autonomy, something like Kulak's dreamland. One could equally see urges towards civil libertarianism leading to 60s/BLM excesses and a corresponding backlash. I don't see a strong Right-Wing gain in the sense in which the Republican party passed the Patriot Act or the sense in which the Right wing favors abortion restrictions. All the political effects will be downstream of the dysgenic effects. If we lost 20% of our engineers, lawyers, codemonkeys maybe we get a safetyism administration that seeks to carefully husband our remaining human resources.
-- I'd like to think that political leaders involved would be permanently discredited, but that has not been my experience of prior disasters. See E.G. the Iraq war; people today say that everyone supported it. I point out that I went to large protests against it and Ted Kennedy fillibustered it, they say I'm nitpicking. It will all be memory holed.
On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity
In the past week, I took my dad to the annual Street Rod show in our hometown, where we walked around all afternoon looking at thousands of custom classics, running into a lot of the same people we’ve run into at the same show every year since I could walk. And I took him to see his all-time favorite movie, George Lucas’* American Graffiti, in theaters one night only for the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
At the film, and even more at the car show, I felt like a kid, like a teenager. Not in the sense of “Wide eyed wonder” or “remembering my own youth,” though there was plenty of that as well. It was simply that I, at thirty, was one of the younger people at both events. The people at the Street Rod show have frozen in time, always my dad’s age or older. Fewer and older every year, as they die off one after another. When I was ten they were older but still robust guys who could lift a transmission and you wouldn't mess with; when I was a teenager you started seeing canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and they’ve become more common every year since. This year, I followed two guys for hours across the show, on Rascal scooters, matching MAGA hats, chain smoking cigars. I wasn’t sure if I admired their IDGAF attitude (“I’m already on the scooter, why give up the cigars now?”) or if I was horrified at the idea. When two street rod enthusiasts see each other at the show and catch up, the conversation is all ailments and surgeries now. And then they all turn to the same question: where are all the young people? Why don’t young people care about these cars? Why don’t young people love Street Rods?
And the answer seemed blindingly obvious to me: these cars have a completely different meaning and symbolism for you than they do for me. Custom car culture still exists, but it’s not about Street Rods as defined in the show charter, not by a long shot. The National Street Rod Association describes street rods as a vehicle of 1948 or earlier that has had modernization to the engine, transmission, interior, or anything else and is a non-racing vehicle used mostly for general enjoyment. “The more family-friendly version of the hot rod.” Besides the obvious fact that cars from 1948 are less accessible to young people, it simply doesn’t make sense to modify a car for performance today.
Modifying a car for street performance purposes makes essentially zero sense in this day and age, doing so is entirely performative in nature. In 1962, the year American Graffiti is set, hot rods were fast because factory cars were slow. I’ve built and driven cars similar to John Millner’s “piss yellow deuce coupe” and while they’re fun to play with, they’re not really very fast**. It’s impossible to guess exact specs in a film that’s largely a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve driven similar cars with more modern running gear, and it’s pretty hard to take that kind of platform and get a sub-7s 0-60 just by getting the engine running hotter. Now, in 1962, that car was fast, it was the fastest in the Valley!, because Steve’s ’58 Impala probably made 60 in something like 14 seconds, and the Edsel his girlfriend drives probably took 10 seconds or so. Even a brand-new ’62 Vette would have taken 6.9 seconds to reach 60. It really was possible to take a clapped out little old Ford that a teenager with a summer job could afford, slap a big engine sourced from a wrecked truck in it, tune it for power in your garage, and have a meaningfully fast car, a car visibly faster than other cars on the road, a car fast enough that other people would be impressed by it. You could have the bitchin’est car in the whole Valley, and the handful of mostly-foreign performance cars that could challenge you were rare as hen’s teeth in the American small town.
Today, factory speed is so widely available that not only is it impossible to hot-rod anything meaningful, it’s impossible to really street race without being more limited by balls and rationality than by the machines involved. The 2023 Vette runs a sub-3 0-60, in automatic, and costs less than $80k brand new Chevy sells 30,000 of them every year. A Tesla Model 3 Performance sedan can do 60 in 3.5 seconds, costs $55k, and is also a practical day to day car. Hell, for a little over $30k today, you can pick up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Prime which will get you to 60 in 5.6 seconds while being among the most practical and reliable family cars on the road. There’s no logical reason to modify your car to be faster today, putting an annoying exhaust, taking out comfort features and turning it into a penalty box, will still deliver less speed-per-dollar than just saving up for a used Corvette. Even if you just want to Mod, you’re better off starting at the Vette and modding that, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. You cannot build a meaningfully fast car on a budget today, at best you might be able to keep a clapped out old M3 on the road. The budget path to a meaningfully fast car today is taking a factory fast car that has deteriorated to a budget price and managing to keep it in shape. A friend of mine has a 2012 e550, I’ve driven it and it’s a lovely and incredibly fast car with over 400hp that will happily bounce off the electronically limited top speed, he bought it for $20k a couple years back, but it’s caught a case of electrical gremlins that are causing an engine misfire that the mechanics all estimate at $15k to fix, and wholesale trade-in on it is $11k, probably sell it for $5k with the engine issues. There’s nothing you can do with $6k in parts for a $5k Honda Civic that will get you anywhere near the E550’s 4.3s 60 time.
Factory speed is the enemy of custom car culture. When any chucklehead can just pay-to-win by buying a fast car from the dealership, having a fast car has no meaning. Think of the great eras of custom racing: American Graffiti memorializes the late 50s early 60s street rod era, and the first few Fast and Furious films commemorate the late 80s-90s tuner era. But the thing is, the 80s and 90s were a nadir for cars in general in America. The 60s and 70s had the great muscle car era, that was the death of the Hot Rod era. Post Embargo, common American cars wouldn’t achieve the performance heights of the Judge and the great SS cars until the mid 2000s. The C4 Corvette is a mediocre car by today’s standards, would be a Toyota 86 competitor, but in 1984 it was such a monster it was banned from SCCA competition because Porsche and Mercedes products simply couldn’t compete, the Corvette needed its own category! This was the environment that fueled Tuner and Ricer culture: you really could take an Acura Integra and make it meaningfully faster, fast enough to compete with a C4 corvette.
The irony is that “car guys” have always slavered over factory speed! They want car companies to make great performance cars! But they also love custom culture. These two desires are in natural conflict, factory speed drives customs out of the market. Today’s custom culture is all about art cars, interesting aesthetics, or over-loud audio. The very same guys complaining that young people aren’t into cars, created the environment where custom cars don’t make sense. Our desires kill the environment that creates and fuels those desires.*** Too much of what we want kills us. It’s the inherently elegiac nature of the Western: the cowboy sheriff makes himself obsolete, by taming the West he destroys the West he knew.
The restrictive definition that the National Street Rod Association uses sentences their shows to decline and death. I look out at the show, shrinking every year, aging every year, and I know the only path forward for this subculture. If they want young people, they need cars that mean something to young people! A 75 year old man wants the cars that were cool when he was young, so does a 30 year old man, so does the 22 year old man. I look at the park and think, cut it right down the middle, this half is T-Buckets and Golden Oldies, that half is Ricers and Reggaeton booming out of trunk mounted subwoofers. You can still have the traditional street rods, but limiting the show to traditional street rods leaves it sterile, unmoving, not going anywhere. Open the show up to everyone, and maybe they’ll also learn to love the traditional street rods. Sure, have the old timers, but have the young artists too! The only way to preserve hot rod culture, to really keep the spirit of John Milner alive, is to allow it to change and grow, to bring in young people customizing the cars that mean something to young people.
But the OGs, the NSRA Golden Oldies types, they have no interest in seeing things change. They don’t want Riced out Civics, they don’t want big subwoofers and Bad Bunny, they want what they’ve always had. And maybe they deserve that! Maybe the purity of that culture is worth it! But walking through the show, I’m very aware, viscerally aware, of the choice being made: the Street Rod show has chosen death over diversity. They’d rather the car show shrink than that it feature modern customs. They’d rather see it die than see it change. That’s the tragedy, walking around the show looking at these beautiful machines, and knowing that the culture that built them has rendered itself sterile, chosen not to reproduce itself for fear of change.
*This was, coincidentally, the film Lucas made immediately before becoming “the Star Wars guy” forever. It’s a cozy little realistic slice-of-life all-rounder of a film, no special effects to speak of. It’s fascinating to consider: if Lucas hadn’t made Star Wars would he have continued making movies like this for thirty years instead? Did we miss out on unmade masterpieces consumed by the Star Wars universe? I might write a bigger comment on the film later, the way it perfectly captures the really beauty and feelings of freedom of American youth, the unique Americana teenage culture of driving around with your friends that is disappearing every year, I wanted to include more of it here but this comment is already entirely too long.
