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
1mo 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.
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.
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
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
14d 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?
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
4mo 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
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
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
3mo 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.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
5mo ago
https://www.thecut.com/article/gambling-addiction-casino-world.html
I saw this article this morning, with the online headline "My $5,000 Bender in Casino World"
And my reaction was... Befuddled. $5k? That's it? I'd be modestly interested in hearing a friend tell me about losing $5k gambling. But as the subject of a whole article? Come on. With inflation the way it is, I think you have to lose at least $30,000 before it's interesting. Listing $5k might hurt a lot of people, but the real problem was their prior destitution/poor decision making, not the $5k lost gambling. Just, like, get a job?
I had a similar reaction to would-be academic Kierkegaard's changing his name and moving country to dodge a $10k judgment. Come on, what formidable person can't just pay that off? Tighten your belt for six months and you should be fine.
Maybe it's just seeing the world through privilege, but I feel weird being asked to respect these people. It's an ethos argument: if you don't have your life organized such that you can handle a minor financial setback, you're not a substantial person.
What do you think is, in 2023 first world countries, a large enough financial loss to be interesting, or to force a life change on someone, for a person you would respect?
Relationship therapist Esther Perel has a famous line that "The victim of the affair isn't necessarily the victim of the marriage." In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage. For a variety of reasons, I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman. The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.
Rarely are divorces truly "out of nowhere," more normally divorce filings formalize the death of a marriage that has already broken down completely. Long processes of fights, counseling (secular or religious), compromises, deals, fights, betrayals, and failures precede the actual legal process. The actual filing often reflects a situation where there is no marriage going.
A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash. Absent any care for his wife's feelings, most men will have no real interest in doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.
In my own marriage (which is great and nowhere near divorce), my wife and I have a regular fight about chores that goes something like: she thinks I don't do enough chores around the house, I think that I would totally do them if she would stop doing them first. She's home more than I am for a variety of work reasons, and she has a lower tolerance for seeing dishes in the sink, for seeing a full laundry bin, etc. I'm at work later, left to my own devices I will happily spend a few hours doing all that, but I won't reflexively do it when I get home from work, while she will sit there during the day working and see the dishes and they will bug her and she'll do them.
Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.
Keep in mind that men typically control more of the finances. Both in terms of assets and income, and servicing debts and taxes. I would have vastly more ability to mess with marital assets than my wife would: I make more money, I know where the assets are, I would know how to move them around.
This is before we get into things like Exit Affairs, when an extramarital relationship is just a tripwire to make her file, or physical abuse.
So the dynamic is often that a man stops doing anything around the house, stops substantively being a husband, and then a wife files. So the decision these women are making when filing isn't "Happily Married Woman vs. Divorced Woman" it's "Abandoned, but legally married woman with no legal tools to control her spouse's use of marital assets, still expecting divorce vs. Divorced woman, with legal tools to control spouse's disposal of marital assets."
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
Line item veto.
It was briefly introduced in the 90s, but ultimately declared unconstitutional. It would be a method of breaking the "giant omnibus bill" system of government, by allowing the president to remove pork-belly spending at will. ((One proposal I've seen would restrict the veto to bills passed by a simple majority, bills passed by a two-thirds majority that would allow congress to overturn a veto would be immune from a line item veto, so if we really put together a compromise bill that has near unanimous congressional support it would be immune))
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
One of the most striking things reading Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, a history text on Asian immigration to the United States from the 1800s to 1980 or so, was that the first wave of Chinese immigrant laborers to the western continental US largely just...died out for lack of wives. Most of the early Chinese immigrants were men, who came over planning to earn money working on construction or mining or in service industries, earn money, and return to China or import a bride. While some brides were successfully imported through various means, the crackdown on Chinese immigration meant that vastly fewer brides ever made it over than were needed, and the realities of exploitation and debt left most Chinese laborers unable to afford to return to China successful. American women mostly disdained to marry Chinese men, for a variety of reasons, and interracial relationships were rare*.
