FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
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FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9mo ago
What does an Alabama Sorority Sister Consider an Ordered Sexuality?
My wife recently got into Substack and sent me this series covering Alabama Greek Life, particularly the famous #RushTok phenomenon of girls at the University of Alabama on tiktok. My wife followed #rushtok for a while, it’s a popular story among women. The substack piece is great, I highly recommend the whole series for a view of things we, uh, don’t get around here. I'm probably putting together a whole-'nother top level post about the other major thread in the series later. Some highlights working towards a core question I'm left with:
What is Rush and RushTok?
I’m sure most people here are familiar with the concept of Rushing and Pledging a fraternity or sorority, I myself have a family tradition of pledging a frat freshman year and getting in and then quitting immediately because it sucks (or because the men in my family are congenitally weird). The University of Alabama is a school with a very high development and prominence of Greek Life in the classical sense, which has become a national symbol for a kind of throwback Greek Life nationally.
In short: Rushtok is a genre of TikTok videos that includes women who are going through rush (also known as PNMs, or Potential New Members) and videos made by the sorority members themselves. Rushtok first took off in 2020, which is why people refer to this iteration as “Season Three.” Since that first year, the organization that governs rush (Panhellenic, or Panhell) has issued guidelines on the type of videos that PNMs can make (#OOTDs, aka Outfits Of The Day, and commentary that says nothing about the houses themselves or their specific experiences with them).
Why do they want to do this, this sounds horrible? The first and most obvious reason — even to the women themselves — is social structure and friendship. A lot of them talk about their desire for “sisters” in their videos in ways that sound pretty hollow, but friendship is what they’re grasping for: a network of friends and community and a path forward through the maze of college. That’s why I was convinced to rush as a Greek-system-resistant freshman at a liberal arts college, and I’ve long heard the advice to undergraduates (particularly at big state schools) that joining the Greek system is your way to get “plugged in” at school (as opposed to finding yourself lonely and lost in a faraway dorm or apartment off-campus). Obviously there are SO MANY ways to get “plugged in” to college life, but the Greek system is the cheat code. Before school even starts, you have somewhere between 100 and 400 “friends,” or at least people who will do things with you, tell you where the parties are and what time you should show up to them — and orient you to the campus, class, help figure out study groups, have people who can talk to you about what professors to seek out or avoid, etc. etc.
My wife and her friends love it. You get this look into the cool girls, and they have this guide aspect to it, very The Official Preppy Handbook for Gen Z. There’s always been an appeal to media that offers a direct guide to how a subculture works. Especially a subculture it is easy to fantasize about; women fantasize about being the hot sorority girl the same way men will fantasize about joining the Rangers. There’s something fascinating about the social Hell Week of getting a bid, the same way there is a fascination to the Seals Hell Week workouts. If you want to get a bid from the good sororities, you wear these sneakers and you buy this bag and you do your hair like this, and you never say that. There’s an entire culture to it, and you can see the impact it has in fashion trends:
What do you need to fit in?
Like so many processes that determine social order, there are written and unwritten rules — and various means that people pass down the knowledge that make it easier to abide by both. The most obvious is a handy guide published by the university every year called “Greek Chic,” which walks girls through the intricate Rush process. The Table of Contents spans everything from “Summer Dos and Don’ts” to a day-by-day breakdown of how Rush unfolds.
The aspirational standards at BamaRush this year are pretty similar to what they’ve been for the last few years: white (we’ll get to that); tan; long, straightened hair with waves; thin; significant amounts of makeup; short dresses with overly feminine features (big ruffles, structured poof sleeves ); and extensive jewelry, including multiple bracelets and rings. The deviations from that norm (in size, in skin color, in dress choice, in hair texture) are so remarkable as to single the girls out for Tiktok stardom. See: the two ‘stars’ of this year’s rush, Bama Morgan and Bella Grace. Both are aspiring for the norm in different ways (Morgan straightening her hair, Bella Grace’s dresses) but can’t quite fit in (for reasons of personality and perceived class). They mirror what so many of us, particularly those of us many years distant from our 17 and 18-year-old selves, understand as the building blocks of a good person and good human: individuality, personality, kindness, and humor….instead of looks, body size, wealth. (More on Morgan and her rush experience below)
And for girls outside of Alabama, there are two primary resources: TikTok and The Pants Store. If you drive from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa, you’ll first encounter the Pants Store via a massive billboard. Originally the pants store sold, well, pants. Mostly men’s. But now it’s an Alabama institution, and it specializes in whatever the college kids want: Hokas, Yeti mini-coolers, and walls upon walls of whatever’s the “right” thing to wear for Rush that year. The manager at the Pants Store told me that so many girls from out of state would come in before Rush asking questions about what they should buy that the company decided to come up with a full-color cheat sheet to help them shop...this place is basically the “Rush uniform store” — lots of “ruffles and flouncy stuff and bright pink and bubblegum pastel colors and sparkles,” which is exactly what the sororities are looking for. (And relatively modest: another sorority member told me the best look is your absolute cutest dress you’d still wear to Easter Sunday)
“I feel like there are definitely Bama/Southern trends observed in Rushtok, but there are Gen-Z trends that get characterized as Bama/Southern because they are different from what millennials and older expect,” they told me. “The commentary skews towards characterizing certain shows of wealth as inherently southern when I can name six girls between DC, NYC, an MN that are wearing fake designer or Cartier bracelets right now. Things are happening on a different scale for sure, but so much of it is the consumerism inherent to growing up with a curated profile. Every girl I know is performing femininity or consciously Not Performing (which is to perform) on IG/Tiktok and — and Tumblr when we were younger still. Like I have been visible on some scale since I was 13 and I will continue to be so and so everyone who meets me can see who I was and who I am and who I will be, which leads to such unique image curation on social media culminating in very performative ‘I own this’ signaling item…..and then boom, Golden Gooses for the South.” (Golden Gooses, by the way, are shoes that are $600-900+ and look like purposefully dirtied up Converse — and a current staple of RushTok)
I’ve seen the Golden Goose store at the KoP mall, and holy shit I felt old finding out those were a trend for rich sorority girls, and watching the storefront crawl with ABG shoppers coming out with bags of multiple pairs. What the fuck man? They look like converse purchased by some artsy middle schooler and painted with Sharpies for fun. It’s a pure Veblen good. Obviously it indicates that you’re spending Daddy’s money to fit in, that being one of the prime values of any Sorority...
While lots of people who attend the University of Alabama don’t come from money, most people in the Greek System do — some from regular upper middle-class money, some come from “American Gentry”-style small town families (think: Dad owns the biggest car dealer) and some come from the Chicago suburbs, Orange County, and New Jersey. One day on Greek Row I counted at least eight Jeep Wranglers just from where I was standing. One student told me the real car of choice amongst the Zetas is the Mercedes Benz G Wagon, which run upwards of $140,000. Driving those cars doesn’t necessarily mean you’re filthy rich, but it does mean you want to convey a certain level of wealth.
Kylan came to Bama for the same reason so many beauty queens do: because they match pageant scholarship dollars, and over her decade plus of competing in pageants, Kylan had amassed a sizable fund. Alabama is one of the only major universities that offers this match, but it’s honestly a brilliant recruiting strategy. How do you get more traditionally beautiful, academically invested, proficient public speakers to come to your school? Recruit them where (many) of them gather: on the pageant circuit.
Can’t emphasize enough how smart it is to literally dedicate effort to recruiting professionally hot teenage girls to come to your school, in the process producing a viral online content farm, which recruits more students. Alabama is going to be a top university within a generation just by being less aggressively abnormal than the old Ivy adjacents. I’m always amazed that Jeep has never built a more practical Wrangler clone, like the old Jeepster, the Wrangler has been perpetually popular as an SUV that is also a fun convertible, but it has wildly bad ergonomics, handling, and efficiency as a result of building it for off-road chops that the majority of buyers don’t need. The styling and the convertible top could easily be put in a smaller, unibody-AWD, practical package for the mall crawler crowd, sold at a lower but still premium price, and clean up. Ok, you’ve piled your Sororstitute outfits into your Jeep Wrangler and arrive on campus, what next?
Trust the Process
On a very basic level: Alabama’s sorority Rush is broken into multiple rounds over nine (very long) days. At the end of each day, students rank the sororities they’ve seen, and the sororities rank the students. The next day, you spend time at the houses you picked that also picked you. The process is repeated after each round, getting more and more exclusive, with fewer and fewer people invited back. Once you’re out — meaning, you have no matches — you’re out, with no recourse and no do-overs. As a result, each of these nine days — and each interaction with each sorority girl at each of these houses — is crucial. Until finally, at the end of it all, if you’ve made it that far, you find out which (if any) sorority has offered you a “bid” to join.
In practice, that means that a whole bunch of prospective new members have “recommendations” written by the friend of a friend who works with their dad. They’re not recommendations so much as evidence of social capital: that your parents are connected to people who were in Greek organizations, which is to say, that they occupy a certain place within the social hierarchy. And if you didn’t grow up in one of those places, and realize that you have absolutely no idea how to play this game with all these unwritten rules, but you really, really still want to….well, then you hire a Rush consultant.
A consultant? To help your daughter get in? More of daddy’s money, but why on earth does daddy agree?
This a carefully planned process. The ignorant might not realize it, but the in crowd knows it. Before you arrive they know who you are and what they want from you. And this is where the Sorority vision of femininity becomes so interesting to me:
What is the Sorority view of Ordered Human Sexuality?
[K]now that by this point (if not before!) all your social media profiles should be totally scrubbed of anything even resembling “bad” behavior. No visible drunkenness, no red solo cups, no cigarettes, no super revealing outfits, no thirst traps, maybe not even any bikinis, depending on the sorority you’re looking for. Oh, and probably no political content — although a little Jesus never hurt. One woman told me that she’d be advised to scrub her Venmo. (And if you think that you can just set your profile to private, wrong again: active members will start friend requesting you… and screenshots of locked accounts circulate freely.)