**A forum comment I found from an old timer is the best summary on the topic of how fast Hot Rods were:
I remember reading "Uncle Tom" McCahill's road tests in Mechanix Illustrated in the mid to late '50's. The thing I remember back then was that breaking 10 seconds in the 0-60 run was a real big deal. It translated to a 17-18 second quarter mile time. Back then 0-60 was the standard for acceleration times (the 1/4 mile was something some goofy kids in California used).
A bunch of friends and I took our cars to the dragstrip one Sunday. The "hot" flatheads (mainly stock "shoebox" Fords) could break the 20 second mark in the 1/4 miles. One guy had a stock Model "A". I seem to remember he ran in the 22 second area. In 1961, a friend and I ran a stripped '36 Ford coupe with a '42 Merc engine (heads and carbs, modified ignition; all else stock) and turned a best time of 16.44 seconds. We were happy with it and held the "D/Altered" track record at Minnesota Dragways for a few months. Some guys came down from Fargo later in the year with a '32 coach with a fully built 296" flathead with 4 carbs and cut almost 2 seconds off our "record".
A couple of other comments. In '58 we were all astounded by the fact that a stock FI 283 '57 Chevrolet ran a certified 14.34 in the quarter; it was almost unbelievable then (and I expect a little sophisticated cheating was going on). In the late '80's, a friend had some nicely restored '63 and '64 409 Four speed Chevrolets. We went for a ride and ran them through their paces. At that time, I had a '67 Corvette with a 327/350, a four speed and 3.55 gears. I will have to say I was singularly unimpressed with the performance of the vaunted 409's.
I can't let Mr. "Elcohaulic"'statements pass without comment. First of all, I would discount the fact that a 337 Lincoln flathead was involved. I knew a couple of guys in high school who put one in a '53 Ford. It was waaay nose-heavy, handled like a safe in a wheelbarrow, and would have had no traction. Also, although I think Edmunds made heads and carbs, no serious speed equipment was available for that lump of iron. As to 11 second quarters with a modified flathead in a '49 Ford. Sorry, but that never happened. Joe Abbin made 335 hp on the dyno with a blown 284" engine in a '34 sedan and ran consistent 12's at the strip. The only way that guy was in the 11's was on a 1/8 mile strip.
***Another example from my youth: Baseball Cards were something kids were supposed to care about. My dad bought me baseball cards and sort of informed me that little boys were supposed to like them. But whenever I actually played with them, he’d yell at me for ruining their collector value. I wasn’t allowed to flip them, shuffle them, make fake lineups, trade them: they were worth something. Because from the time my dad was a kid, his generation had made them collectable, made them valuable. As a result, I have no connection with baseball cards, really. I’m aware they’re collectibles, but I have no emotional attachment to them the way his generation did. The capitalist urge to create something special and market it, to make "collectibles," erodes and destroys the human meaning behind those collectibles.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Thoughts on Shifting Definitions and Models of Religious Liberty
Every man has three hearts, A false heart in their mouths, which they show to the whole world; another heart in their chests, which only relatives and friends know; and finally, a real heart, which no one knows, hidden. Only god knows where. -- James Clavell, Shogun
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; -- First Amendment to the US Constitution
I've been thinking a lot lately about how the definition of religious liberty has morphed in my lifetime. The legal definition of religious liberty seems to be expanding outward legally, while at the same time the feeling of liberty of belief for actually existing religious people feels like it is shrinking. These expanding protections feel necessary to maintain a degree of freedom, rather than expanding it. But so much of it is that the model of public faith has changed. The two quotes above give me my model of what religious freedom was, and how the context has changed.
The framers envisioned a society of men with three hearts when it came to religious liberty: a false secular heart in their mouths in public spaces, a sectarian religious heart in their chests that they shared with their friends and family and coreligionists, and a real true heart of their beliefs that they were entitled to keep private and that no one could punish or penalize them for. One's true personal third heart might be atheist or animist or deist, one's sectarian second heart might be Catholic or Quaker, but everyone agreed their first public heart would be secular and nonsectarian and that no one would be punished for their other beliefs. This view of religious liberty envisioned a country in which men could hold any religion, in which men would collectively acknowledge a kayfabe of secularism in public so that no one creed predominated, while all men would hold a private religion together with their friends, and where all men had the right to believe or not believe anything in their own heart without punishment or censure.
This is distinct from other visions of religious liberty historically. Many empires allowed variants of a different kind of religious liberty, confessional liberty, freeing the second heart but restricting the first and the third. Groups had some right to practice their own religion privately (second heart), even allowed to punish their own apostates (third heart), but in public they had to acknowledge the divinity of the imperial faith (first heart) and had no freedom to contradict it.The Jews under Roman rule could practice their religion amongst themselves, but they must engage publicly in worshipping and acknowledging Caesar Augustus, because the Roman cults were the public religion Jews would always be second class citizens. At the same time, individual Jews like Jesus were subject to punishment under Jewish religious laws for their own private beliefs, there was no individual right to freedom of worship.
In America, Quakers and Babtists and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and even a few Jews and hey maybe a couple Muslims too all worked off the same system. None really believed in the secularism taught in schools but they would go along with it and agree with it., because everyone knew that everyone else went to church/synagogue/meeting on Sunday and learned something different that we agreed or disagreed about it in parts that weren't worth arguing. And it was understood that atheists were probably in those pews as well, but no one was going to launch an inquisition against them, that was their own business.
But in the 21st century, fewer and fewer Americans are actually operating on three different hearts. The rise of the "Nones" or secularism or wokism or successor ideology or whatever you want to call it, is the combination of the first and the second hearts. Max Lynn Stackhouse, when defining religion, called a religion "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted." Wokism meets all those criteria, while failing the Merriam-Webster definition of having supernatural elements (arguably). Because Wokes skirts the traditional lines of "religion" they are able to advocate everything they want in the public sphere, where traditional religions are restricted to only advocating half their beliefs. Wokism is, in many ways, a religious memetics that has evolved to avoid being restricted by traditional freedom of religion law. It offers answers to universal questions that feed the need for the sacred which all humans possess, while also being entirely within the rules of public discourse.
That is what Roberts, Barrett, Scalia (RIPower, King) are groping towards but not yet saying out loud. Traditional religions are fighting off the back foot, they aren't allowed to advocate in the public square because traditionally that was a method to avoid religious conflicts and persecutions. But Wokism has adapted to that circumstance, and now provides a full binding metaphysical moral vision in public that must be bowed to, Wokism seeks by monopolizing the first heart to destroy the freedom of the second and third hearts. For traditional religious pluralism to survive against this evolved competition, as the founders envisioned, we have to allow religions to fight on an even playing field. The religious freedom advocates on SCOTUS are groping towards this, but are restricted by their textual originalism, they are looking at the text of the constitution when what matters it that the circumstances have changed, the founder's vision is no longer possible when one competitor has adapted to the rules. So much like the NFL or MMA will change the rules of the game when a strategy emerges that ruins the spirit of the game, so freedom of religion must be changed to allow for the competition envisioned.
So how do we level the playing field, without shredding the constitution in ways we'll regret later when we live in Rick Santorum's Iran? I'm interested in all ideas. Here are a few I see.
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School choice seems like step one. Religious schools already deliver better results at a lower cost, offering vouchers to as many students as want them would allow religious schooling to exist on a level playing field with secular schooling, and see who wins the Trans-Black-Lives-Matter School or the Sisters of Perpetual Ruler Snapping.
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Restrict Atheist speech in the same way that religious speech is restricted. One should be just as loathe to say that there is no God as one is to say that there is only one. The traditional point of conflict is Biology class, which I think is a case of religions failing to adapt to facts, one can make evolution about the way the world works rather than how it started quite easily.
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Restrict claims of religious faith to those who hold genuine religious beliefs more strictly. The phenomenon of fake religious trolling by atheist-Jews claiming that abortion-on-demand is a religious rite, or fakakta Satanists putting up statues of the Dark Lord because someone else put up one of the Ten Commandments, needs to reined in. How do we do that without instituting Santorum-Iran? I'm not sure.