As a result, most of these thousands of men lived out their lives in America and simply died, never having any long term romantic partners, only the occasional mining camp prostitute. An entire population and subculture, it existed and died out, failed to reproduce itself. Contemporary accounts and census figures back up that the Chinese population dipped for a period, before immigration resumed. Chinese-Americans who grew up during that period, the children of the handful of couples who successfully imported brides, report the shade-like presence of these aging men in the Chinese community, dozens of honorary uncles all childless and often filled with regret. White society barely noticed them: after all they didn't have any children or any power of money or language or politics. Politically, legally, and socially, it was possible to just eliminate these men from the "dating" pool.
Another anecdote, reading Lee Kuan Yew's From Third World to First at the moment, he talks about Singaporean students traveling overseas, and disproportionate numbers of Singaporean women bringing back foreign husbands. Talking to Singaporean friends of mine, they corroborated this: Singaporean girls who study in the US are more likely to stay in the USA, and more likely to marry an American either way. Singaporean boys are more likely to stay in Singapore or return to Singapore, because of the social privileges accorded to sons. College educated women find that Singaporean men mistreat them, they don't want a woman who is smarter than they are, they want a submissive wife; as a result women choose other options. Singapore's particularly bad gender balance, despite being a fully formed and wealthy state with sovereignty, is determined in part by this social reality. This is a problem that Singapore must combat to maintain its population. The way the country treats its women, and the way other countries treat their women, makes maintaining the culturally and intellectually open society that Singapore's success was built off of a direct trade against their gender ratio.
The striking point being that the gender balance is socially determined. Thousands of Chinese immigrant men weren't the victims of a gender imbalance per se, though at that time in the West there probably were factually too few women for the white population. Singapore's choices around foreign education weaken its gender balance because of fetishes formed ten thousand miles away. These thousands of men were marked for sad single ends because of a social construct around their race. Society chooses how to distribute women, not in a command economy sense necessarily, but in a broad preferences sense. No matter how bad the percentages are in aggregate, some men will be marked for success and others for failure.
Inasmuch as gender balance is a dial worth playing with, the obvious levers at the national level in a first world context to pull aren't killing off men. They are abortion and immigration. Sex selective abortion is a major issue among certain communities, and should be wildly illegal. In China the ratio of births is 120:100, in parts of India it is little better. While it is less common in the US as a whole, it does happen in some immigrant communities.
Open immigration policies equally lead to gender imbalances, immigrants are more likely to be men. Privilege female immigration significantly more highly, and it isn't hard to improve the balance quickly in the United States or the UK or France. Import Venezuelan or Burmese women by the boat load.
For that matter, first world men have the personal option under the current law to import wives quite easily. The fact that they don't is largely a social choice those men are making. They don't face a material gender imbalance, they choose to face one for the sake of social structures.
These social structures also probably have much more to do with your dating pool than do population level statistics. Middle class American men want equally middle class American wives, shunting aside the opportunity to date poorer or immigrant women. Men often want women less educated and successful than they are, leaving educated women on the shelf. Manage how your society treats women, and you will face fewer parents seeking to have sons instead, you will attract more women from abroad, matchmaking will be easier among your population on class/education/social bases. Social constrictions create the gender imbalance as experienced in day to day life, be ready to violate or manage them and much of the problems melt away.
So in the long run, I do not think we face terminal societal decline as a result of these problems. Historically, societies have dealt with worse, they simply sentence some men to misery, and because the kind of men who can't get a girl are disproportionately "losers" in other ways to begin with it doesn't tend to have much impact on history. The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves. The wealthy West, by comparison, is doing a great job. We don't need a war, we just need better marriage norms, and the courage to address our problems.
*Interesting contrast: Takaki talks about Filipino men being considered a crisis because they were TOO seductive, too smooth. Newspapers and politicians wrote screeds against the menace of Filipino men seducing white women. Takaki, of course, being an Asian and a liberal, is willing to say directly and quote sources that Filipino men were simply "great lovers" or "more attractive and stylish" or "more attentive" than white men; while he is totally unwilling to state that Chinese men died out because they were ugly or weren't great lovers, inasmuch as this was perceived it was the result of racism.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
Saltburn as a Critique of Privilege Discourse
Full of spoilers, just don’t read it if you plan to watch the movie later.