Why do they call their dresses “cute little dresses? Diminutive is feminine — and also the opposite of sexy, which is not the image you’re trying to exude during rush. (There’s a bit of a virgin/whore dynamic going on — rush dresses are, in many ways, “church dresses,” which are a contrast to the “going out” dress you wear when interacting with fraternities and under the male gaze)
My understanding is that there are queer out women in a lot of the sororities at Bama, and, well, there’s a lot of gay sex in the fraternities. A cis-gendered femme queer person would theoretically do just fine in rush if they had a hetero-seeming social presence, since discussion of the three Bs (booze, bars, boys) is strictly forbidden (and, by extension, any discussion of romantic relationships). For instance, as a PNM (Potential New Member), it seemed like people were just randomly approaching her and starting conversations when she visited the houses. “Once I was on the other side,” she explained, “I realized how strategic this meeting of people was.” Strategic is an understatement here. It's maybe more like... a very precisely choreographed and potentially creepy performance. She was now judging strangers on whether or not they had some magical combination of Alpha Chi traits: A smart girl, a Christian girl, a pretty but not in a slutty way girl, a girl who gives back.
But not all of the other actives approached ratings the same way. One moment really stuck with her: a girl was dropped from Alpha Chi because of nude photos — which had almost certainly been leaked by an ex-boyfriend. “I remember being appalled by that,” Emie said. “To write off a teenage girl for sending a picture to someone she obviously trusted, who then shared it was so awful to me. And it was just common practice.”
So don’t be too slutty. You must be hot, but don’t be provocative. Traditional femininity, but you have to be sexy. Not too sexy though. And for gooness sake, you can't be sexually available, forget it then. But you have to be friendly to the right guys or you're useless to us, we need you to turn it on for them to preserve our status. Ok, we’ve got it down, but then later in the series when discussing fraternities we see:
Step three is attending a “swap” party with a sorority, where the super drunk pledges are paired with sorority pledges. “In some cases,” Luke said, “a pledge might be like implored” (not forced, Luke clarified for me, but implored) “to like slap a girl on the ass or motor boat her.” That amount of alcohol over such a short period of time is a disaster waiting to happen — for the guys, but also for the women. They’re not allowed to bring alcohol on sorority premises. But they, too, often join the Greek system for the party life, which means that they’re left trying to circumvent these rules, either by sneaking in liquor and taking a whole bunch of shots in quick succession before heading to an event. Or, in order to drink, they have to depend entirely on the fraternities to supply it. Which means that they’re drunk on guys’ home turf, in cavernous fraternity houses that are unfamiliar to them — spaces where the guys are treated like unaccountable monarchs. And if you’ve just done some shots before walking out the door, the effects are probably kicking in just as you arrive at the party.
And the girls report:
“Fraternity boys in general scared me,” said Emie Garrett, who we heard from back in the first article. Before attending her first fraternity party, Emie had it drilled into her: Never leave your drink with anybody. Watch the bartender make it. Emie says girls were taught to keep their hand over the top of their drinks at parties. Of course, a lot of this advice goes out the window once you show up to a party, a little tipsy, with a bunch of jacked dudes shouting at you to do shots. “I just had so many friends who were roofied by guys that they trusted,” Emie said. It never happened to her. But other girls told her about experiences where they blacked out on a night when they didn't drink much or woke up somewhere with no memory of getting there. They’d make excuses for the guys: I'm the one that went there. I’m the one that drank it or did whatever drugs. They’d brush it off, make a joke of it. Reporting it never even entered the conversation.
Most of the sorority women I spoke to voiced something similar. They’d sat in their houses and watched the presentations on how to report a sexual assault, and how to get someone out of a vulnerable situation — as if they were soldiers, readying for war. Then there were the meetings after the parties — the ones where Emie saw sisters get dragged into hearings over pictures they posted online where they looked too drunk or were too provocative. “It’s like female sexuality that they were policing,” she said. So many women have internalized the idea that if something happened at a fraternity house, it was their fault for putting themselves in the situation. And they knew — by watching others — what usually happened when you tried to speak out about it. And it was usually nothing but embarrassment and shame.
Now it should be noted here that while there’s a constant panic about college sexual assault, women who are in college are less likely to be sexually assaulted than women the same age who aren’t in college. This does not mean that sexual assault isn’t a problem, but it does mean that we need to question the degree of causation between the circumstances of colleges and frat parties and sexual assault. To some extent our panic over frat party assaults is classist: an assumption that the "good girls" shouldn't be subject to this kind of treatment.
But still, the questions rise in my mind. The core values of UA trad families that want to put their girls in a sorority are conservative in the Country Music sense of conservative, and one of the things you see over and over in country music is being terrified of your daughter’s sexuality. (The offensively, vomit-inducing, treacly modern version which I truly can’t stand on the radio) But these sororities are family traditions, and as everyone emphasizes over and over most of their families were involved with Alabama Greek Life. I’d expect most of them to agree with my father, who advised my sister that who she married would be the most important decision she ever made in her life. I’d expect an outwardly patriarchal organization like Alabama Greek Life to agree broadly that women will ultimately be going to UA as much for an MrS as a BA degree, and that the former is as or more important than the latter to a woman’s life. How does joining a sorority help the modal sorority achieve that goal in a fulfilling way? I strongly suspect that the moms and the executive board would say that the ideal Alpha Chi girl should be modest and chaste, meet a nice high quality guy (presumably in a top frat at UA), and marry him. Certainly shouldn’t be having sex outside of a “committed relationship” monogamously, certainly never hook up. But then the dissonance with the party attitude of the sororities, and their subservient role to the fraternities, which is a kind of deranged and degenerate form of patriarchy by which the highest quality women are treated the worst. Why is some Alabama dad paying thousands of dollars to a consultant to help his daughter get assaulted at a frat party?
So I would love to see an interview with the kinds of moms that are still involved in alumni orgs, that encourage their own daughters to join these orgs, or with the social chairs of the current Sororities, about what they view as the optimal romantic life of an Alpha Chi girl. And how is what they do helping the girls to achieve that? Because you look at all their public marketing, and then you look at what they do, and it doesn’t line up. It’s not like their moms or aunts went to school in 1908, even a mother who had her now-UA-frosh daughter at 30 would have herself been at UA in the mid-90s, hardly a time of strict morality. It’s not like the parents are under the impression that their girls are going to a Christian summer camp here.
Now possibly the blackpill answer is that the risk is inevitable, so it washes out. The baseline risk at a frat party isn’t any higher, and may be lower, than it would be if she didn’t join greek life, or even if she didn’t go to college or went to LIberty. So the other aspects and appeals of Greek Life are worth more in the balance. But nonetheless, Sororities and Frats are constantly cited as conservative, and self consciously present themselves as such. Why don’t they organize their lives in conservative ways? Certainly I’m not expecting college students to live as monks regardless of their outward commitments, but why aren’t those outward commitments more in line with their stated values? And maybe their stated values themselves are a reflection of a more nuanced view of morality they hold in an interior way. Maybe the sorority moms would say, hey, girls are gonna have fun, we’d rather they have fun with the “right” kind of guy and hope for the best, and the structure of the system will protect her as much as she can be protected.
I’m not sure what the answer is. But I’m curious to see an intelligent, sympathetic breakdown of how these people think. The series is interesting to me, but the author is ultimately too liberal-blinkered to ask the most interesting anthropology questions about what these people believe. What do these girls (and the families funding their project) seek out of the experience of being part of this social circle, in terms of what they themselves would say is the most important decision in their lives?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Reviewing Predictions on the Israel-Gaza War
The Institute for the Study of War opines that
The Israeli campaign into the Gaza Strip was a military success but has fallen short thus far of setting conditions to replace Hamas as a governing entity. The Israeli government enumerated three objectives at the beginning of the war: destroy Hamas’ military, return the hostages, and destroy Hamas’ government.[1] These objectives—though expansive—were achievable through a combination of military and political action. The Israeli campaign succeeded in destroying Hamas’ military and securing a ceasefire that would release the hostages. The campaign has also isolated Hamas in the Gaza Strip, though Israel and its partners will need to ensure that Hamas remains contained. But neither Israel nor the United States has tried seriously to achieve a political end state that would build upon this military success and permanently replace Hamas as a governing entity in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s failure to achieve this final war aim means that the strip will remain without an alternative governance structure and security broker, and Hamas remnants will inevitably try to fill that role again, especially as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdraw. Hamas will use this space to reassert its political authority and reconstitute its forces—unless the United States and Israel take further steps to prevent those things from occurring.
The Middle East Monitor meanwhile summarizes Israeli opinion:
Unlike previous military campaigns in Gaza – on a much smaller scale compared to the current genocidal war – there is no significant strand of Israeli society claiming victory. The familiar rhetoric of “mowing the lawn”, which Israel often uses to describe its wars, is notably absent. Instead, there is a semi-consensus within Israel that the ceasefire deal was unequivocally bad, even disastrous for the country. The word “bad” carries broad implications. For Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, it represents a “complete surrender”. For the equally extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, it is a “dangerous deal” that compromises Israel’s “national security”. Israeli President Isaac Herzog refrained from offering political specifics but addressed the deal in equally strong terms: “Let there be no illusions. This deal – when signed, approved and implemented – will bring with it deeply painful, challenging and harrowing moments.”
In Haaretz we get headlines like: "Total Victory in Gaza? Dismantling Hamas? The Hostage Deal Is Exposing Netanyahu's Lies” and "The Gaza Cease-fire and Hostage Deal Is the Same One From Eight Months Ago. Why Did Netanyahu Accept It Now? Ailing hostages rotting in tunnels for 15 months and over 120 Israeli soldiers killed since Benjamin Netanyahu declined a previous cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas are the least of the Israeli prime ministers' concerns. He wanted to be pressured just ahead of Trump's inauguration”
I can’t track it down online and I’ve since recycled the paper, but at the signing of the ceasefire, I read a WSJ op-ed in which the writer bemoaned that the hostage exchange, as lopsided as it was, constituted a defeat for Israel, and provided an obvious structure for future defeats. There’s been a consistent drumbeat of sentiment among committed Zionists and self-described foreign policy realists that the ceasefire constitutes an Israeli defeat. And inasmuch as one takes Netanyahu seriously earlier in the war, it does seem a defeat of a kind. Israeli hawks have said from the beginning that they were fighting to destroy Hamas root and branch and obtain lasting peace and security for Israel. That this was not another “mowing the grass” operation, that their intent was to totally and permanently alter the relationship between Israel and Gaza such that there would never be another attack originating from Gaza against Israel.