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Make and allow for more non-sectarian expressions of religious belief. I was an Eagle Scout, and for years the Chaplain's Aide of our troop, I've given tons of prayers in the name of a faux-Lenape "Great Spirit" that stood in for the member's of my troop for our personal beliefs in God, Allah, Jehovah, or Krishna. That worked, we all understood what was meant. How do we develop that secular stand-in that would work universally? Maybe we choose to honor Amerindian beliefs as a nation, invoke the Great Spirit? We should expect our presidents and our politicians to invoke a God, and assume everyone has the maturity to understand that it also means their God. Make America Believe Again.
ETA: Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. If you don't celebrate it, I recommend it. A feast of gratitude towards the almighty is a positive tradition, and should be exported.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Someone commenting on the Dickstretcher-Rolex saga suggested we have a watch thread. To kick it off, I'm going to post a guide to What Watch to Buy based on why you want a watch, I figure that's a good way to pick a fight and get it going. I love watches, watches are cool, they're one of the few pieces of acceptable jewelry for (white) men, I love the historical associations of vintage pieces, I love the mechanical beauty of automatic watches that turn movement into energy as if by magic and can go farther underwater than I ever will.
I want a watch that tells time, is cheap, and maybe isn't a total piece of shit and that some people will like
G Shock Classic Tough Solar. Classic to iconic design, will survive anything your wrist will and a lot your wrist won't, solar battery lasts effectively forever and the multi-band atomic system means you'll never have to set it. Has a stop watch and other fun stuff if you want to play with it. People love their G Shocks so it's not something people will look down on, has a certain rugged utilitarianism to it. If you end up loving G Shocks, they go up in price, features, and collectibility from there to a $500 all steel model, which I found kind of ruined the point because it was so damn heavy.
I want to blend into the corporate upper classes and fit in, this is a status item, but I don't want to spend a ton of money
Just buy an Apple Watch. My circles aren't yours, but no one I know can tell the difference between one model and another (maybe they'll change this with the ultra), and half the top execs and earners I meet these days are wearing Apple Watches anyway for "fitness" stuff, so for <$400 you blend right into the C Suite. Honestly, this watch has hollowed out the watch industry as a jewelry/status purchase, the ladder of success has broken down at the middle tiers. Only stuff cheaper than an Apple Watch or much more expensive than the Apple Watch can survive. It no longer makes sense for a middle manager to buy a $1k Tag or Raymond Weil and expect anyone to give a fuck when the mail cart kid is wearing the exact same Apple Watch the CEO is wearing.
I want a new mechanical watch that looks like a classic men's watch and functions well, but brand isn't important
Seiko 5, Glycine Airman, or the Timex Marlin, are all affordable models with respectable reliable mechanical movements and good looks. No batteries are nice, and you can see if you like mechanicals. Nobody will look at them and say it's horrible or cheap. Pick what aesthetic tickles your fancy. If you want to get more into niche boutique unique stuff, some microbrands like this Armida Explorer Homage or any of the fine dive watches out of Islander Watches have moderately better finishing than the lower end brands and more unique styles, while still basically paying homage to the big guys.
I have a really small penis and I want to make that obvious to everyone
Can I interest you in an invicta? They offer products for all price ranges between $50 and $5,000, and it all screams compensation from top to bottom.
I want a mechanical watch from a brand other watch nerds will respect, but that Champagne taste is on a craft-beer budget
Go vintage non-Rolex swiss brand. You can find great cheap Tissot Seastars, or for a step up in brand value get a vintage Omega Seamaster or Constellation, or go out there with a Vostok if you're quirky like a Coen brothers film. The vintage will appeal to enthusiasts richer than you who are wearing Rolexs or Blancpains that cost ten times as much, while costing much less. Much better value than spending $1k on a mid tier watch.
No, really, I'm fancy and I just want to dive into the deep end and flex
Just get a Submariner or a Speedmaster , they have the pedigree and the history and the reputation that you're looking for. Unless you're ready to buy a Patek or something, and that's out of my depth!
As for my collection? I have a black square G Shock and an Armida A9 that I wear 90% of days. I have a 60s Omega Seamaster which was a gift from an old friend that I love, and a Bailey Banks and Biddle watch that was given to my great grandfather for 25 years of work at the same plant which I wear for special occasions (I love wearing it to a fancy event because no one else has one quite like it).
So what's in everybody else's drawer and on your wrist? Or how did I fuck up my advice above? Do you wear nothing but fakes? Nothing but Swatches in fun colors?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society
TLDR: We're increasingly seeing an urge to regulate media consumption, social media moderation, and public speech along the lines of an ersatz "equal time" doctrine, in which users must both view and affirm one's viewpoints. People don't just want the right to free speech, they want the right to be cool, to speak and be heard and enjoyed and honored.
A theme running through a few different recent threads on here is an urge by different societal movements to seize the mantle of “cool,” to be hip, to be fun, to be interesting.
The people trying to ban TikTok have cited over and over the differential between Israeli and Palestinian content.
Now, critics allege that TikTok is using its influence to push content that is pro-Palestinian and contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. The claims about TikTok’s promotion of pro-Palestinian content are anecdotal, and they have been bubbling up on the social media platform X, in statements to the media and on conservative media outlet. TikTok said the allegations of bias are baseless.
The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.
Meanwhile the primary effort I see in the Anti-Anti-Semitism space is the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, which is so confusingly bad I literally think it is its opposite every time I see it. I see the ads, and I read it naturally as Stand Up to Hatred (by) Jews rather than Stand Up To Hatred (of) Jews. ADL content is lame, bad, boring. Pro-Palestinian content is simply better and put together by better creators.
Just accept not being cool! Did you know: what only number one hit in the 1960s was explicitly about the Vietnam war? Ballad of the Green Berets. Go figure. You want to compete with better memes, produce your own. While we associate the 1960s music scene with the antiwar movement, there were significant patriotic songs produced too. Fighting Side of Me, Okie from Muskogee, the patriotic hits of the era were huge. You compete with memes with better memes. Banning tiktok will not save Israel.
We see the same dynamic with astroturfed “Positive” male role models. Male role models who are nothing interesting, simply because TPTB don’t like the ones that are actually current and good. We see the same dynamic with everyone claiming to be the new punk. This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written and I tend to agree, but the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater and taking antidepressants just floors me. Everyone wants to be cool and rebellious and also in power and also secretly the choice of the grill pilled normies and the proletariat and the artists and the one true source of loving families that produce children. They want to be James Dean and Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. They want to be both the enemies in the culture war at the same time.
This comes back to the debate about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach, right? How do you create the right to equal time in a world where people are picking among free choices with their eyeballs? How far does this go? If people buy books that are on one end of a conflict, must publishers and libraries fart out books for the other side? It was possible in a more centralized era for governments to force limited broadcast stations to cover sides evenly, but in the era of consumer choice, even if you force content creators to put out pro-Israel movies Netflix and Youtube customers don’t have to click on them. You can’t force eyeballs onto content anymore. To what extent is the effort to force advertising into these platforms in part an effort to force content consumers to get exposed to these messages whether they like it or not? Once people can choose their own content, they might not pick your content, and that can’t be allowed.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Using ad-blockers is antisocial behavior and should be discouraged or banned wherever possible. If you don't want to consume content that contains ads, don't consume the content if it contains ads. Simple as.
Advertiser supported content makes it possible for a much broader array of content creators to make a living producing commercially viable products. A world without advertising is a world with more paywalls and fewer creators making a living. See the decline of the newspaper for what content creation looks like without advertising dollars: fewer writers making a decent living, higher prices for less content, increasingly desperate catering to a tiny demographic target.
If you don't want advertising on your TV, don't watch OTA TV, limit your viewing to paid streaming services that don't show ads. If you don't like youtube ads, subscribe to premium. If you don't like reading essays with pop up ads, pay for a newspaper subscription, or if you're too cheap for that go to the library and read it for free. If you expect to google "How to fix my sink when it gurgles" and find the answer for free, you have to expect that the ads on the side of the page are paying the guy to make it.
If you think that putting advertising in your face is wrong, vote with your feet/wallet/eyeballs: reward content producers that offer alternative models. If content producers find that they're losing customers when they put up obnoxious ads, they'll stop doing it.
Can anyone offer me an argument in favor of ad-blockers that doesn't amount to some kind of misanthropic "The system, man, it's broken; so whatever I do against the system is a-ok"? I really can't even create a steelman for the ad-block position. I can understand the logic of not liking to be tracked, sure, and I find that a somewhat reasonable ask; but not viewing any ads that pay for the content you consume is just expecting the world to provide you with something free of charge.