Saltburn is an excellent film in the Sex-Thriller Dark Academia vibe genre. Interestingly, for a movie where the protagonist engages in incest-adjacent homoerotic sex, fucks a grave, and hangs a lot of dong, it’s a deeply conservative movie in message. In my mind the philosophy of the film isn’t in Ollie’s speech about the rich “having no natural predators” and thus being vulnerable to attack by an upper middle class striver like Ollie. Rather, I think Farley’s monologue to Ollie earlier in the film, at the birthday party, when he tells Ollie:
Oh, Oliver. You'll never catch on. This place... (he gestures to the house) ... you know, it’s not for you. It is a fucking dream. It is an anecdote you’ll bore your fat kids with at Christmas... Oliver's Once-in-a-Lifetime, Hand job on a haybale, Golden, Big-boy Summer... And you'll cling onto it and comb over it and jerk off to it and you’ll wonder how you could ever, ever, ever, ever get it back. But you don't get it back... Because your summer's over. And so you, you catch a train to whatever creepy doll factory it is they make Olivers in. And I come back here...This isn't a dream to me. It’s my house.
The film is largely about celebrity and privilege discourses. Celebrity culture is of course most vicious in the British tabloids. Think of the life and death and afterlife of Princess Diana: made miserable and made immortal by gossip columnists, given power and forced to endure public ridicule, driven to death by the paparazzi only to become the subject of award winning books and films and prestige television decades after her death. We had to have her, desired her, wanted to be her, and we hated her and were jealous of her and felt she didn’t deserve what she had, and our hate and our adoration killed her, suffocated her, and once we’d driven her to death we fuck the grave, we masturbate over her remains, we always want to comb over the ashes again and again and make another retelling of Diana’s story. The same with Marilyn Monroe, with Brittney Spears, with Aaron Hernandez, with Mac Miller. We want to tear them down, we drive them to insanity, to death, and then we are left with the memories. We create these powerful celebrities, we worship them, we destroy them, and after they are destroyed we talk and talk and talk about them because they were the interesting thing. Philadelphia sports media worshipped Nick Sirrianni and Jalen Hurts when they were lucky, and they couldn’t wait to sharpen their knives to tear them down once they got unlucky. One of the most primitive urges, anthropologists theorize that the first kings were sacrificial, that the power of the king was in his extinguishment, as a scapegoat or as a victim.
Privilege discourse is the same. Ollie play-acts as impoverished, but he is upper middle class. Uses the mythology of struggle, uses a critique of his own class, as ammunition to get the attention of the true aristocrats. Ollie is a freshman at Oxford, from an upper middle class family, he has every opportunity to build himself a good life*. But as much as he attributes his success to his willingness to put in work, Ollie does all this to avoid working. He doesn’t want to build, he wants to be handed things, because he perceives other people having been handed things. He struggles not against oppression or misery, but against anyone anywhere having it better than him. Privilege discourse is all about the upper middle class, the college educated, critiquing those a little better off than they are. It is rooted not in oppression but in jealousy. The Marxist doesn’t seek to critique the rich for their existence, but for the oppression of the poor. Privilege discourse was built around critiquing the easy lives of the perceived favored races, rather than complaining about the oppression of the disfavored races. It’s not coincidence that it appeared as actual brutal repression started to slack, particularly for the ivory tower academics who wrote these papers. The shift from a dynamic of escaping a misery that one was forced into, to a dynamic of criticism, of jealousy of the perceived easy lives of others, has been the fuel for so much of the culture war. In a nod to Hlynka, the flavor of the discourse is visible in the Grievance Politics wings of both Tribes. So much of Red-Pill adjacent discourse is oriented around this idea that women live better lives than they deserve, not active bad things happening to men.
College students know the dynamic: the law school WoC Collective has ten members and nine of them are dating white guys. So much of racial discourse is bound up in [weird]( sexual tension. Even moreso among the queers, they want to destroy the straights even as they just after them. People who allow their lives to be consumed by hostility and jealousy, they want the target of their hatred, they want to be them, they can’t live without them. This extends to the phenomenon, in so many post-colonial countries, of National Liberation Parties that never move past their revolution. Revolutionary leaders, and their heirs, continue to dominate government decades after their putative victories. They dance, naked, in their conquered mansions; but they have nothing to give their people but reliving their golden summer of revolution. The populists demand entrance into the commanding heights of culture controlled by their enemies, but they can build nothing once they are there. The revolutionaries, the barbarians, can’t build, they are culturally sterile. They lust after those happier than they, they dream of tearing them down to earth, of taking away their unearned privileges. But hatred is all they have. They can’t build anything after they capture the world they lusted over, they can only dream of their victories in the culture war.