Now, at the end of the war, the grass is well and truly mowed, but permanent changes seem unlikely to materialize. Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity, while the doomerism seems overwrought it’s tough to see how Israel emerged from this more secure in its long term future. In the short term, perhaps even for a decade or so, Hezbollah is neutered, Hamas is pulling itself off the mat, Iran has been punched in the nose, Baathist Syria is gone; the grass is mowed, there is no immediate threat of attack. But in the longer term, it is hard to see what strategic objective Israel achieved. While a great many Palestinians were killed, amid cries of GENOCIDE from the usual suspects, I’m not even sure there are fewer Palestinians now than there were on 10/6/23. The attitude of those left behind in Palestine towards Israel requires little guesswork. Support for Israel is in decline among younger American voters, they may not be able to count on unconditional US support in the future (I’m not sure Zionism is a position likely to shift with age in the way that positions of issues like Taxes and Racial Equality have historically shifted with age). Israel still has no actual operational plan of what an acceptable government of Gaza would look like, a group that they would endorse as an alternative to Hamas rule in the enclave, or even an outline or an idea of what such a group might be. Many Israeli officials and soldiers face risk of prosecution abroad on war crimes charges, which I imagine will not come to pass in any significant quantity, but it means something that thousands of Israelis will be unable to travel to much of Europe. Israel is unlikely to see a revival of the Abraham Accords peace process with the Gulf States under a second Trump admin, though we can all hope that the Dealmaker in Chief can pull a rabbit out of the turban and get this done.
Looking back, this leaked intelligence paper from Israel detailing plans for removing the population of Gaza to camps in the Sinai before occupying Gaza, was remarkably prescient. The authors predict that the violence required to occupy a populated Gaza would be too great, unsustainable for the Israeli forces politically, and result in the Israeli forces ultimately exiting Gaza without achieving their goals. This has now occurred. While Trump is now making noises about removing Gazan civilians, it is not clear how this would be achieved physically.
@Pasha had an excellent comment near the beginning of the war presaging the situation facing Israel now:
To delve deeper into the uncomfortable topic of the looming genocide, I also increasingly get the feeling that contrary to the expectations of some whose view of geopolitics is eerily similar to RTS mechanics, the genocidal military power IDF is displaying right now is ultimately going to harm Israel a lot more than it helps. I think it mainly has to do with political/military leadership trying to cover their ass and muffle their enormous failures with the sound of bombs. If IDF really goes through with their plan which seems likely to cost civilian lives in the hundreds of thousands, I don't think the nation of Israel will ever recover from this. It is a country that is already losing two of its most powerful weapon: Endlessly idealistic and intelligent Ashkenazi founders who knew to out-think and out-work their opponents at very turn, and most importantly to not lose the sight of their goal even when they had to take very nasty decisions at times: to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide [AND] Zionist influence in the Western world. Through a combination of dedication, money, human quality, well-crafted propaganda, historical guilt and Cold War positioning, Zionists has always had a very unique power position in Western institutions, especially the US ones. This is quickly disappearing. Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism. A Gazan genocide is very likely going to be the final nail in the coffin here.
I fully agree that the situation with Gaza is entirely unsustainable. But if Israelis go through with what they are plotting right now, they will slowly but surely find out that they are 7 million souls surviving in an ocean of half a billion through miracles, and they are pissing in the miracle potion.
It seems clear that predictions at the outset that “eliminating” Hamas/Islamism as a force in Gaza was not an achievable goal. I’m curious to see if this is an example people reach for in the future. Given the failure to consider predictions based on the 9/11 experience before this war, I doubt it.
What other predictions did you find particularly prescient or wrongheaded?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10mo ago
So, anyone have a read on what a realistic ceasefire deal looks like? Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
Ukraine's winning scenarios have run out at this point. The abortive and telegraphed offensive ate up too much time and material for them to win in any conventional sense. Prigozhin might have been the Black Swan they needed, but he pussied out. The Russian economy is showing no signs of collapse. Some point to a Wunderwaffen or to some chart that shows NATO production coming online at a faster pace from 2025 onward, but I doubt that will make a material difference. Ukraine is basically hoping for a Russian collapse as a result of some as-yet-unknown cause, which is not impossible, but not much of a strategy.
Russia's odds of winning much more than what they have so far seem longer still. They're hoping Ukraine just gives up, but that might be longer odds than a Russian collapse, as Ukrainian psychopathic nationalism seems more systemic rather than oriented around a single individual.
Neither side is going to win the kind of victory that will make good their losses. So how is a ceasefire outlined that will deliver a lasting peace?
I still haven't come up with a better idea than putting Harry and Meghhan on the throne in Kiev.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10mo ago
I have an effortpost somewhere in my notebook brewing, ever since I finished Tooze's Wages of Destruction on the topic of all the different frames that one can use to examine WWII in Europe. There are at least seven framings I can think of that I can make a full argument out of, and completely justify the beginning of the war. WWII was, in some ways, vastly overdetermined.
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WWII was primarily a replay of WWI with a little shuffling around the edges. The core conflict was once again Germany-Austria-Hungary vs England/France/Russia/USA, with Italy going from a liability for Britain to a liability for Germany and Japan getting involved. This was known even before the war started, Ferdinand Foch famously called the treaty of Versailles a twenty year ceasefire as it was signed. The flow of conflict runs directly through Versailles, much of Germany's chaos and depression resulted from the aftermath of WWI, and the conflicts with the western Allies began with conflicts over reparations and the removal of formerly German territory into creations of Versailles like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
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WWII was primarily a result of the early Cold War, a symptom of the struggle between Communism and Capitalism, which began before WWII and continued after; Hitler is best understood as a Golem figure, built by both Communists and Capitalists to protect against the Other, only to turn on each in their turn. The Cold War didn't start in 1945 Berlin, it started in 1917 at the latest. The first Red Scares in the US and the rest of the West happened long before Hitler rose to power. Hitler could not have achieved what he achieved, could not have been half as destructive as he was, without the support he garnered from both sides of the Cold War. Without Stalin's material support in the years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Barbarossa, Hitler never could have achieved the Blitzkrieg victories in the West. Stalin and his crew were ideological Leninists, and believed in the science of history, that Capitalist imperialist powers must go to war, they can't help it, the competition over economic markets is too powerful a motive. Threatened by the capitalist western powers, Stalin supported And the western Allies significantly aided the rise of fascism diplomatically, seeing it as a counter to Communist revolutionary fervor in Germany, Spain, and Italy; believing that Hitler would naturally fight the Communists because, you know, he kept saying he was going to fight Bolshevism and invade Russia.
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WWII was primarily an economic conflict. Germany could not sustain its economy without the resources it did not have access to within its own territory, and England and France were constantly threatening to cut Germany off. Germany had to go to war to secure economic resources to support its economy, and England had to go to war to defend its economic predominance. Balance of payments tells us more about the leadup to the war than any amount of studying battlefield choices.
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WWII was a "don't be racist" contest with golf scoring, and Germany and Japan lost. It's very difficult to look at many of the decisions that were made by conquering German and Japanese armies in the first phases of WWII, and not think to oneself that if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit, maybe they could have gotten some of their conquered peoples to buy into the project a little bit, and then they would have won the war quite easily. Japan stormed into Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor, and they threw out the hated white colonial governments, and then instantly proceeded to behave so much worse that many of the freedom fighters who had been fighting against the European colonial overlords flipped to working with the European colonial overlords. The Japanese could have been recruiting Vietnamese auxilaries to fight against the British and Americans, instead they were unable to exploit Indochina to its greatest extent because of local resistance. If the Nazis had aligned with the Banderites at the start of the war, instead of imprisoning Bandera for most of the war before springing him near the end of the war in a last desperate shot; if the Nazis had aligned with Poland to invade Russia together instead of destroying Poland; if the Nazis had at least made vaguely credible motions in the direction of a future Free Russian state rather than making their exterminationist intent obvious; if the Nazis had utilized their Jewish population properly instead of destroying them in a tremendous waste of human capital. The British Empire and the United States were racist governments at the time, but they were less racist than their enemies and that was enough. Stalin killed millions of Jews, too, but he didn't make explicit his intent to exterminate the populations his armies sought to subdue, putting their backs to the wall. The only way to square the circle is to assume that Hitler actually did believe all that racial superiority stuff, otherwise his actions are inexplicably illogical.
And so on and so forth.
It is possible to draw so many different framings for WWII, that are all perfectly cohesive, and are perfectly adequate explanations for why the war took place. And part of the upshot of this is that the guilt for the war is overdetermined. It's possible to say everyone is at fault. The British are at fault and Stalin is at fault and the Germans are at fault. It was the inevitable result of the avarice of Clemanceau at Versailles, and it was the contingent result of decisions made regarding Czechoslovakia and Poland. There's a ton of different ways to slice it up, but the nature of guilt for the deaths of millions is that they can all slice up a share of guilt that is more than enough for one lifetime.
That all being said, while I love some of Daryl's, he's long been pushing credibility with increasingly edgy contrarian takes, and when you play the oh my aren't I an edgy boy game, it's dangerous to dance this close to power. Tucker Carlson was reported to have significant influence, it is a reasonable attack surface to look at who he has on his show. Daryl himself has been retweeted by JD Vance. These aren't random folks engaging in a touch of edgy trolling on the motte or 4chan, of course this bullshit is going to stir up a kerfuffle. Kulak has not, yet, been a Twitter Main Character for his pas-de-deux with Hitler apologism, because he hasn't yet presented a valid attack surface against mainstream right wing politicians.
A Trip to the Mall and our Society-Wide Experiment in Extreme Trust
OR
Whatever happened to dress codes?
TLDR: We expect the vast majority of shops, restaurants, and other common commercial services to provide service to anyone regardless of appearance. This is a nearly unique experiment in human history, an effort towards not just a high-trust society but an extreme trust society, not long ago it would have been common to refuse service based on appearance. This should be considered when debating the role of trust in modern American society: we have removed the mechanisms by which one can establish trust at a glance, and as a result any degree of trust must be universally extended.