A Death at BUDS, or How Anti-Science Ideologies Trickle Down to Harm Heroes
TLDR: Media bias against drugs leads to people ignoring obvious, medically supported interventions. This creates room for other people to cheat the system, which creates dangers. Kyle Mullen would probably be alive today were he on a medically supervised steroid cycle instead of buying a used car to store his illegal drugs in and learning how to use them from some mix of bros at the base and bros on the internet. I say bring on the Space Marines, or at least provide pure drugs at military expense, it’s only polite.
By any reasonable standard, Kyle Mullen was a Hero in the making, in the classical sense. A muscular 6’4 SEAL candidate, choosing to forego a career out of an Ivy League school to serve his country.
The 24-year-old arrived on the California coast in January for the SEALs’ punishing selection course in the best shape of his life — even better than when he was a state champion defensive end in high school or the captain of the football team at Yale.
He finished the toughest parts of SEAL training, and died on the beach afterward. NYT article here, all quotes are from that article. The NYT story was a real gut punch, expose and heartbreaker all rolled into one, I recommend reading the whole thing and now it’s circulating through the “Summarize a real journalist’s work, make two generic comments, and pass it off as your own” internet chain. Slate chimed in to probably say the whole thing is to be blamed on Toxic Masculinity, The National Review of course needs to Defend Tradition while blaming the drugs, even some Arab website hopped on to call it an example of American brutality, cheating, and drug culture.
What none of the think pieces suggested was the obvious solution: if steroids make you better at the things we want SEALs to be good at, give them steroids. Why are SEALs buying them independently and taking them secretly, when it would all go much better if the SEALs program offered an option to be put on a mild steroid cycle under doctor’s supervision? At the very least, that’s as upsetting as schoolteachers buying their own school supplies!
Sailors who enter the program bolstered by steroids and hormones can push harder, recover faster and probably beat out the sailors who are trying to become SEALs while clean, said one senior SEAL leader with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up selecting only the very best cheaters, and steadily fill the SEAL teams with war fighters who view rules as optional.
“No one can do everything the instructors ask, so you have to learn how to cheat to get through,” he said. “Everyone knows it happens. The point is to learn how to not get caught.”
Teaching trainee soldiers to cheat goes back to at least the Spartan Agoge, and I doubt Lycurgus was totally innovative on this one. But you can prevent trainees from going off the rails by providing reasonable rails. What killed Limewire et al (or at least made them less prominent), wasn’t suing some random college kids for downloading an album, it was creating a legal framework for listening to music online and paying for it. While testing is suggested as a solution, it hasn't worked in sports so I fail to see how we can be optimistic it will work here.
If cheating is easy and it works, then the only solution is to obviate the need for it by making it legal in a managed form.
The Dead Pool is a real phenomenon, steroids are nothing to play with. But those kinds of results come from out of control drug use without medical supervision by guys who are used to pushing their limits, and are OK with dying in the process. There is no question that overuse of steroids can have negative health impacts, but a light, managed cycle isn’t going to make it any more likely that anyone dies, it would probably reduce the odds of other injuries during BUDS if it were used to manage existing problems and lead to more medical supervision. Steroids are like anything else, they follow the 80/20 rule: the first extra push gets you most of the results, then you can keep adding more and more to get attenuated marginal gains. WADA isn’t going to test SEALs before they kick in doors and disqualify guys that don’t have clean piss. Putting all SEAL candidates who want it on a basic cycle would obviate the desire to go on more, level the playing field, and improve performance.
Instead, the Navy chooses to make the competition ever more fierce, and just hope that guys won't cheat or get themselves into trouble.
In the 1980s, about 40 percent of candidates graduated. Over the past 25 years, the average has dropped to 26 percent. In 2021, it was just 14 percent, and in Seaman Mullen’s class this year, less than 10 percent.
Like everything else in American life, the competition at the top is increasingly fierce. The bifurcation of American life into a Barbell Chart of winners and losers doesn’t stop anywhere. SEAL training is particularly brutal, consider this story of a man who was probably tougher and in better shape than anyone on theMotte:
Three weeks in, Seaman Caserta collapsed while carrying a boat. Instructors yelled at him to get up, and when he said he couldn’t, his father said, they made him quit the course. An X-ray later revealed a broken leg.
Candidates who don’t complete BUD/S often must serve out the remaining years of their enlistments in undesirable low-level Navy jobs. Seaman Caserta ended up manning a snack counter at a distant base.
Seriously, I don’t know the whole story, but in what universe is a guy 50/50 between commando and snack counter? There wasn’t a slightly more useful landing spot?
You’re asking these guys to take a gamble between doing their dream job being a certified superhero, with highly paid job opportunities galore in a variety of fields after they serve their country with honor, and obscurity behind the snack counter. Is it any wonder that they’ll do anything to win, especially when you already select for guys willing to risk death?
“What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?” said the leader. “A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision?”
I’m really just putting this quote here as a laugh line. We ask SEALs to be elite, to be the best, to sacrifice their bodies, their lives, and often parts of their souls; but God forbid they break the rules by taking medicine that makes their lives easier.
Early aughts Rick Reilly really did a number on America, we’re still recovering from it and realizing just what Better Living Through Chemistry can do for us. But our sportswriters and their cousins in the hard news are the main way the public hears about steroids: I would bet that more NYT writers/editors know someone using Test to transition than using Test to hit a PR. They’re pulling their info from SI, not from T Nation. Much of the NYT commentariat and audience views male weightlifting and fitness with vague suspicion of wrong think. That combination gives us a public discourse about steroids soaked in myths about roid rage, tiny testicles, and ignoring all the scientific studies of the health benefits of testosterone supplementation. Much like a recent discussion of plastic surgery, if everyone keeps it a secret you only ever notice the bad work, not all the work that passes.
The result is that someone like Kyle, who should have been serving his country with distinction, or at least living the probably pleasant life of a former Yale football captain, instead chose to buy a used car to hide his drugs in, inject himself with God-only-knows-what, and died before he ever saw an enemy combatant. What a waste. Let’s at least consider the possibility that the problem wasn’t drug use as such, but using illegal drugs dosed by an amateur, with the obvious preventative being legal drugs dosed by medical professionals under regular observation for results. Recognize that bad results come from homebrew experimentation, not from the substance itself. Let's give Justice to Kyle, not by weakening SEAL training or introducing an ever expanding and expensive team of nannies to keep an eye on everyone, but by doing something that might actually have saved his life.
The Dawn of Everything, The Pop-Tarts Bowl Mascot, Joseph Campbell, and the Importance of Play
The Pop Tarts Bowl was played between North Carolina State and Kansas State. From my limited understanding, it is a second or third tier bowl game, well below stuff like the Orange Bowl and Rose Bowl, on the fringes of something that makes national TV. The colleges are relatively unimportant schools. But it took over my Twitter for a while, because of the edible mascot. And dammit, they delivered didn’t they Canonically (I have been informed) within the advertising universe personified Pop-Tarts want desperately to be eaten, it is their favorite thing. Tweets exploded at the sheer absurdity of the spectacle. It produced absurd quantities of earned media and was the most watched bowl game to that point. Other Mascots got in on it. There were infinite comparisons to Christ and the birth of Christianity: "This my body, that is being given up for you, and for many." And I can’t find the tweet anymore because I rarely save them, but I saw one in the midst of this onslaught of content that went something like “Archaeologists will unearth this and say that Americans engaged in mass sacrifice in college football stadiums. What if the Aztec temples and the Roman Coliseum weren’t sites of brutal slaughter, but intense silliness and play acting?” I don’t endorse those interpretations of Roman and Aztec history, and certainly not of Christianity…but let’s consider another possibility.
The Dawn of Everything (hereafter DoE) is a magisterial work. It endeavors to cover a great deal of ground, from meta-critique of European historiography and ethnography to straight historical storytelling, from absurd theorizing about Rousseau secretly plagiarizing indigenous authors to interesting interpretations of obscure cultural and historical forms.
((A brief aside on that Rousseau bit: ACX featured an extensive review of the book. The reviewer criticizes the idea of indigenous thought influencing European political thought as absurd then compares the Dawn of Everything view of power to the film Mean Girls…without realizing that he is himself participating in exactly the dynamic that the authors of DoE are talking about. Mean Girls quite explicitly compares the tribalism of High School cliques to a silly view of African wildlife and native life. The main character of the film is explicitly created as an outsider to American middle class norms, by way of making her the child of researching professors raised abroad in darkest Africa. The entire plot is, at some level, deeply influenced by and in conversation with the Western view of indigenous African cultures. To turn around and offer it as a pure and naive example of what hunter-gatherer tribal culture would have looked like is precisely what the Daves are talking about in DoE.))