Jealousy is the core of privilege discourse, and of celebrity worship, and jealousy is ultimately sterile, it does not produce but only destroys. Farley’s prophecy to Ollie comes true darkly, not with Ollie being banished from Saltburn and living a middle class life where he still dreams of his hand job on a hay bale, instead with Ollie taking control of Saltburn and gaining nothing from it. His life will always be devoted to that one golden summer he was at Saltburn with Felix, no matter what else comes of it. That summer with Felix becomes the peak of his life, by his jealous obsession and efforts to destroy and steal it. At the end of the film he dances naked through the halls of Saltburn, is that nearly as satisfying as his one golden big boy summer? Ollie can’t produce the experience of Saltburn, he can only murder it, and then masturbate over its grave. This was the experience of the barbarians who conquered Rome: they could destroy Rome, but they could not reproduce it. Most of the Germans and Goths and Vandals who destroyed the Western Roman Empire first sought entry to Rome, sought to become part of the empire, to enjoy the wealth and grandeur that was Rome. They destroyed Rome, but they couldn’t live in it, because they couldn’t reproduce the institutions that built it and ran it. Cavafy writes:
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
...
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
The barbarians are a solution for the civilized, but so was Rome a solution to the barbarians. The existence of the barbarians in Cavafy gives the possibility for the people to see an apocolypse , to give up on working on their problems, to stop legislating, to just wait for the worst. But Rome was a solution to the Barbarians, it organized their society, it gave them something to strive for, to organize themselves towards, to pillage. The destruction of the Western Roman Empire wasn’t the glory of the conquering barbarians, it was their degeneration, their slow downfall into a morass of chaos.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
9mo ago
What strange, unique, personal, harmless design flaws does your body carry? On balance, looking around, I'm extremely satisfied with my body, but over time I've noticed...some minor problems.
-- My ears clog up with wax, any time I get a cold or my seasonal allergies act up. No method of removal solves it reliably other than using those drops from the drugstore several times.
-- I feel like I can't really spit with any velocity. Seriously, I don't get how people spit on other people to start a fight, any time I spit it just kinda...falls? I can't get much forward momentum on it. I guess I could spit on somebody's shoes if I leaned over, but that seems like a bad idea before a bar fight?
-- I have seriously flat feat, the "barefoot" shoe trend is great for me. I'm still frustrated that it's gone away, I basically buy Amazon knock-offs of shoes that Merrill and New Balance used to make. I see a shoe that promises arch support and I groan. Supposedly flat footed soldiers were once frowned upon or something? But idk why, other than shoe limitations I've never had a problem.
How about you?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
Elections are by their nature a contested environment not just between the individual candidates, but as Tom Scott touches upon in this video on electronic voting, between the candidates, their respective voters, and those administering the election. You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works. You need to understand that the purpose of an election is not to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and their voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. [some spelling corrections]
So one side gets a Heckler's Veto until they are convinced of the legitimacy of the election? If they're upset enough, then the government needs to alter procedures until they are satisfied? No evidence is required, merely a sense of disquiet among some portion of voters? What procedural changes would produce a "legitimate" election for those people?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
6mo ago
Reports emerging that the USA is "pressuring" Israel to have a fully developed exit plan before invading Gaza to which Netanyahu presumably replied "Leeeeeroooooy Jeeeeenkiiiiiiins."
NEW: The Biden administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flush out what its strategy is for the day after it completes its stated goal of eradicating Hamas in the ongoing Gaza war, a US and an Israeli official tell [The Times of Israel]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his inner circle have indicated to their Biden counterparts that Israel has not yet come up with such a strategy and instead are more focused on the immediate goal of removing Hamas from power in Gaza, the US official says. (2/4)
But the US official cautions against this approach, saying that devoid a strategy for who will control the Strip if and when Hamas is removed, IDF is more likely to get bogged down in Gaza indefinitely, despite Israel insisting that it does not want to re-occupy the enclave (3/4)
[] National Unity chair Benny Gantz and fellow faction member Gadi Eisenkot demanded the creation of a Gaza exit strategy a upon their entry into the government and that they have tasked a committee with drawing one up. (4/4)
Meanwhile Blinken has reportedly been meeting with the Israelis for 8 hours.