My wife's birthday was this week, and for various reasons my original birthday gift for her fell through, so instead I took her shopping at our fanciest regional mall. Which in practice meant wandering for hours through various luxury brand stores, where she mostly bought nothing but tried a lot of things on and took notes for later second-hand online shopping. What struck me most about the experience, along with going to several rather nice restaurants recently for various occasions, was that people don't dress up anymore. Not just in a general, people have no class anymore kind of way. But in a particular, we don't use dress, appearance, and presentation as a basic credit check kind of way. In the old days class was very easily visible from dress, many historical societies carried sumptuary laws forbidding certain forms of dress to the lower classes. White collar and blue collar and redneck, rather than merely being colorful phrases, were specific references to particular modes of work-clothing: a white dress shirt indicated office work, a blue denim workshirt indicated proles, a red-neck was a poor outdoor laborer with no collar at all, sunburned from labor in the fields. The presence of these class indicators showed what kind of work you did, and showed that you had the wealth to keep these things clean. And in social and commercial settings, a person in one mode of dress would be treated one way, a person in another mode of dress treated another. This has melted away.
I mean, obvious, right? But I'm at a store where the cheapest pair of shoes is $800, or a purse is $2,000, or a jewelry store with a selection of $8,000 watches. And people come in wearing flip flops, sneakers, shorts. And the sales staff were taking care of them as customers. It's summer, so of course people were dressed like that. One obvious objection is that the branding on some of those items indicates to the trained eye that a pair of flip flops can cost vastly more than any suit I've ever owned. But the staff weren't discriminating on that basis either: my canvas sneakers were Amazon chinesium, and the T shirt was Kirkland Signature, and at Ralph Lauren the salesman helped me try on a $2500 suit without blinking. The staff essentially treated, and certainly was expected to treat, everyone who came in as a potential customer regardless of presentation and appearance. I'd imagine there's some level of filth or obvious poverty that would potentially disqualify a person and lead to their being asked to leave, but I didn't see it happen. Certainly, many customers came in wearing clothing that would not reliably indicate an income over $100k/yr, and were treated with respect as potential customers. This is a remarkable fact about our society!
We've decided as a society that classism, most frequently enforced on a commercial level through dress codes and similar mechanisms, is Badtm. We all dress like slobs, and you can wander into Cartier in shorts and a T shirt and expect to be allowed in. Restaurants almost never refuse service based on appearance or dress. This is particularly a problem for Restaurants. Where the worst a bad customer can do in a retail store is steal, and this is fairly easily prevented in a luxury goods store by providing security and limiting access to product without a salesman nearby; a fancy restaurant is essentially giving you a very short term loan, giving you the goods up front and expecting payment after the meal is over. A person who refuses to pay, or leaves without paying, could in theory be arrested or sued in small claims but in practice I've never even heard of such a thing. Yet even the fanciest restaurants I've been to recently have no dress code, no attempt to screen in the most basic way that the people coming in have the ability to pay. There's no effort to screen against lower class people coming into a store or restaurant they can't afford.
Racism was, of course, the most commonly enforced form of classism until at least the 1960s. Black people, and immigrants of all kinds, were typically poor, and so if you lacked white skin or had an immigrant accent, you would be refused service. That has been eliminated, largely through long legal and social efforts by activists, but also simply isn't that useful today. I'm not sure the crowd overall was quite majority-minority, but certainly black Americans and Chinese immigrants (or tourists) formed a strong plurality among paying customers, and a definite majority of customers I saw spending vast amounts of cash on large hauls. You hear stories today about black customers having difficulty getting help, or being followed around, but I saw lots of black customers being served, and if it happens at all today it is much more subtle than one would expect if it were being used as a screening mechanism.
But I'm curious as to how and why we abandoned any effort to screen for class or presentation in these situations.
Clearly the lack of screening "works." In the sense that these stores are open and don't do it. Perhaps it is my Wawa theory of societal honesty striking again: there are few enough problem customers that you gain more from refusing to screen than you lose from screening, and that says something about our society in itself. Or maybe we're missing out on what a truly great public retail experience could be if it were done? There are a handful of boutiques that are appointment only, and restaurants at which one has to Know Somebody to get a table, and those are an obvious cuts above. But even the wealthiest wear Hermes and Rolex as status symbols, and those stores didn't really screen at all. So maybe it's a solution in search of a problem? Americans are generally honest enough that it's not worth checking.
But it's still noteworthy that this is an unparalleled experiment in human history, a society that does not discriminate based on class when providing public services, except at the extreme high end or when someone is visibly disordered. And I'm not sure what that means. I've talked before in the Wawa post linked above, about the evolution of their ordering system. At first one ordered, paid over at the register, your order slip was stamped, and then you handed it to the staff in exchange for your sandwich. Then it was that they didn't collect the slip. And now it's that most people order online, and they set the hoagies and coffees on a big rack and you walk up and take it and leave without talking to anyone or being observed or checked by anyone.
It bugs me, because I read all these screeds, from Op-Eds in respectable newspaper weekend editions to NrX substacks to published sociologists, and they all tell me that our society is becoming ever lower trust. That people don't trust their fellow citizens like they used to. And this seems intuitive to me in my day to day. But then I zoom in on some of these activities, and what I'm seeing isn't lower trust, it is higher trust. Once upon a time if you walked into a Cartier in a T shirt, they'd ask you to leave and not waste their time. If you tried to get dinner at a $100/entree restaurant without a blazer not that long ago, they would refuse to seat you. Today, we don't do that kind of screening. That's a level of trust that you see, that is manifest, and it is raised, rather than lowered. The salesman trusts you not to waste his time, the hostess trusts you to pay your bill. Perhaps they screen in more subtle ways I'm not picking up on. But they once used far more obvious ones.
And I'm not sure why they abandoned them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9mo ago
To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.
I think what you're getting out of this is less, they don't care, and more that they make more money off of honest people than they would spend on labor to fix the problem and so they pursue a profitable path. They have no problem paying dishonest people, as long as they keep making money they don't care who is getting paid.
I'm of the schizo opinion that things like self-checkout are a form of psychological warfare against trust in society. Every time I self-checkout, I scan everything correctly, but I'm aware of how easy it would be not to. To tuck a couple small items in the corner of my tote bag and never scan them, to scan the $2 switch five times instead of scanning the four $10 switches, to ring up the organic carrots as ordinary carrots. And in my head I'm aware there is nothing the store will do to stop me, and that their profit margin is such to account out of the money they make on me for the person who doesn't scan it all. And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.
We've already seen this happen with "free" media, where internet commenters will act as if it is a personal affront that Youtube has advertisements, while ignoring that they can pay a pittance each month to remove all ads. Once people get used to free stuff, they can't stand the idea of paying for it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1mo ago
Playboy Was Never a Magazine, It Was a Breast Certification Organization
A Lot of Companies Aren’t What You Think They Are
Thesis: Playboy magazine has been iconic virtually from the first issue. But for almost all of its history, the Magazine was something between a loss-leader, a marketing expense, and a cherished tradition. While the magazine was occasionally profitable throughout its life, Playboy made most of its money from other ventures over the decades; running night clubs, casinos, television shows and networks, and selling branded retail merchandise. The iconic titty-mag was core to their branding, the product they were selling in the clubs, casinos, television shows was, in a sense, drawn from the imagination created by their magazine. The waitresses in the clubs were pretty young women who were implied to be hot enough to be in the magazine, even if the vast majority of them never appeared in the magazine, when you talked to them you were passing into the fantasy world of the centerfold, talking to a certified Playmate. Playboy magazine’s path to profit wasn’t selling subscriptions, it was setting the organization as a prestige knower of what made a hot woman hot, which it then as an organization certified and sold. The certification of a woman as Playmate Quality was irresistible to both male customers, and to female employees, and formed the basis for Playboy’s empire, and to the degenerate remnant of marketing that exists today.
My wife and I recently watched two separate docu-series on Hugh Hefner. [American Playboy], which was produced by Hef and his family as promotion for the company, and took a positive and mostly soft-focus view of the story of Hefner and Playboy; and Secrets of Playboy, a multi-part hit piece designed to undermine the Playboy legend and dredge up every grudge every woman has ever had against Playboy and Hefner from the first issue to last week. Neither was particularly journalistically rigorous, and our natural skepticism lead us both to come out of each series with the opposite of the directorial intent. After Hefner’s self-aggrandizing autobiopic, I found myself thinking that there was probably a lot of bad stuff he was sweeping under the rug, and that Bobbie Arnstein was probably smuggling drugs for Hef. When I turned to the angry-women’s-greatest-hits, I found myself defending Hef in my mind, because the charges leveled became increasingly absurd, I half expected to have girls talking about how Jimmy Hoffa got drunk at the mansion and that was the last time they ever saw him, or that Lee Harvey Oswald was often seen going upstairs with Hef. They threw the kitchen sink at him, but somehow never actually got Hef doing anything all that bad. He was always a step removed, someone else was asking on Hef’s behalf but Hef himself said no anyway, Hef was close friends with a guy who was a creep, bad things happened at a friend’s house that was built in imitation of the mansion. But anyway, this story isn’t about any of that, rather what fascinated me were all the things they agreed on about Playboy.
Growing up, I was aware of Playboy the magazine. I arrived just at the end of the golden age of magazines, and of porno mags in particular. A couple kids I knew had old Playboys, and they featured prominently in older media, but they were rapidly being outmoded by internet porn (and blogs, for everything other than the tits). Despite the decline of the magazine, Hugh Hefner remained a media icon in the early 2000s. The Girls Next Door was one of the early hit reality shows, my wife and many of her friends remember watching it when it aired. Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Entourage all featured Hef in prominent cameos during Playboy Mansion themed episodes where the gang all winds up at one of Hefner’s parties. He was a cultural eminence grise, one of those figures you were just aware was important, and had made all this money selling softcore porn magazines. Playboy magazine seemed iconic, the Playmates seemed hot, even though I never stole one or looked at one in earnest, only as a vintage curiosity more recently as a middle aged man.