But the real focus of DoE is in my view twofold. The first goal is recapturing the idea of humans as universally self-aware political actors, even in primitive societies. The second is an examination of how political forms radically different than our own interact with human freedom, and the authors view of the “Three Fundamental Freedoms” and how to measure them. I have no interest in going over the many examples offered in DoE to support the first point. They offer numerous examples of humans engaging in political thought, debate, and reorganization. They make what I find to be persuasive arguments that rather than a straight line from a pure state of nature, through intermediate steps growing progressively more complex and controlled, to the modern capitalist surveillance state, itself an intermediate step leading towards the singularity/the Federation of Planets/True Communism/Whatever. DoE makes a compelling argument that in many places over time, peoples have gotten something resembling early civilization and soundly and consciously rejected it. That through the resulting institutions and traditions primitive successor nations specifically built strategies to prevent the formation of tyrannies. This is obvious, if only by evolutionary means: only societies that have formed strong traditions against the formation of more strictly organized control and tyranny will remain free. We can examine societies that built cities and monuments in Cahokia, then abandoned them, to see how a society can be built to resist such further authoritarianism.
DoE frames this view of anti-authoritarianism in the Three Freedoms. The freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to reorganize social relationships along new lines. The first is the most fundamental, underlying such post-modern futurist visions of freedom as the Archipelago and the Patchwork. As long as people are free to flee, building a new tyranny is impossible, people will simply leave. What if they had a pogrom and nobody showed up? The second is obvious, can people disobey orders given to them? What are the consequences of doing so? Interacting with the first freedom, can you just leave town if you don’t want to listen to orders, or will you be restrained? The third is more subtle: how can people change the organization of their social relationships? Are the hierarchies handed down to me, or can I build my own? Are we allowed to form our own religion, our own secret society, our own fan club, freedom of association? Can I marry who I choose, and structure that marriage how I choose? While the other freedoms are purely the freedom to assert oneself (to move under one’s own will, to act as one chooses) this freedom also involves a strange freedom: the freedom to submit. Am I free to bind myself to religious doctrines? Am I free to structure a covenant marriage? Am I free to run my family how I choose? Am I free to sign contracts to work as I see fit? By the very act of granting rights to parties that are irrevocable, modern governments impinge on the right to transform social relations: I have the freedom of association, but not to bind myself or others to promises beyond what the government chooses to recognize. Beyond that limit, all can escape.
Much of the work is devoted to examination of different bases of power, and how they interact in primitive societies. But one of the interesting insights is how, looking at societies that are seemingly on-the-verge of developing into more complex polities, there seem to be play-powers, carnival-kings whose power is temporary or farcical, and are obeyed with a giggle but have no real power. DoE compares this to play-farming, typical of hunter-gatherer cultures, who will often cultivate a plot for fun but not as a primary means of subsistence. The authors theorize that play-kings develop into real kings over time. But they also assert the importance of play-relations as a way to model, to experiment, to grow into new forms of real relations, an assertion of the third freedom. Play can be an important means of building civil society, of creating new forms.
In talking about the first freedom, DoE talks about the Clan system of Amerindian tribes. Each tribe contained a cross cutting system of Clans, within the Algonquin there were Bear, Wolf, Hawk clans and then among the Haudenausee there would equally be Bear, Wolf, Hawk clans, and so on in tribes across the plains to the canyons. The clan members were putatively all relatives of each, clan descent was matrilineal, and clan members must marry someone from another clan. Clan members owe each other hospitality, travel was facilitated across long distances. The authors note that much of the long distance travel and trade seems to be for fairly frivolous purposes, minor luxuries or curiosities rather than necessities. Much of the long distance trade and travel was itself play, a frivolous means of achieving status. But at the same time, the preservation of these networks of trade and travel enabled the freedom to move. It was impossible to tyrannize citizens when they have the option to move from place to place easily and freely. So while the networks may be frivolous in application, they have a serious impact. It's these kinds of cross-cutting identities that can offer freedom against the polity. The combination of all identities into a single coinciding nation-state is the opposite of this, a totalizing identity: an ethnic identity that coincides with a political monopoly on violence which coincides (often) with religious identities which coincides with linguistic identities. Maybe we need to disentangle the identities from each-other.
Think of all the ways that frivolous things can become serious. Everything I learned about leadership, I learned from either youth sports or the Boy Scouts. My wife and I use joking ironic pet names for each other, that slowly become the only names we refer to each other by, the sappy irony becomes sappy reality. We have seen “meme-magic” turn an ironic joke into a president, and then into a number of people who may or may not have been in on the jokes going to prison. On this very forum, I learned about the Doge system, and I really would consider implementing it in other organizations I am a part of in the future. The Nika riots are a great example of play civil society coming to the fore, albeit to a tragic conclusion. Much of the glue of civil society is in ball leagues, in reading clubs, in sewing circles.
This all reminded me of a quote from a Joseph Campbell lecture that has stuck with me for a long time:
There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as “play language,” asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, “I see that you have come to Tokyo,” one would express the observation by saying, “I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo”— the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game, freely and with ease. And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person, “I hear that your father has died,” you would say, rather, “I hear that your father has played at dying.” And now, I submit that this is truly a noble, really glorious way to approach life…That is the attitude designated by Nietzche as Amor fati, love of one’s fate.
The field of play can encompass everything in life, all the world’s a stage and whatnot, but it is also important to create fields of play to experiment, to create spaces of mastery in which to learn.
Which brings us back to the Pop Tarts Bowl. It’s comical, it is silly, it is a corporate goofball advertisement. But it can also be the start of a tradition. Maybe this is how traditions start, with something so ridiculously stupid that it captures the imagination. These kinds of imaginary games, ceremonies, meanings, can be used to start to build to cross-cutting identities that will help us imagine and reproduce a new universe of freedom, outside the modern totalizing worldview.
It’s important not to take things so seriously. Treat life as a game, and you’ll build something real.
Note: DoE dislikes the use of terms like “primitive.” For all the typical reasons of judgment etc. I still find it a useful conceptual anchor, and for lack of a better term that isn’t dripping with euphemistic political correctness I will use it here. I do not indicate, in general, that these are not sophisticated societies, or that they are not organized. The whole point of this is that they have political thought! But they don’t have the maxim gun, as it were.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
7d ago
Contra Nate Silver on Political IQ Tests OR On the Limits of Moneyball Philosophy
Nate Silver, on his new Substack argues that Sonia Sotomayor should retire, and that if you don't want her to retire you're a moron. Some pull quotes:
However, I’m going to be more blunt than any of them. If you’re someone who even vaguely cares about progressive political outcomes — someone who would rather not see a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court even if you don’t agree with liberals on every issue— you should want Sotomayor to retire and be replaced by a younger liberal justice. And — here’s the mean part — if you don’t want that, you deserve what you get.
...
In my forthcoming book, I go into a lot of detail about why the sorts of people who become interested in politics often have the opposite mentality of the world of high-stakes gamblers and risk-takers that the book describes. Both literal gambling like poker and professions that involve monetary risks like finance involve committing yourself to a probabilistic view of the world and seeking to maximize expected value. People who become interested in politics are usually interested for other reasons, by contrast. They think their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day. And sure, they care about winning. But winning competes against a lot of other considerations like maintaining group cohesion or one’s stature within the group.
Silver's core argument is that Sotomayor, at 70, is old; and according to models the Democrats are unlikely to control both of the Senate and Presidency in the near future, and that therefore Sotomayor should step down now when it might be possible for Biden, Schumer and co to replace her with another Democratic justice.
I find this take to be indicative of the flaws in Nate's own mindset, the Moneyball/Analytics/Sabermetrics venue that Nate comes from applied to politics, and to a certain extent to Rationalism more broadly, so I'd like to dig into why this is so wrong point by point. For the purposes of this argument, I am viewing this from the position of, as Silver defines it, a progressive or a "person interested in progressive outcomes" who would prefer liberal outcomes to SCOTUS cases. We will also assume that Sotomayor is a decent judge. It's not a particularly interesting argument if we argue that Sotomayor sucks, and anyway there's a point about that further down. I've loved Nate since his PECOTA days, I'm not reflexively anti-analytics, but it has to be balanced with humanity.