Speculation abounds that this indicates that US intelligence is finding out that things are much worse in Gaza than we realize. There is very little information coming out of Gaza right now. Journalism seems to be dead, it's a black box in there, and whatever reports we get later are going to be urban myths.
I wonder what all this will amount to. I doubt this will achieve any credibility with the Arab world for saving Arab lives, even if it works to do just that. If it doesn't work, no one in Israel will remember Blinken's advice when they're trapped in the quagmire.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
I agree with your points, and also with @2rafa about the course of the sexual revolution. But also:
-- If you're interested in the topic, I recommend the podcast You Must Remember This which did a long series on erotic films of the 80s and 90s, placing them in context and talking about the social movements around them. Karina Longworth always does a good job with the material, trigger warning for occasional performative woke acknowledgement if that kind of thing bothers you overly much. One of the things she highlights is the way that rating systems, censorship, the rise of home video, and pornography interacted to place different meanings on ratings. There was a time when X and NC-17 were legitimate ratings that indicated a real film intended for adults, both slowly succumbed to being viewed as porn. It used to be that a film (often a sexual thriller from overseas) marketed as NC17 would be a hit, all the adults would go see it. Now that is hard to imagine.
-- I theorize the rise of internet pornography has made viewing sexually arousing material outside of privately hunched over a laptop seem perverted, even homosexual, to a modern audience. Even as barely-pubescent teen I caught the tail end of the "finding a foreign movie my parent's didn't know had tits on video" cultural moment. I remember watching stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien with my buddies because there were naked girls in it, I don't think we understood anything about the movie. Once internet porn became practical with DSL, I don't think anyone did that, watching something became a purely private endeavor. Decades earlier, porn theatres existed, where men would congregate to watch porn. The idea of going to a theater to see a movie with a heavily arousing tilt strikes me as strange, if I went to the movies without my wife it might even feel kind of gay to be in a theater full of other dudes also getting aroused. Everyone is a goon-er now, but everyone hides it, that's for your home, not for the big screen, or even for watching with family.
-- Don't underestimate the degree to which one work can ruin an entire genre convention. Don Quixote killed the chivalrous romance. The Daniel Craig Bond Films were so dark and serious because Austin Powers was absolutely huge right before they were made, and everyone on set was conscious of the fact that they couldn't do a sex scene without the entire audience giggling and someone shouting "Do I make you horny baby? Yeah! Shag now or shag later?" at the screen. Today Austin Powers is almost forgotten, but in 2006 it was totally unavoidable if you were making a spy film. An effective parody can kill a genre. So can self-parody. Game of Thrones did the whole obligatory sex-scene thing to death, and then completely self-immolated in the final season. The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale. RE: Dune upthread; GRRM ripped Herbert off pretty directly in using scenes like "bring me a child prostitute to torture" as establishing bad guy credentials, but GRRM abused it and HBO beat it to death on camera, so while in the novel having Vlad torture-fuck-murder child slaves seemed edgy, in the film it would seem derivative (of the thing that was itself Derivative from the book). As with how the Bond films are still working in the shadow of Austin Powers long after we've forgotten Austin Powers, GoT has now been lame for five years, we forget just how bad the Finale was, and just how much prestige and power was lent to the show leading into the finale, how excited everyone was for what the Extended Universe would produce next, and what a complete fucking letdown the whole thing was. But in 2020 when the first Dune film came out, they had to avoid all association with GoT it was overplayed and toxic. That kind of influence can really carry, and can make a scene unshootable for decades at a time.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
These two aren't necessarily small-scale, but they are relatively compact by conspiracy standards (ie, they could be true while the rest of the world is still basically Blue Pilled)
-- Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were a work. Snowden is a deep-state public Kamikaze, by revealing that the government was doing something hard that the NSA was bad at doing (finding target communications in the haystack that is general communications streams), no self-respecting terrorist or spy or drug lord would use the public channels that the NSA is known to be monitoring. Then the terrorists all download the "encrypted" supposedly secure apps...which the NSA either puts out itself, or has a backdoor into, or just finds it easier to monitor who is using the secure apps than it was to go through all the insecure communications. So they set up this big scary leak that publicized it better than any other effort possibly could.