I was vaguely aware that once there had been Playboy Clubs*, night clubs where the waitresses dressed up like bunnies, featured in Mad Men most recently. But what I never realized until watching the competing docu-series, was that the Clubs were the core of Playboy’s business almost from the start. Hefner was a marketing genius much moreso than he was an editorial genius. While he obsessively built his magazine, personally approving layouts and choices of material, he started expanding the brand nearly immediately. The magazine was launched as a mildly profitable periodical by the famous photos of Marilyn Monroe** in 1953, and by 1959 Hefner had moved to a late night variety show Playboy’s Penthouse featuring Hef and various guests and various beautiful women implied to be (and sometimes being) the women featured in the magazine (dressed, at the time). In 1960, the first Playboy Club would open in Chicago and rapidly chained across the nation and world. The Playboy Clubs were member’s only night clubs, where guests could enjoy drinks and entertainment (the first club opening featured a teenage Aretha Franklin), while being served by beautiful waitresses in the famous Playboy Bunny outfits.
What made the clubs so popular and profitable, was the slippery equivalence of the Playboy playmate (a woman who appeared in the magazine as a model) and the Playboy Club bunnies (the waitresses at the clubs), and Hef’s legendary Playboy Mansion with the Playboy Club itself. Playmates often appeared, and sometimes worked, at the clubs. And bunnies occasionally found their way up the ladder into the magazine. For the most part, the girls serving you drinks in the clubs were not the girls who appeared in the magazine. But, it felt that way. The bunnies were screened rigorously for appearance, and when Gloria Steinem went undercover as a bunny she reported that they had to maintain a certain weight and bust size or face termination. But of course breastaurants have come and gone throughout the past hundred years, what made the Playboy Clubs special was the idea that these weren’t just hot waitresses, they were waitresses hot enough to be employed by Playboy, they were waitresses who occupied the fantasy space of the centerfolds.
And in turn, the club itself became the mythical sexual Shangri-La of the Playboy Mansion, Hef’s playground for him and his famous and lascivious friends. Just as Playmates from the magazine occasionally found their way into the clubs, and waitresses occasionally worked their way into the magazine; the famous guests at the Mansion often hung out at the clubs, and big spenders at the clubs or especially the casinos might eventually earn an invite to the Mansion.
Tim Allen talks about this in an oddly poignant passage discussing the first time he saw a Playboy centerfold as a boomer child, which has stuck with me since reading his comedian memoir at the beach in 2004, where he talks about how he has never been the same age as the Centerfold Girl: first he was a young teen and the Centerfold was like his friend's older sister or a younger teacher, then suddenly one day they were the age of a younger sister or a new employee or eventually (gulp) a daughter. There was a never a moment where the fantasy crossed over into reality, where he felt like a direct peer to the Centerfold Girl.
What Playboy sold, at its peak of clubs and Casinos, was that liminality between Fantasy and Reality. Hooters and the Tilted Kilt, for all the endowments they had, never had that. A Playboy club, or a Playboy Reality Show, or Playboy merchandise, offered a thin place between fantasy and reality. A moment where you might just break through the veil, and enter your fantasy, if things went just right. When you could suddenly become a peer of the Playmates and of Hef, if only for a moment.
I realize this might be a complete piece of trivia, but it kind of fascinated me when I realized it.
*My dad, coincidentally, had a Playboy Club membership key card. My wife uses it to fold letters for her office, she says the metal card is the perfect tool for the job and she uses it every day.
**The provenance of this photograph is itself interesting: Marilyn didn’t pose for Playboy, she did a nude photoshoot for some calendar before she ever hit it big, which Hef then bought from the original publisher and splashed across the country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Every Book I Read Last Year
I set a goal of reading 26 books last year, or approximately one every two weeks. I did not meet that goal. Probably primarily because I chose to read War and Peace while annotating it for a friend. I also read snatches of a lot of other things, but only included stuff I read more or less cover-to-cover (I’ll admit to skimming sections of Yellowface and Stranger in a Strange Land between about the 50% and 85% marks).
Honorable Mentions I did not finish: Seeing Like a State, which was brilliant and I’ll get around to finishing it later, but I only read it in boring meetings and I didn’t have quite quite enough of those where I wasn’t involved; The Good Soldier Svejk, which is good but I got bored of; Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Songwriting I still have like a half dozen songs to go, but it’s not really that good and I got out of the rhythm of it; I worked my way through a pile of Platonic dialogues, but I try to stick to only counting it as finishing a “book” if I’ve gone cover to cover as bound at the printer otherwise I'd have to start thinking in pages and then wordcount; ditto, I suppose, the King James bible, in that I read passages but not the whole book; I started The Savage Detectives while walking my wife around the mall but haven’t got back around to finish it; I started Where Men Win Glory, Krakauer's biography of Pat Tillman, which is good but I forgot it at my parents house at some point and never got back to it. I also don’t “count” audiobooks towards the goal, though I quite enjoy them and listen to them pretty constantly.
Razzmatazz! I devoured Chris Moore’s novels when I was a kid, but this was painful to read. His schtick just doesn’t work anymore. I keep meaning to reread his novel of Christ’s lost years, Lamb, so I can review it for themotte, it really is a brilliant time capsule of mid-2000s Morally Therapeutic Deism. Would not recommend this one though, trying to be sensitive to historical traumas of prostitution while also playing it for laughs leaves you with neither.
The War Nerd Iliad Loved it, brilliant. A prose translation of the Iliad, what I admire about it is that it has a strong interpretative view of what the work means, and he sets out to give the reader that view; where so many academic translations get so caught up in accuracy and euphemism that they fail to give much energy. Highly, highly recommend, you owe it to yourself to read this one.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Excellent book, deservers all the praise it ever got. It filled me with nostalgia for when great literature could also be fun. It’s a book that has a real political and philosophical message, while also being a perfectly fun adventure story. Back in the day a masterpiece could also be a bestseller.
From Hell Great book. Boy is Alan Moore weird. I keep meaning to look more into the theory behind it.
Sevastapol Sketches Around here I got off track to the goal, because I made the mistake of starting War and Peace. But I told a friend I would annotate it for her. I kind of stalled on it, so I went and read Sevastopol Sketches to kind of get a win in the books. It was a great pick me up, and reading it added a lot to reading War and Peace so I was glad I did it. It’s interesting seeing prototypes of a lot of the characters, Nikolai and Andrei and Berg showing up in miniature. Would highly recommend it if you’re a Tolstoy fan.
Cheated A book about the Astros trashcan scandal in Major League Baseball, it is a high-mediocre sports journalism book but a bunch of anecdotes stick with me today. If you liked that era of baseball, you’ll like the book.
Day of the Oprichnik I hated this book and didn’t get it, but I think it’s because I’m not Russian and I don’t find gross-out gore or porn interesting.
Trust the Plan A book pretending to report on the QAnon phenomenon, but it mostly got so many things wrong that I only got through it because it was mercifully short. I wasn’t, ultimately, any better informed about Q after than I was before.
Aeneid The Dryden translation. I prefer older translations of classics generally, both because they tend to aim for actual poetry, and because they believe in what they’re writing about. Maybe not the most accurate translation from the Latin, but the translator thought that the story had value and meaning beyond as a museum piece, which gives it more energy.
Yellowface This was the worst book I read this year. Turner Diaries for the anhedonic members of a college Women of Color Collective.
And The Band Played On Brilliantly written, and I learned a lot about the AIDS crisis and gay culture. A really great example of writing, in that I would bother my wife by reading out passages that were alternately horrifying and hilarious, it captures the tragedy of plague without ever letting go of absurdism and fun. It was amazing how many personalities turned back up like bad nickels for COVID, and how the actions taken to combat COVID largely map onto the AIDS crisis as things that would have worked for AIDS, but didn’t for COVID. I expect we’ll see the same cycle again, always fighting the last war. Perhaps a consequence of Gerontocracy.
Path Lit by Lightning Really nicely written biography of Jim Thorpe, a well done piece of sports history, and I was thinking later while listening to Lonesome Dove on audiobook about how time periods intersect. Lonesome Dove is set in the West in the 1870s, Newt is around 20 by the end. Jim Thorpe was born in 1887. Jim Thorpe’s father could have been one of the sad Indians in the background of the cattle drive in Lonesome Dove, Newt (assuming a natural lifespan) would have lived to read headlines in the Montana newspapers about Thorpe’s exploits. Thorpe meanwhile, is just on the edge of modernity for us: one of the first modern Olympians, the first president of the NFL, an early Hollywood fixture. He’s just on the edge of having run into people that I could have watched on TV, and then he is just on the edge of having known rebel Indian chiefs in the old west.
Master and Commander What can I say about this that hasn’t been said before? He does such a good job of giving a feel of how crazy the world his characters inhabit is. A firehose of exposition without a single speech.
Stranger in a Strange Land When I read Dune I felt like I had suddenly discovered what Star Wars had ripped off, Star Wars was just Dune with less thinking. Then I read Stranger and realized that Dune was just Stranger if the author was terrified of human sexuality.
War and Peace My favorite work of literature. A masterpiece. It contains all of human life.
King Rat I read it after watching Shogun with my mother, and wanted to revisit Clavell. This was so much better than I thought it would be. Absolutely perfect book. Read it. The strongest indictment of capitalism I’ve ever read, and a love letter to it all at once. Clavell was a master of writing books that are deep and engaging adventure stories.
Stepford Wives Really fun Halloween book, and it’s funny how much of it holds up, but at the same time how much of it never makes any sense at all.
My Brilliant Friend Read it because it was ranked so high on various best of the millennium lists. I can see why it ranked so high: Ferrante pulls you into her world, head first. Beautifully written, and consistently engaging. I can’t wait to get to the sequels this year. There’s an amusing irony to the debates, which in America center on whether men are sexist for refusing to read this brilliant book by a female author, and in Europe mostly revolve around which man is the real Elena Ferrante.
On the Edge The further I get from this book, the less I think about it. Junk food in text form.
The Price of Peace A Singaporean educational propaganda book about Malaya during the Japanese Occupation in WWII. An angle of WWII we don’t normally get in America. Fascinating to look at, but not something I’d recommend. Mostly fascinating for examining the message the propaganda is trying to get across, and for considering different viewpoints of WWII.
Sad Cypress An old Agatha Christie, just something I got as a gift. A nice little treat.