Much like the Moneyball Oakland As famously put together talented regular season teams that failed in the playoffs, Silver's approach to politics is about grabbing tactical victories, but will never deliver a championship. Sabermetrics types have long derided concepts like veteran leadership, man-management, The Will to Win, clutch play; we can't measure them on the numbers then they don't exist. Yet while analytics have value, so does traditional strategy, team variance isn't entirely random. Let's examine how some of this applies to politics here:
Flaw 1) What Gets Measured Gets Managed Silver builds a toy model, demonstrates that within his toy model SCOTUS seats are really valuable, then assesses possession of SCOTUS seats based on raw-count of votes by partisan appointment. This is an extremely limited view of what impact SCOTUS justices can have. Sotomayor is 70 years old. Going by most projections, she has about 16 years to go. There's some indications of poor health outcomes, balanced by the fact that she'll get top-tier medical care. For reference, Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect, and a long stint on the court. Clarence Thomas is another example of a justice who slowly came into his own, and in the last ten years (his age 65-75 seasons) has gone from punchline to influential intellectual force. SCOTUS justices take time to develop, both in terms of their intellectual impact and in terms of their relationships on the court. Replacing Sotomayor early may buy you a few extra years of a nominal democrat on the court, but it may cost you a more influential judge in the meantime. Silver, because his toy model can't account for jurisprudential influence, ignores all this. It's impossible to model, so it is ignored, or worse derided as fake and gay.
Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies. Silver's models predict that Democrats won't control the Senate for some time; that is within the power of the Democrats to change! Replacing Sotomayor because you likely won't control the Senate for another 16(!) years is like signing a high-priced closer to get a .500 baseball team an extra win, you still aren't making the playoffs. It also ignores history: the Senate has changed hands repeatedly, 8 times since 1980, or roughly once ever six years. If you start from the assumption that the Democratic message is basically unpopular in much of the country, such that they will never hold a Senate majority, then the Democratic party needs to rebuild from the ground up. Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland. If Democrats don't think they can win majorities, they shouldn't be Democrats, and shouldn't care about the SCOTUS majority. If you don't see a path to victory for your project, you need a new project. There's even a sort of "tanking" argument to be made that strategically, 6-3 and 7-2 aren't that different, so it doesn't matter if Sotomayor is replaced by an originalist, and it's politically better for Ds to face a brutally conservative SCOTUS, which might allow them to pass laws to bypass SCOTUS altogether, rather than a mildly less conservative SCOTUS. The only path to a liberal Majority on the SCOTUS is for Ds to win the Senate and the Presidency, repeatedly, they need to be working towards that goal, not maintaining their minority.
Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate. Sinema and Manchin wouldn't have it any other way, and no Rs have the guts to cross the aisle. If Sotomayor had the opportunity to retire with a 55 or 60 vote D majority, she could be assured of being replaced by a successor with a brilliant career ahead of him. If Sotomayor retires now, she's quite likely to be replaced by a third-rate non-entity. This is the Trump problem that made the original FiveThirtyEight blog unreadable since 2016: Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them. Sabermetrics treats the ballplayers like numbers, probabilities of outcomes at the plate, but in order for every MLB player to get to the bigs, to become those numbers, that player had to believe in himself. He had to work hard, thinking he could get better, thinking he could win, even if statistically he wasn't likely to. Nobody ever made it to The Show surrendering to the numbers.
This kind of short-sighted, analytical approach to politics, slicing and dicing demographics to achieve tactical victories, is the noise before defeat. We saw the flaws in this strategy in the Clinton campaign, and to a large extent in the Biden '20 campaign where Trump vastly over-performed his underlying numbers. We're watching Biden '24 sleepwalk towards a possible November defeat, relying on demographic numbers that seem increasingly out of date. And while it's not all Nate Silver's fault, this kind of sneering bullshit is what drives people away from politics. It drives away exactly the people you need: people who irrationally believe in your political project, and will sacrifice for its success. It points away from leadership and towards management. It undermines coalitions by making it obvious they are only ever conveniences. It is bad politics.
TLDR: Nate Silver thinks 70 is a good retirement age for Sotomayor because we might not see a Democratic Senate Majority again for a while, but if we can't get a D Senate for 16 more years, what's the point anyway?
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
-- Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows
Waiting for the cavalry to ride over the hill doesn't work if society has spent fifty years making sure no one like you learns how to ride a horse. Conservatives face the same problem when it comes to boycotting large companies that don't agree with their values. I started replying to @coffee below, where he wished that conservatives would launch a serious boycott in response to social media/tech companies targeting conservative viewpoints, the post expanded to the point where it felt like it ought to go separately to avoid jumping down anyone's throat.
Conservatives talking about launching mass boycotts of any company with liberal values immediately throws me back to Ferguson and over-exuberant BLM protestors shouting "They have guns, we have guns, let's do this!" "Have" and "Guns" being, here, relative values although superficially similar, it is rather important to note how many guns each side has and if they know how to use them. Just as I roll my eyes at antifa types claiming that they're ready for a violent revolution when the majority of their side steadfastly refuses to own or know how to use a firearm and the security services are on the other side; I giggle at Christian conservatives thinking they have the moxie to force a boycott on every industry with liberal values. Because every industry with liberal values is, at this point, virtually every industry that makes the world modern. There is no non-luddite path to an offensive boycott against liberal corporations; there are too many liberal corporations, and if any of the corporations tried to veer right-wing their employees are too left wing and would exit.
Call it the Long March through the Institutions and blame the enemy if you like; or note that Mao's physical Long March was a work, that Chiang Kai-Shek (foolishly, as it turned out) let it happen, practically escorted Mao out of town without too much of a fight or too many efforts to undermine Communist columns on the way. The supposed socialist Long March through the institutions has been mirrored, or exceeded by, a Republican Long Retreat from the Institutions; this started long before Rudi ever wrote about the Long March. God and Man at Yale came out in the fifties, when conservatives still dominated among college graduate voters and colleges were still seen as broadly conservative institutions. Republican skepticism of academic credentials and intellectuals dates at least back to Eisenhower as a political strategy; and accelerated under Bush II, culminating in the Palin nomination. What we see today is downstream of seventy years of anti-academy politics. Just as BLMers' desire to reform police departments will be futile as long as virtually no blue tribers want to become police officers; conservative efforts to reform the commanding heights of American culture will be futile when it is virtually impossible to assemble a critical mass of conservatives in important professions.
In the academy, Democrats are estimated to outnumber Republicans something like 12:1. While studies note that the concentration is highest in Northeastern elite colleges, those are also exactly the colleges that set the trends the rest follow. Is it any wonder that Democrats rack up ever larger leads among college graduate voters?
In the film industry, the biggest conservative political group "Friends of Abe" counted 2,500 members out of more than 300,000 workers in the film colony. And while I loved Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump and in CSI; he's like a C or a D list star. In the music industry, the vast majority of donations go to Democrats, with A-Listers like Bon Jovi and Springsteen and Jay Z shelling out for blues, while Reds get warmed up leftovers like Toby Keith and Ted Nugent. Overall, the entertainment industries shelled out 87% of their money to Dems in most cycles.
In the tech industry, the vast majority of donations from employees go to Dems. The FAANGs in particular all gave over 80% to Ds. Tech entrepeneurs aren't much redder than their employees as a class. Research scientists, somewhere between Academics and tech workers, also lean overwhelmingly left, with 80% Dem/Lean Dem as far back as the Bush admin.
The upshot of all this is that there is no critical mass of workers for red tribe coded projects in the commanding heights of American culture. As long as Blue tribe workers are sufficiently organized to do things like walk out to protest their corporate masters failing to take the correct positions, even a single CEO deciding to give it a try won't work. All the corporations will hold the line on blue tribe cultural values, because if they don't they'll lose their talent, and without talent they are nothing.
Consider the fix Ottowa found itself in from the trucker protests: tow truck operators turned out to be on the other team, and refused to tow protestors. Turned out, basically nobody on team blue knew how to drive a big rig. That control allowed the truckers to shut down a city, and force concessions; the government was forced to seek out blue coded allies (banks) to strike back.
Similarly, blue tribers dominate tech and culture to such an extent that red tribers will be perpetually unable to produce content that is nearly as good quality. As much as I might despise mainstream culture, there's a lot of craft and skill that goes into making a Marvel blockbuster, and it can't be knocked off by amateurs.* I don't know that you can make a Marvel type movie, a workmanlike blockbuster product, without a lot of blue tribers. As long as that is true, the theory that companies will fold to Red tribe boycotts because they don't want to lose 20% of their customers doesn't work, because a united blue tribe labor revolt will cost them 100% of their products. Disney might fear losing customers, but it is terrified of losing talent that it uses to produce products to sell around the globe. And the talent is much better organized than the customers will ever be.