-- Affirmative Action is not primarily targeted at increasing diversity or reparations or whatever the fuck. It serves the primary purpose of stripping the Talented Tenth from URM communities, preventing those communities from ever really improving or forming alternate cultural power bases. If you're a fairly high-iq, conscientious, young Black or Hispanic male, and your choices are between starting a business in your (normally shitty) community or going to Harvard, which are you gonna pick? And a community needs smart and talented men to make the (normally stupid) decision to start a business. Charles Murray has written a lot about the Big Sort of High IQ individuals as a result of educational/professional meritocracy and the negative effect that can have on community; but think about it, it is so much sharper for Black students.
These are much smaller
-- Elevator buttons do nothing. The door doesn't close any faster if you press the button but it gives you something to do.
-- The Bachelor Season 25 producers removed a contestant from the show and edited her out of the earlier episodes in post production. Either because she got Covid, literally died, or did something so horrible that it couldn't be associated with the show at all.
-- Trump 100% originally ran for President on a dare from Bill Clinton. It was supposed to be a joke run to weaken JEB! and Ted Cruz and soften them up for HRC in the general, then he got there and thought huh maybe I can win the damn thing. None of the principals involved can admit to it after it went the way it did.
-- Significant portions of accepted history are misinterpreted fiction, and we have no way of proving which are which.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
10mo ago
For instance, this seems relevant if true.
Yeah. I'd say so. Thank you for including that article. Given what was presented in the article by the prosecution, there is no reason to feel that juries are systematically stanning for Black victims or defendants. That was his headline case, it's shit, I can dismiss the whole argument. To say nothing of his misuse of the word Systemic, if the Right starts redefining words the same way the Left does, we're fucked.
In general the law frowns on jumping from fists to guns as proportional escalation. Getting punched does not entitle you to shoot. This is actually a fairly old-fashioned remnant of an era of masculinity, today violence is treated as an on/off switch, and in that environment it seems totally rational to chickenhawks to say "Well getting punched by a Black man is like, totally super scary and he felt threatened!" When the rational response there, given that he was not restrained from retreating in any way, was to walk away and call the cops.
The "gang sign" and "he said he was from California" bit is also pretty hilarious. Are gang hand signs even a real thing?
To say nothing of carrying concealed in a bar being, on net, a bad idea for this exact reason.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
In terms of small cars, Japanese automakers have been beating Detroit for decades. For luxury vehicles, Germany has worldwide dominance. That leaves only light trucks and SUV's, where Detroit still performs well only due to tariffs. We've sort of forgotten about Detroit since 2008. The perception is that things were bad for awhile, but then the automakers got bailed out and they're okay now, especially #girlboss CEO Mary Barra.
I don't think that is the perception, but I guess it must be yours, because it misses a yuge number of developments since then.
Detroit won't be competing with any $10,000 import hatchback, because they don't even make anything small anymore. Ford literally makes nothing in a sedan or coupe except the Mustang. GM still makes the Malibu, for some bizarre reason, and a couple Cadillac also-rans. Ford, GM, and Chrysler spent decades trying to make a family sedan to compete with the Camry and the Accord, and failed completely. They never managed to produce a car that matched the Camry and Accord in quality, reliability, or features. Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.
At the same time, Ford and GM poured billions into Lincoln and Cadillac over the years, trying to develop luxury brands that would go blow-for-blow with the Germans. They failed, spectacularly, over and over, then landed ass-backwards on a successful luxury branding with the top trim six figure pickup truck. The only American car company to successfully build a luxury sedan to compete with the Germans is Tesla.
Luckily, fat American tastes run towards unnecessarily large pickups and SUVs. But for the $10k import hatchback, the question quickly becomes: what used car are you competing against for $10k? Prior recent efforts at bottom-tier economy cars have largely failed in the USA because of the increasingly quality and survival of used cars, which for various reasons are less of an issue in other markets. The average car on the road is entering its second year of middle school. Will people purchase a Chinese car new over an older Escape or Rav4? Time will tell.