Il Gigante A biography of Michaelangelo around the David. Picked it up at a church flea market, it was mediocre, but I finished it anyway.
The Message Ta Nehisi Coates new book. I’m buying copies of it for all the Nice Liberal Jews in my life. He makes a powerful case for why the core values of American liberalism are incompatible with support for Israel as a Jewish ethnostate.
I feel like I’m forgetting something, but I’m probably not. Right now, in addition to struggling through Plato, I’m loving Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey. It’s not the most traditional translation, but it’s so wonderful, the language feels like sipping an icy sprite on a sunny day.
For 2025, I want to read some self-help books, strange as that may sound, to get some of the books that are always being recommended. I want to read more science fiction, I haven't been able to get into the genre in a while. I want to get around to some more of the recommendations people made here for graphic novels. Basically, I'm in the mood for lighter fare.
Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America. In almost every way, our society is less equal than it was in 1962. Across domains that don't seem like they should be related:
Fitness Hobbyist athletes of today would largely stomp on the professionals of 1962 in fitness metrics. Nobody in 1962 ran marathons as a hobby, now it is common, no PMC office lacks a marathon guy. Lifting weights was weird, and maybe kinda gay. Now it is common. The lifts and PR times of your average Crossfit box would be jaw-dropping at any of the few existing gyms in 1962. The fitness obsessed are stronger, faster, better than their 1962 equivalents. And yet in 1962 the average person was in better shape than the average person in 2024. They weren't overweight or obese, they could walk ten miles if asked to do so. A randomly selected man of 1962 could join a touch football game or help you move furniture in a way that your randomly selected man of 2024 often cannot.
Sex 1962 society was more monogamous, and because of the drive to achieve pair bonding, most people could get one long term partner and marry them and stay together. More men had sex with one woman in the past year compared to today, but more men had sex with anyone. In 2024, it is vastly easier for some men to get laid, your top percentage of men can get vastly more sex with vastly more partners. But there are also vast numbers of men who never have sex, have no long term partners, and few prospects of getting them.
Cooking Imagine I took 100 mothers from my local high school today, and 100 mothers from my local high school in 1962, and Iron-Chef'd them with scratch ingredients and told them to bake me a cake. I posit that the 1962 mothers would all make more or less the same mediocre American cakes, with some ethnic-white flourishes or particular talents, but mostly pretty similar stuff. But virtually all would know how to make a cake given flour, butter, eggs, sugar. The 2024 mothers, a large percentage would simply have no idea how to make a cake from scratch without premade ingredients, only a vague concept of what to do with the ingredients, and we'd get some truly sad attempts. But among the 2024 mothers, there are also some percentage of hobbyists, Great British Baking Show and youtube obsessives, who will make a ridiculously good cake, vastly better than anything that the 1962 mothers would even know how to attempt. All one has to do to figure this out is look at old cookbooks and new cookbooks.
Physical appearance Paul Newman vs Chris Evans. Or just compare Superman to Superman, or even Hugh Jackman in different Wolverine roles. The earlier physiques are easy for a man with good genetics if they don't screw it up or attainable for most men with a bit of effort, the current physiques are impossible without at least two of good genetics, extreme effort, and pharmaceuticals.
Education More Americans than ever have completed college degrees, the value and difficulty of which we can debate but there is no question that completing years of education highly correlates with intelligence. Fewer books are read every year in America. Authors lack the popular celebrity impact they once had. Literary prizes lack the credibility and punch they once did. PhD Theses of 1962 and earlier are often pretty readable, covering a basic or normal topic. PhD theses of 2024 are often whacko, out there, unreadable to anyone without a master's in the topic already, citing obscure theories unknown to anyone outside deep academia.
Gun Ownership Gun ownership has declined from a narrow majority of households in the 70s to a third as of 2014. At the same time, many gun owners today have an absolute arsenal compared to the men of the 60s and 70s. A lot of Old Timer Fudds at my small town gun club think it's insane that the young guys want to own anything other than a shotgun, a deer rifle, a .22, and a revolver. A small percentage of gun owners in America own a vast number of firearms. This simply wasn't a normal middle-class pursuit in the 1960s.
There are other places it feels like there's something there, but I don't know how to parse them with any rigor. Religiosity, racial tolerance, "handyman" skills, foreign travel, military service, automobile driving. It feels intuitive that in the past, a base level of each was expected in every middle class man and variation was rare; and today extremes at both ends are more common while the middle is shrinking.
We live in the age of the Barbell Shaped distribution. There's something deeper there.
My dad loves Tim Walz. I haven't seen him like a politician this much in decades. It's weird to me, because I'm way too cynical. It feels like when my wife makes me watch TikTok videos that have obviously been staged, and I can't enjoy them because I can't suspend disbelief, while she does. She's not a gullible person in general, her job depends on not being taken in, but she enjoys the videos and I can't. My dad is a smart guy, and a very cynical guy about politics, but Tim Walz' nice-guy schtick really works for him. He teared up repeating lines from one of Walz' speeches to me (my dad tears up a lot as he's gotten older, actually, and it makes me very uncomfortable), and he won't stop inventing things he wants Tim Walz to say to J.D. Vance.
I don't really get it. I like Tim Walz' schtick well enough, as schticks go it's better than some, but buying into lock stock and barrel seems kinda over the top. On the other hand, he's so out of the great white north that it seems Republicans won't come up with decent attacks before we get to November. ((Before someone brings them up, no, the horse semen attacks weren't decent, nor were the weirdo implications about race fetishism. The riot stuff might stick eventually, but it hasn't so far.)) Idk, I just can't get up that kind of enthusiasm. When I listened to Pod Save America after the debate, I'd hear them curse and think that I need to work on cursing less.
Trump supporters seem grimly determined. It's hard to get excited about Trump anymore, we know what we're getting.
I feel bad for JD Vance. I identify a little with him, and he's just getting hammered on bullshit day in and day out, over and over. I don't think he's doing great, but he can't get out of his own way. In many ways, 2024 Vance is like 2020 Harris: he's running against his own type. We're seeing it, once again, with Dave McCormick, who will spend millions of dollars telling me he was in the army for a minute and likes hunting; until I read his wikipedia I never knew he got a fuckin' PhD from Princeton, and he never brings up that he ran one of the world's biggest hedge funds. Vance and McCormick are running against their own achievements and their own intelligence and their own qualifications, which says something absolutely tragic about the Republican base electorate.
I'm just going to throw a bunch of quotes from the excellent Rick Reilly book Who's Your Caddy? in here. In the book, Sports Illustrated off-beat journalist Reilly set out to caddy for various people. He caddied at the Masters, he caddied for a blind guy, he caddied for Jon Daly, he caddied on the LPGA tour, and he caddied for Donald Trump. The book came out in 2007, so we're talking long before Trump Derangement Syndrome; long before anyone would have been offended by Trump's politics because no one at the time took Trump all that seriously. This isn't just pre-escalator, this is pre-birtherism because Barack Obama was still a longshot to run for President when they were on the course and nobody gave a shit where he was born, the Capitol Steps were still doing Hillary Clinton's I'm Gonna Run to the tune of Pink's I'm Coming Out because Hillary was the inevitable 2008 nominee for the Democrats. It was Her Turn. Democratic vs Republican interplay was Liz Lemon snipping at Jack Donaghy and Jack rolling his eyes at her. Reilly was just writing about this cooky rich celebrity he played golf with once.
I've condensed a lot of line breaks and paragraphs to make it easier in this format. Some emphasis added for money quotes.
The introduction to the chapter...
You do not interview Trump. You just try to be in the Doppler radar when his tornado blows by and sucks you in. You needn't even ask a question. Trump will take over from here. Your job is to simply try to keep your hat on and your Bic working. At the end of a 12-hour day, you will be spit out of a black stretch limo on a Manhattan street corner, unsure of what you've seen, your notes scattered, your mind severely Trumped. So you try to piece it together. Was it real? Any of it? All of it? So many lies. So many truths. So much bullshit. So much beauty. It all rolls into one colossal Trumpalooza.
While Reilly is around, Trump shoots a commercial for McDonald's:
MCDONALD'S IS HERE to film a commercial. All Trump has to do is eat a Big and Tasty and attest to its deliciousness. For this he gets $1 million. If it runs more than 3 months, he gets another million. But this is not what Trump is excited about. He's excited about the little yellow card McDonald's has given him. “With this little baby, I can eat McDonald's free the rest of my life!” he announces. “They say there are only nine in the world, Baby. Michael Jordan's got one, too. So I can be totally tapped out, fucking broke, living on the street, and still be able to eat!” Thank God. We won't have to throw a telethon.
Trump does not quite understand the concept of the book Reilly is writing...
PROBLEM IS, TRUMP wants you to play instead of caddy. He seems to want this more than anything else in the world. He's already got his caddy, Billy, ready to go—“Best caddy in the world!” he declares—and since the EuroBabe and Tiffany don't even play, Trump would have to play by himself and he just won't have that under any circumstances. You don't get the feeling Trump is a guy who requires a lot of personal quiet time. “But, see, the book isn't about playing, it's about caddying for—” “Did I tell you Bruce Willis is a member here? And Sylvester Stallone. And Rudy Giuliani. And . . .” So that settles that. “Any chance maybe you'd have a game tomorrow I could caddy for?” I ask. Trump stops and looks me square in the eye. “Believe me,” Trump says. “One day of me is enough.”
Reilly goes into the history of Trump's golf courses, hitting some highlights...
This story is absolutely true, though: When architect Jim Fazio, slightly less famous brother of architect Tom Fazio, was finished looking at the property and drawing up plans, he called Trump and said, “We can have 16 great holes.” “Whaddya mean, 16?” Trump says. Fazio explained that there wasn't enough land for the first two holes he wanted to build. “Why not?!” Trump bellowed. “Because people's houses are there,” Fazio said. Trump told Fazio to hold, picked up the phone, called somebody, and bought the houses. Fazio got his holes. You think Fazio doesn't know how to play his Trump?
My aunt asked me the other day, if Trump invited me to lunch would I say yes. And I said absolutely, and you're an idiot if you say no. I'm absolutely convinced that on a minor policy matter, something Trump has never really thought about or understood, anyone with a strong verbal IQ has at least a 50/50 shot at convincing Trump to take a stand on anything. I don't think I could change his position on Abortion, or Ukraine, but I could totally get Trump to try to federally ban that annoying voice at self checkout.