If Red tribers want to play hardball, it must be on their own turf. I said I doubt a Marvel film could be made without blue tribers, I don't know that a cattle herd can make it to a farmer's market in NYC metro without a whole lot of red tribers. The Canadian truckers succeeded for a long stretch because there aren't blue tribe truckers to oppose them, there are a lot of industries in the USA that are the same. An energy strike would be fascinating, fine you want to decarbonize here we'll do it all tomorrow. Or a police strike. The reds are decades behind the blues in the organizational sense, but the second best time to plant a tree is today and all that jazz.
Simultaneously, conservatives need to be building institutions alongside and parallel to blue tribe dominated institutions, producing beautiful cultural content to compete on talent. If cultural production is denigrated as blue tribe, and no red tribers go into it, that's permanently ceding the field, slow suicide. Both compete on quality with blue tribe, and shifting paradigms away from blue tribe framing. But never attempting to stand up inferior red tribe knockoffs, like Turks I have a lot of thoughts on how that would work, but you've read enough of me for now.
TLDR: A conservative boycott of liberal companies would fail because in competitive industries the top talent is all blue tribe, or such a strong majority that it is doubtful red tribe talent can even man a ship together.
*Moreover, making conservative knock-offs of mainstream products has a strong Christian Rock problem. Christian Rock is bad because it affirms the dominance of the secular rock music paradigm.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
Is HBD the path forward?
I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question that has been bubbling whenever (racial) HBD comes up as a topic on this forum: do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?
Studies of the correlation between education levels that are clear indicators of IQ (ie, a Bachelor's or above) are scarce, possibly because it is almost impossible to actually study because the number of college graduates who actually commit crimes is so tiny as to be nonexistent. Lochner and Morretti found a 30% decrease in murder and assault rates for each additional year of schooling, and that increases in schooling after high school graduation had no discernable impact because the rate of incarceration had already bottomed out. I couldn't find actual data on the topic, but working backward prisoners appear to have less than 4% of the odds of having a Bachelor's compared to the general population.
HBD advocates like Charles Murray and Lee Kuan Yew have both talked about the effects of the Great Sort, that once meritocratic policies are implemented and a majority of working class students have the opportunity to advance through education, the remaining working class becomes increasingly composed of the less intelligent or less conscientious. LKY talks about how labor union leaders in Singapore were initially drawn directly from workers, but this became less practical in recent years because there was no one smart enough to take on a leadership role, so they brought in college educated labor professionals to lead. Murray discusses this as a central thesis of Coming Apart, where he discusses the decline in IQ among working class whites. My own father talks frequently about how when he was young, a lot of white contractors were smart guys who never thought about going to college or just took over the family business, where today young white contractors are dumber and lazier because any white kid who wanted to work and had half a brain got into college.
So if I want to avoid crime, why would I advocate for racial discrimination, and not for economic discrimination? Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race? Which is rather...what we have in our current Capitalist Hellscape, n'est pas? If you want to escape crime, have money. If you want to have money, have good genetics for intelligence and conscientiousness, work hard, and you'll get a job that will pay you enough to move into a restrictively zoned neighborhood where the criminally inclined will be kept out by high housing prices and lack of public transport.
Why do wignats who trumpet HBD findings convenient for them rail against "elites," elites who clearly have the better gene pool?
The political problem with true HBD, in the long run, is that very few people are located at its apex. If I accept its moral bases, I see no reason to help out people below me on its ladder, whether by skin color or by education. And most people are below someone.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I am fascinated that white Americans are so sissified in the face of this open bigotry. In many ways, their patience is Christ-like.
If White Americans are Christ-Like in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous (checks notes) Yahoo News articles...it's more Craig Christ than his brother Jesus. I'm sure everyone has seen most of this online dating data before, along with the income data, prison odds, marriage patterns, as long as you aren't poor or stupid or both {in which case there's a good chance I don't really care anyway} being white is awesome in America.
I get irrationally annoyed at white male grievance studies types who have fully internalized the minority narrative of oppression and try to apply it themselves. There is a substantive difference between my wife slapping me and me slapping my wife. The relative strength and power of the two actors changes the meaning. To pretend it doesn't is a sign that one simply doesn't understand the burdens of patriarchy, that one is substantively unprepared to be a paterfamilias. One who is so sissified that he must constantly bark his head off at every perceived slight isn't an alpha, he's a chihuahua who needs to prove how threatening he is.
To be young and smart and white and male in America is perhaps not to be born on second base and think you hit a double, but it is certainly coming into your at-bat with a 2-0 count and a runner in scoring position. If you can't convert, it's on you.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Bonfire of the Insecurities
Next week is the traditional moment for new starts, new resolutions, improving ourselves. Let’s take this moment going in to talk about all the weird little things we worry about in life. The nagging mosquitoes that prick at us when we aren’t aware. Admit, and exorcise.
— My wife is extremely successful, and I do all I can to support her, but I worry sometimes I’ll end up like a penny-ante version of one of those 19th century art adjacent women who get biographies in the NYT Book Review as the muse and aide to a famous artist but her own works are all lost. I love her for who she is and I’m proud of her and I want her to be great at what she does, but in some circles I’m already more Mrs. FiveHour’s husband, even if I’m equally professionally successful in my own circles. I worry how I will succeed as a husband without compromising my self-respect in the long term.
— I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none, and I worry that I’m wasting my potential at anything through a desire to be well rounded. In general my aspiration is to be Heinlein’s Competent Man, but what if I’m just making myself universally INcompetent? I can’t stand the idea of being bad at anything, and that might keep me from ever being great at anything.
— I want to spend more time with my parents, more time with close friends, more time by myself, more time with my wife, more time with my dog, more time traveling, more time at home. Somehow there’s never enough.
— What opportunities have I missed? What will I miss if I don’t wake up and smell the coffee?
These are all absurd and minor in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what I need to be honest and acknowledge before moving forward.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Affirmative Action and Helter Skelter: The through-line from Charlie Manson to the Woke White Liberal
Epistemic Status: stoned rant while half watching a Christmas movie. TLDR: Manson's insane racial theories were based on the prophecy of a great racial war, the whites would lose and be exterminated by the Blacks, the Blacks would find themselves incapable of ruling the world and pass power back to the surviving whites in the Manson family. Woke upper class whites who support affirmative action have the same beliefs, only instead of surviving in a giant underground city in Death Valley, they will hide behind wealth and class and ivory tower qualifications.
If you don't know the story of the Manson Family, I highly recommend Karina Longworth's podcast on the topic. It's very good, highly listenable, fairly objective, and gets into a lot of the cultural setting especially around Hollywood. If you want to hear the conspiracy takes, Chaos is extremely good and very extensive, but comes to no conclusions, even the author doesn't know what happened. (It also pairs well with Family of Secrets to follow JFK rabbit holes)
What a lot of people don't realize about Manson, that I think a study like Longworth's makes clear, is that Charles Manson's manipulations of the young women in the Family were mainly a witchy 60s psychedelic take on traditional mid-century Black pimping techniques. The kind of stuff Iceberg Slim wrote about, which is also a book I recommend. Manson manipulated young runaways into sleeping with who he told them to when he told them to, acquired male hangers-on by leveraging sexual access to his young female runaways. The male family members who worked and fought for him, drug suppliers who provided him with acid and speed, and rich men who provided him with housing and money and recording opportunities were all really just interested in fucking the Manson girls. A poorer, dirtier gentile Epstein with a guru bent.
Part of his act was this big Helter Skelter prophecy, much of which was a racial ideology that inherent white superiority will out. Manson, who spent much of his life in prisons and reform institutions, hated Blacks viscerally. He thought them animals, but physically superior and ferocious animals. The diminutive Manson was a frequent target of assaults and rapes in juvenile facilities as a teenager, many by Black inmates. He would famously carve a Swastika into his forehead, and join the Aryan Nation in prison after the Family trials; most thought this was a departure from popular portrayals as a peace and love hippy, but that kind of semi-mystical white supremacism was already the Family's ideological base.
Manson saw the racial conflicts of the 1960s and used that as the apocalypse that his followers would be protected from by following his teachings. He taught that a great racial war was coming, Helter Skelter, that the United States would break down into civil war over treatment of minorities, and that ultimately the militant Blacks would exterminate the white race, both the liberals and the conservatives. The only surviving whites would be the Manson Family, hidden in a bottomless pit/hidden city in Death Valley. The victorious Blacks would be unable to rule a sophisticated society without whites, and discovering the surviving whites they would gratefully pass power back to Manson and his followers, who would rule the new world. It was an insane fantasy, peddled to drug addled teenagers to explain why they should follow this shaggy ex-con who fed them acid and sodomized them. Whites were so superior to Blacks that even after the majority of Whites were exterminated, the handful of special white survivors would rule the world. Subtext: it is good that the Blacks will destroy all of white straight society for us, clearing out the dead wood so that we noble enlightened whites can rule. Stop me if this feels familiar.