Tesla's success can largely be attributed to building EVs as status symbols, EVs that were functionally superior to every ICE car on the road, looking great and blowing them out of the water on acceleration, silent and potent. Tiny EV penalty boxes have failed over and over, because they deliver a worse experience than an equivalent ICE car. Maybe Chinese manufacturing will solve that problem.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
Thoughts on Consumption, Ethical and Otherwise
TLDR: As costs have changed with automation/globalization/etc the status implications attached to items or forms of consumption have changed, despite the costs reflecting less or even opposite directions of status. Why have the implications persisted beyond the mechanical reasons for it?
A discussion elsewhere since lost, and that acid-trip TEMU ad at the Super Bowl, had me thinking about a statistic I saw in a WSJ article that has really stuck with me.
American’s average spending on apparel has declined from 14% of expenditures in 1901 to 10% in 1960 to 4% in 2002. For the most part, we can see that as early industrialization in 1901, when many things were still tailored, to full factory industrialization in 1960, to early globalization in 2002. In 2023, with full globalization, expenditure on clothing declined all the way to 2%.*
My wife and I are probably a little fancier and more enthusiastic about clothing than the average on the Motte, if asked I would say that I spend more on clothing than I need to and own too much and too expensive of clothing, but we were absolutely blown away by the idea of spending 10% of our annual income on clothing. We agreed that we could probably do it, and have fun doing so!, for one or maybe two years, but after that the budget that would create would just be insane. The idea, as an upper-middle class professional couple, of spending something like $30k-$40k on clothing per year every year is insanity! Buying the best and starting with nothing, I don’t really see how a man in my position could spend more than $10k on clothing, once, with less than $1k/yr spending after that to maintain/freshen, unless one gets deep into really truly strange and expensive frivolities. Yet we still talk about clothing items as status symbols in the same way, despite clothing making up a decreasing percentage of spending, despite the obvious fact that if a lower income American spent like a 1960 American they could easily afford to look like a modern upper class American. Clothing just isn’t actually expensive anymore.
And this got me thinking of how many status symbols have changed so thoroughly in their cost, while remaining essentially the same in their perception. I own a 25 year old BMW 3 Series, which had a $27,000 msrp when new, which I like driving around casually; I also have a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche which I drive for work, which had an MSRP of $48,000 new. ((For those of you following along at home, I never got around to actually buying a new-er manual car to replace it)) Persistently, people will give me “rich kid” jokes about the BMW, while the Chevy is treated as working class. Not only that, guys driving new pickups that retail north of $60k will give me the same guff about the BMW! The branding still gives credibility or prestige, even long after the relationship of cost has evaporated or reversed. Small “sporty” BMW = rich, pickup truck = blue collar.
I’m utterly confused as to how people around me spend their money, and I’m fairly certain they are equally confused by how I spend mine. I have friends with similar incomes to mine, who are in credit card debt, but also don’t have the things I would expect a person with my income who is also in credit card debt to have. The money seems to evaporate into nights out, travel, concerts, and house renovations. They look at things I “waste" money on, and I can’t say they don’t have a point: I could probably reduce my clothing budget significantly, I own too much expensive assorted strength training and fitness crap, I could reduce my grocery/food budget considerably if I cooked more from scratch. But then I equally look at their spending, and they invite me to go on a trip, or out to a bar, and I look at the price and say I’m not spending $2k on travel, or $100 on a night out. Though I’ll equally admit that my own travel habits are extremely cheap, and my own tastes in food and especially alcohol relatively light and plebeian.
We’re factually in the same social class, we make similar money in similar positions, but our consumption patterns are different. And what fascinates me is that one set of consumption patterns is judged as normal, even blue collar, while another is judged as fancy, bougie, aristocratic. And the meanings of these symbols of upper-class taste have endured beyond and transcended the actual cost-balance of the activities. The expensive microbrewery play-acts as industrial space. Expensive travel is normal, even treated as normative. Housing, education, healthcare are ruinously expensive but treated as normal, invisible even. I’m not sure I know who is right and who is wrong, or even if someone is right or wrong, in terms of what form of spending will lead to The Good Life. But I’m sure we’re both going wrong in reading into status symbols in the way people once did, when the meanings are so twisted and confused.
I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.
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:
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:
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.
More options
Context Copy link