Trump also uses building his course as an opportunity to sneak advantages...
Building your own course must be more fun than being locked in a room with the Rockettes and a box of Lady Gillettes. For instance, Trump insisted the range be built between the 9th green and the 10th tee. See, when he's playing badly, he likes to go to the range and figure out what's wrong. It's quite illegal, but what are you gonna do? He's Da Boss.
A bunch of softball anecdotes I just thought were fun...
TRUMP REALLY DOES love golf. When asked to list the top 10 things that helped him climb his way back from $9.2 billion in debt in the 1990s—the largest financial comeback in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records—Trump's No. 1 was: “Play golf.” “It helped me relax and concentrate,” he once wrote. “It took my mind off my troubles.” See, at that point in his life, he didn't get the free cheeseburgers.
“Trump let the LPGA host the ADT Championship there in November 2001. This is the tour wrapup for the top 30 women, with a $1 million purse. And, boy, did Trump put on the dog for them. And, boy, did the players put out the snarls for Trump. “It was awful,” says LPGA player Nancy Scranton. “It was tricked up. It was contrived, ridiculous, and stupid. He kept going around, pestering everybody: ‘Is this the toughest course you've ever played? Is it? Is it?' But, I have to admit, Mar-a-Lago was beautiful and Donald was a wonderful host.” Trump decreed that some of the mounds in front of lakes be mowed down to the height of cue balls so that short shots would all roll right back into the water. Trump was like a little boy melting ants with a magnifying glass. “I kept going around asking them, ‘When was the last time you scored this high?' And they kept saying, ‘When I was nine.' " During the first round, Trump walked right down the middle of the fairway with the players, who would sooner be followed by wolf-whistling construction workers than Trump. “You'd think he'd have better things to do,” grumbled Annika Sorenstam, the tour's best player. When Sorenstam tripled the first hole, Trump said, “Oops, looks like she just threw up on herself. You know, we could make this course more difficult if we wanted.”
Then there was the whole prison incident. According to written reports, inmates at the Palm Beach County Criminal Justice Complex, which is close to Trump International's third hole, got word that women pros were just across the way. So they started screaming things that might make hockey players blush, much less LPGA players. “That never happened!” Trump yells. “Never happened! That was put out by my enemies. The wall of the prison that faces the course doesn't even have windows!” Still, he put up a huge row of 200 palm trees to serve as a barrier. Cost him $1 million, which is a lot for something that never happened.
JUST A WORD on Trump's hair. There are those who do not like Trump's hair. My softball buddy, B-Square, asks, “The guy is worth billions, so all I can figure is that he must want to look like that!” And I admit, when I asked Trump to let me caddy for him, I was thinking maybe we would need a separate caddy for the hair. Up close, though, it is much less threatening and possibly real. It resembles red cotton candy. It seems to have been spun off a wheel and then fired. Maybe it's fiberglass. Remember making model cars when you were a kid, how the glue froze in cool, solid wisps? That is Trump's hair. I cannot imagine the teams of artists it must take to do his hair each day, but I know they must arrive by the busload. Somehow they've managed to make his hair look like the moment when you open a bottle of aspirin and you can't quite get the cotton ball out and it only comes partially out, all teased. That's Trump's hair.
And something Reilly got completely wrong in retrospect...
YOU EXPECT TRUMP to be a cad. You expect him to have a new woman every weekend. But this is four years now I've seen him at fights and Super Bowls and galas with the same woman—the zipper-busting Miss Melania. Here's a guy who owns a piece of the Miss Universe pageant and the Miss USA pageant—“I bought Miss Universe for $10 million,” he says, unsolicited. “I've already made $100 million in ad revenue on it”—and yet he stays with the same woman. Why isn't that in Guinness? True, staying faithful to Miss Melania is like staying true to your Ferrari Testarossa, but still, think of the opportunities!”
And now, finally, to the actual game of golf they played together...
TRUMP PLAYS GOLF fast. And well. We're on 11 and he still hasn't missed a fairway. OK, there's been a stray mulligan or two, but mostly he hits it low and far and straight. On 3, he drove it 310 yards, I kid you not. Three hundred and 10. Man is 56 years old. Doesn't matter how much hellajack you've got, you can't buy a golf game. He owns the joint so he parks the cart all the places he wants the rest of the world not to—edges of greens and backs of tee boxes. This makes for a very fast round. We will end up going 18 in three hours and 15 minutes and that includes stopping often to harangue the stonemason, the path paver, and the greenskeeper to redo the bricks, or retrim a tree, or repave a path that is not absolutely, immaculately Trumpalicious.
Reilly immediately admits that Trump is good, but he does take mulligans consistently. Which is no big deal. There's also something inherently Trumpian about parking the car where you aren't supposed to park the cart. If Barack Obama owned a golf course, he would follow the rules more closely than anyone, would agonize over making sure he never failed to repair a single divot. This is both a source of Trump's flaws, and a signal example of his basic humanity.
More on Trump's golf game and tendency to tell absolute whoppers...
DID YOU EVER have a friend in high school who would just tell you the most outrageous lies? Stuff like, “You know, my aunt is Farrah Fawcett.” And you and your buddies give him a wedgie because you know it will turn out like it always turns out, which is that his aunt once had a friend who k“new the lady who cut Farrah Fawcett's hair. Well, Trump is that kid, constantly making you write outrageous, stupid, impossible things he says into your notebook, accompanied by a scrawled CHECK THIS!!! But then—against all logic—most of them turn out to be true!
HERE'S ONE: TRUMP says he won the club championship at Trump International. Now he is a very good player. He ain't no 3, as he's been listed in business magazines, but he's a good 6, and at 7, I'd take him all day for a partner, loser sweeps the streets of Baghdad for a year. I'd even say he is the best-playing billionaire I know. However, I just don't see him winning a club championship. But damned if it didn't check out: In the first year of the club, he won the match-play championship. The guy who lost to him in the final said, “I thought I should let him win the first year. I didn't want him to raise my dues.” Stuff like that torques Trump's rump. If he wins, they let him. If he loses, he's a big blowhard. “Guys call me all the time, they want to come beat me at golf. So I'll bet some guy and he'll beat me and he'll go back to his club and brag to everybody about how he whipped Donald Trump's ass. What he doesn't mention is the five shots a side I gave him.”
On Trump the man...
YOU CAN SEE why his ex-wives still sort of like him. The man is flamboyant, creative, energetic, unpredictable, fun, and nuts. I mean, yes, everybody over the age of six sees how attention-needy he is, how full of himself he is, how if the conversation strays from him for 15 seconds, he lassoes it back around to himself. But you can also tell that at least half of him knows it and is chuckling right along with you. Yeah, he requires a lot of attention, but at least there's a lot to attend to. He's Big and Tasty—a complete whopper of a personality.
And the section on Trump's scoring fibs, tendency to give himself puts, chip ins, mulligans, best balls, and outright lies on his scorecard.
WHEN A MAN exaggerates, stretches, and twists the truth into origami every other 30 seconds, you're pretty much expecting him to cheat like a monkey in golf. So, yeah, Trump fudges. And he pencils. And he smudges. But at least he does it openly. Nothing worse than a sneak cheat. For instance, on the par-5 16th hole, I hit it close for a birdie 4 and he was still off the green, pin high in 4. So he says, “Great birdie! This is good, right?” and scoops it up with his wedge. First guy in history to give himself a chip-in. But I know a lot of big-time, seven-figure-a-year businessmen who do this. You think messing with the bottom line stops in the budget reports? It's like Atlanta Journal-Constitution sports columnist Steve Hummer once wrote: “According to a recent survey, 82 percent of corporate execs cheat at golf. It can also be extrapolated that 18 percent cheat on surveys.” What are you going to do, call the marshal? It's his course, his club, his world. And besides, he fixed my driver swing. “You're coming over the top instead of under with that driver“ he said. “Try it like this . . .” and he repaired my monster driver slice, just like that. What's funny is what Trump does vs. what Trump says. “Make sure you write that I play my first ball,” he says. “You don't get a second ball in this life.” And that's true, except for on 1 and 13 and 17. And he also says, “I don't like to take putts. That's not a true reflection of a man's score.” And that's true, too, except for the putts he took on every other hole, plus the occasional chip-in, and, of course, the one time he said, “I made a 5, but give me a 4. I've got to take at least one newspaper 4 today.” Again, at least he's out front with it. He shot 36-39–75. And thus you see how Trump's game is 80-proof. Not that he wasn't good enough to beat me. I shot 45-38–83. Trump acted like I had just shot 59 at Pine Valley. “I'm just so damn impressed!” he hollered. “You are the King! The way you hit it, you really ought to consider the Senior Tour!” He is saying this as I'm paying him the $10 I lost to him.
And wrapping up...
Loved Trump. Loved the lies. Loved the truths. Loved the bullshit. Loved the beauty. But, as I collapse into a hotel room that is finally, blissfully quiet, I decide Trump was absolutely truthful about one thing. One day is enough, Baby.
I recently bought a discount copy of Reilly's later book, all about Trump and golf, Commander in Cheat. It looks to be pure TDS, but my mother has loved Reilly since I was a kid and hated Trump since he stiffed a friend of the family on work at one of his AC casinos, so I thought it would make a fine beach read for her. Still, it's sad to see how Reilly wrote about Trump in 2007, and how he talks about him now. How did we all end up here? Why is it that quirky sports journalism pays so badly, with Sports Illustrated either dead or a shadow of itself, so that a guy like Reilly who was a legend is stuck doing third rate punditry for cash? Why is it that a jovial guy like Trump, whose life has been nothing but blessed, is so angry all the time? Why is our entire politics built around Trump, a guy who is mostly just himself? What decisions did we all make that got us from there to here?
I tend to take Reilly's 2007 assessment more seriously as journalism: Trump is an excellent golfer, a fun guy, and an inveterate but generally harmless liar. Larger than life, blustering, cartoonish and buffoonish, more human than most anyone.