A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harvard Law, like the Manson family, believes so firmly and mystically in his own superiority that no white loss in a racial conflict can rattle him. He believes in his superiority as a talented white kid as firmly as he believes in gravity. He is one of the Great and the Good, his talent got him here, giving tithes to those inferior to him will only enhance his stature. After all, if I'm a white kid with a 165 LSAT who can't get into a T14, every 160 LSAT Black kid who gets in is a spot that could have been mine, I coulda been a contenda if only things were different. But if I already got in, if I'm confident that my 179 LSAT is such that I always will get in to whatever I want, then I'd rather a less qualified kid got in than a more qualified one. If you're trying to get into a class of 800, ever non-merit spot is a spot you lose, I go from having 800 chances to get in to 600 chances to get in. If I'm already in a class of 800, every non-merit spot is a kid who isn't competing with me anymore for the top spot, I go from competing to be 1/800 to competing to be 1/600. Let the Blacks push out the whites and the Asians, the Blacks won't be able to compete with me anyway. If we're all at a firm together, my pedigree and my talent are worth more the fewer people exist with my pedigree and my talent. Affirmative action at top schools is a way to narrow the field of actual competitors from that school.
This is Manson warmed over, the parallels are striking, true white supremacy is the absolute faith that talent resides in the white and that talent will out, the beliefs that so many of my white classmates had after three beers. Let the race war happen, let the Blacks destroy the unenlightened whites, and at the end the enlightened whites will rule because they will be the only alternative left. This is woke racism, let less talented kids get in to competitive schools, it just makes the real spots that much more competitive. The more of the real competition is eliminated, the easier it will be for me. Rather than hiding in a bottomless pit in Death Valley, they believe they will hide in the ivory towers, too talented and too connected to be dislodged by unfair policies. Keep just enough of a meritocracy, and the really talented kids will succeed and have interest in changing the status quo to help those below them, and the less talented kids who fail under the fakakta meritocracy probably aren't talented enough to make a difference anyway. The great and the good will always be on the side of the status quo as long as the critical mass of talented kids are hoovered up.
They might find this strategy works less effectively than they think it will. Like Hezekiah in Isaiah 39:8, to whom in was prophesied that his sons would be eunuchs in a foreign court, and nonetheless replied that the Lord's prophecy was good for there would be "peace and truth in my days." Apres moi, le deluge. Their talent is less of a protection than they think it is. The affirmative action kids at my schools often blossomed just as well once they got there, the dirty secret isn't that AA lets in less talented kids, but that admissions criteria are mostly a farce anyway when it comes to real life talent. The white kids that got in are mostly just as good as the kids who didn't five years down the line.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
6mo ago
It's especially insane to me in that, if one were going to be racist against any group, Aboriginal Australians have the weakest arguments to make of maybe any ethnic group in the world. They have made virtually zero scientific, economic, cultural, sporting, artistic, political, military, domestic contributions to global culture.
I literally can't think of any other ethnicity, outside of super specific small groups, that I can't make a better argument for. Gypsy culture might be made up of criminals, but Django Reinhardt. We've seen the arguments against Jews and American Blacks rehashed a million times, but vast swathes of modern physics and literature and music and sport argues in their favor. Serbians can't have an independent country for thirty years without starting a war, but there's plenty of great Serbians. Even little Arab Palestine has given us the odd poet, or emigrant businessman or model.
What have Aboriginal Australians ever contributed? The digiridoo?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
So looks like I can review my prior thoughts on the PA statewide campaigns. Oz and Mastriano represented the two faces of Trump: celebrity crypto-moderate and blood-red culture warrior.
If Both win, then we're probably seeing a Red Wave, and Trump 2024 is a near certainty, because voters are embracing both the Christian Nationalist and Quack Celebrity Pseudo-Moderate strains. If Mastriano teaches Shapiro how to Dougie, but Oz quacks out against Fetterman, then it would seem that Trumpism has left behind the cable-tv popularity contests in favor of raw rightist culture warring, and if an anti-abortion extremist can win in PA then there may be hope for the pro-life movement nationally. If Oz beats up a stroke victim, but Mastriano loses to a Jewish government lawyer, then it would seem to indicate that Trumpian candidates are better off triangulating towards vague moderation than fighting for pure culture war idealism. If both lose, then the lesson would seem to be that only Trump is Trump, and other Republicans would do better not to try to follow him too closely.
Most of the results are in, and it looks like both lost pretty conclusively. I would frame that as a pretty conclusive rejection of Trumpism, lock stock and barrel. It's really tough for me, as a local Republican, to look at this and not think that McCormick would have taken this election walking away if he hadn't run against his own best attributes; and Bill McSwain probably puts up a stronger fight for Governor with policies that are sane instead of policies like Abolish Public Schools with No Plan to Replace Them. There was a Red Wave coming in to shore, but PA republican primary voters chose candidates who couldn't swim. We could have kept Toomey's seat, and chose not to; and at least avoided a gubernatorial candidate that was a massive anchor dragging everyone else down. This will probably cost the Rs a SCOTUS seat, and possibly more. The stink of Oz and Mastriano might waft on through 2024 if they aren't shuffled off stage fast enough.
It's possible to frame this as a relative "win" for the Oz wing of Trumpism, on the theory that Doug got blown the fuck out while Oz lost narrowly; Fetterman should be sending Mastriano flowers and taking him out to dinner for saving Fetterman's ass by encouraging D turnout. But the difference is more likely to be explained by differences in the quality of their opponents. Shapiro was popular, well known, moderate and ran a tight campaign. Fetterman was doing pretty well, right up until he went from looking like Gritty to sounding like Gritty, and he was always a more radical left wing candidate at a time of high inflation. That Oz couldn't beat out a stroke victim with a spending plan that makes Bernie look like Grover Norquist is a pretty conclusive nail in the Trumpian crypto-moderate coffin.
Given that PA is likely to remain a critical swing state in 2024, Republicans should be looking at this result when picking a presidential candidate and honing a strategy. Arguably Trump is already triangulating against the culture war end of the party, labeling his likely opponent "Ron DeSanctimonious." Desantis should note this as well, and aim to moderate on the culture war front in favor of competence and general good governance principles. And the Rs should strongly consider running a true moderate candidate, an R governor from a blue state, like Hogan or Phil Scott; if they feel Desantis already poisoned the well with his goofy-ass Disney fight and such.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
I don't have much else to add except that I was reading the WSJ today and several polls showed between 22% and 34% of Republican voters stating that a criminal conviction would disqualify Trump from office.
Huh? How snail-brained are 22-34% of these voters? Why would you care if he gets convicted?
I could understand saying a credible accusation is disqualifying. I could understand saying his behavior was disqualifying in and of itself. But why would you outsource your vote to the jury pool of Georgia?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
Both allege it happened in a secluded area. Why does Carroll get an $83 million payout for Trump saying she's a liar while Reade - doesn't?
I have to stop you there, Trump's alleged defamation was not a flat "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" or "It was consensual." The initial verdict was much, much lower; Trump manages to keep escalating it by continuing to deny the court's verdict in his inimitable manner. Trump will always strike me as an unlikely candidate to be railroaded simply because he could, so easily, avoid the railroading by simply choosing not to do the things he does. "I was acquainted with Ms. Carroll and thought we had a friendly relationship. It is unfortunate that she does not remember it the same way. I will continue to appeal the verdict." There goes your $83,000,000. Trump is trapped in a whirligig of his own creation.
That said, I weakly believe that both claims are more-likely-than-not true in a Rashomon sense of true: they reflect the internal experience of the women who made the claims. I strongly believe that neither claim ought to be justiciable, both because they are old and ought to be out of the SoL, and because as my evidence prof put it "Either Rape law is wrong or evidence law is wrong, but they can't both be correct." The standard of evidence demanded in rape law is so far below the standard demanded in virtually every other felony that the result is absurd, and we've already seen it used tyrannically against regime opponents.
Neither claim is provably true in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the accused. But neither is it provably untrue in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the women involved.
That said, I think you're going to end up just picking a fight here with the theory that:
Try, as far as you can, to put the background and any opinions you have on X versus Y out of your mind. Just go by the statements of what was accused and alleged and no interpretation "well of course A is the type to do this so B is telling the truth but C is not the type so D is lying".
Because now people are going to conceal that phase of their thinking. Or not. More likely, it seems that virtually everyone in a position of power (except Al Gore and his wife) are liable to become aggressive sexual deviants.
How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
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