The whole book is on LibGen, where I just downloaded it to make looking things up easier than going back to my parents' house and finding my childhood copy, I highly recommend it for a light summer read.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3mo ago
What's your current take on the ongoing Ukraine diplomatic drama? Are the Trump Talks likely to lead to the Trump Treaty? Or are they just ongoing comedy and flailing? What does a durable peace treaty look like these days?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9mo ago
One of the Most Despicable Characters I’ve Read About in Years, and I Just Read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Earlier, we talked about the sexual dynamics at play in pledging a sorority, inspired by reading through this series. Now I want to dig into the other major strain of the series: race and Greek Life in Alabama. It’s an interesting article, talking about actual real-life integration of an institution in 2013. We’re talking about the Obama years here, people! This story has everything: hot blonde elites cavorting in grey uniforms, burning crosses, a gay Uncle Tom with a humiliation fetish, a sinister political bloc designed to get the best seats at football games, a moral universe that doesn’t seem capable of considering any race outside of ADOS and Sons of the Confederacy, and a band of Nice White Liberals who didn’t seem to ask any black kids about what they wanted. I’ll be offering money-quotes and commentary below, to our author:
When I started working on a story about Greek Life, I did not think I'd end up recounting a 1980s stakeout and car chase. But then again, I had no idea about the Machine. And neither do most people in this country. Even some students on UA campus don’t know that it’s anything more than a rumor. But for almost a century, this elite group has been at the center of Greek Life at the University of Alabama. The Machine started at the University of Alabama a century ago — some date its inception to 1914, others as far back as 1888. Its real name is Theta Nu Epsilon, and it operates as a kind of meta-fraternity: an alliance, basically, that acts on the behalf of Greek Life. Every year, The Machine picks candidates from Greek organizations to run for everything from SGA President to student senators; it then supports their campaigns by allegedly pressuring fraternity and sorority members to vote for that candidate. Think Tammany Hall, only instead of controlling the election for New York City mayor, they’re compelling fraternity brothers to get out there and vote for the Machine candidate for homecoming queen. We were unable to find any situations in which the university has officially acknowledged that the Machine exists, and several people told us that it had never happened. For decades, it was made up of only white men. (There were no Black students allowed on Alabama’s campus until 1963, when the school was forced to desegregate. There were white sororities before 1963, but women were not invited to join the Machine — until, as you’ll see below, their votes became necessary.)
“Today's college leaders are tomorrow's presidents and US representatives,” Elizabeth says. “Especially in Alabama, [college] is the breeding ground for people who go on to be your local and state elected politicians.” Put differently, at UA, you learn a very specific way that power is accumulated and wielded. Namely: through The Machine. The Machine-to-wider-Alabama-politics pipeline was laid in the very early years of the Machine. J. Lister Hill, born in 1894, is believed to be one of the founding members of UA’s chapter of Theta Nu Epsilon (which became known as The Machine). He also helped start the SGA at UA and served as its first president. He then went on to become one of Alabama's US Senators, and was a vocal dissenter of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. But Hill was just the first of many to reportedly make the jump from Bama SGA to the political big time. Current US Senator for Alabama Katie Britt, Britt’s predecessor in the US Senate Richard Shelby, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, the late federal judge Robert Vance, and the late US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black all allegedly went through the Machine-to-politics pipeline. Oh, and another name: Joe Espy, lawyer to a former Alabama Governor, and also a former UA trustee. Today, recent Machine-backed SGA members are reportedly connected at the White House, in US congress, in the Alabama state house, and on the Tuscaloosa City Council.
We, of course, know about The Machine, because the UA alums among our own membership brought it up immediately. I do think that it needs to be situated within a larger late-nineteenth century yen for secret societies in American colleges at the time. This is when Skull and Bones and Wolf’s Head got big at Yale, along with imitators at Cornell in Quill and Dagger and the Friars at UPenn. It was a common tradition across the country. Having a mutual secret is one of the best ways to bind people together, and I truly believe in the aspect of the agoge that requires young men to commit minor crimes together to bond. At the time of its formation, The Machine was pretty normal within the broader college landscape, and it only developed into what it is today slowly.
As an org-of-orgs, the Machine could hold an internal election to determine SGA president, give its endorsement to the Greek Life membership, and then leverage that support to win a majority of votes. Win the room of frat bosses, you win the support of their supporters, and with a few girlfriends and hangarounds, you win the whole thing. With a third of votes already in their pocket, and turnout low, they’d only need to persuade a small number of outside students. Given that people have a documented desire to vote for the winner, and to associate themselves with powerful secret societies, the Machine endorsement rumor probably brings in some unaffiliated cuck voters on its own. But note that this is only possible inasmuch as your orgs favor loyalty to each other and to the Machine over any other ideological predilection or occupation. They have to be loyal, a trait already prized and selected for in fraternity brothers. For decades the Machine functioned just on the votes of the fraternities, until the university was integrated by force during the civil rights era...
[I]n 1976, a Black student named Cleo Thomas decided to run for SGA president — the first Black student to attempt a run. He won, even without Machine support, because he struck his own alliance with Black students, independents, and white sororities — a sort of counter-Machine voting bloc. For the first time in history, the Machine was a minority. “It was at that point that the Machine began to see the strategic value of bringing women on board,” John told me. By bringing sororities into the Machine, they could shore up a larger voting bloc and minimize the chances of a Cleo Thomas situation happening again. Which is exactly what happened.
This is sort of the path of American liberalism in a microcosm. Blacks, seeking to escape the yolk of white supremacy, ally with white women, seeking rights. Traditional white male power centers break up this alliance by co-opting white women, given them some power to prevent them from voting with the Blacks. It’s almost too good to be true!
The major sororities and fraternities at UA remained entirely white until 2013, when the university administration finally forced the issue. First they tried being subtle:
Blame it on inertia, blame it on tradition, blame it on racism, attribute it to Black students gravitating towards the historically Black sororities and fraternities on campus — whatever the reason, university administrators understood that the optics were very bad. In 2001, they actively assisted incoming freshman Melody Twilley — the first Black student to Rush the all-white sororities — by setting up meetings with sorority leaders and facilitating recommendations at a number of houses. But the Machine, according to the Los Angeles Times, allegedly “didn’t want to let her in.” And it got its way. The sororities ignored Melody and the university administration. And… that was the end of it. E. Culpepper Clark, a dean at the university and author of The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama, declared “God almighty, this is sad.” But it doesn’t appear that any further action was taken. (Similar to yesterday’s piece, we reached out to all of the named sororities and fraternities concerning components of this story; none have responded).
Imagine being the girl who was flagged as great sorority material, the hottest most demure black valley girl they could find. What a bizarre affectation. I can't imagine wanting to integrate, not a school or a business or even a restaurant, but what is ultimately a friend group. Going in and knowing that at some level, they're only friends with you because the admin told them they had to be. It would be psychological torture! Why would anyone want to be that person? The moment university admin got involved, any sane person with self respect would withdraw! The Los Angeles Times report on the matter does note that:
A few Latina and Asian American students have been accepted in the recent past, and last year, a woman who is part black was picked, though her racial background was unknown at the time.
Which was an interesting omission from the substack series. In the 2024 liberal moral universe, it is much easier to limit your actors to ADOS and Sons of the Confederacy, to the most obvious cases in your universe of racists and victims of racism. When you start including other groups, like Asian girls or Arab guys, things get complicated. What does it mean that the sororities would accept a Chinese girl, this despite the (at the time) liberal Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy
There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.
After all, southern black girls probably have vastly more in common with southern white girls than either have with Chinese girls. The white and black girls probably have families more rooted in the USA, similar cuisines and traditions, similar religious affiliations. This blindspot towards non-black minorities is one of my perpetual frustrations with American liberal attempts at intellectualizing race and racism. The book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, widely feted, frustrated me to no end on this count. Its comparison between race and the hindu Caste system was hopeless facile, and represented a deep misunderstanding of how a caste system functioned. Caste systems aren’t about the people on the top or the people on the bottom, they’re about the people in the middle: by convincing those in the middle to accept their subjugation to the strong in exchange for their elevation over the weak. Consider the response from the Greeks when the Ottoman Empire abolished the order of races:
In 1865, when the equality of all subjects of the Ottoman Empire was proclaimed, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, a high-ranking official observed, "whereas in former times, in the Ottoman State, the communities were ranked, with the Muslims first, then the Greeks, then the Armenians, then the Jews, now all of them were put on the same level. Some Greeks objected to this, saying: 'The government has put us together with the Jews. We were content with the supremacy of Islam.'"
The role of Asian and Hispanic girls is under explored in the piece, while blacks are the most common minority at UA, they’re not the only ones! Looking at edge cases is how you determine things! Discrimination hits the black girl but not the Asian girl. Why? Racism is one explanation, and the one that the Nice White Liberals settle on. Ultimately they’d find another valley girl Jackie Robinson and inform the sororities in no uncertain terms that they must be friends with her:
[Kennedi] had a 4.3 GPA in high school and was salutatorian of her class. Her grandfather was a prominent Alabama judge who happened to sit on the university board of trustees. But in the sorority world, grades and connections can only take you so far. Not a single one of the panhellenic sororities on campus – there were 16 at the time – gave her a bid. Because like Melody Twilley, Kennedi was Black. Every year, hundreds of girls who rush at UA don’t end up with a bid. Sometimes they just didn’t play the game correctly: not enough recs, wrong outfits, too much social media, didn’t talk to enough girls, whatever. But Kennedi’s rejection wasn’t the result of a social faux pas or a fluke of the system. After Rush, a few members of Alpha Gamma Delta came forward and reported that sorority leadership had nixed the tradition of deciding as a group who would make it to the next round of Rush in favor of creating a shortlist — one that didn’t include Cobb. There’s no direct evidence that this change was made specifically to exclude Kennedi. But when those whistleblowers tried to argue for Kennedi’s inclusion, they were shut down by alumni, who according to a report in the Crimson White, said that Kennedi didn’t meet the sorority’s “letter of recommendation requirements.” A member of another sorority, Delta Delta Delta, was quoted in that same article saying the same thing happened in her house: leadership intervened in the recruitment process, and Kennedi was excluded.
Then-university president, Dr. Judy Bonner, was forced to acknowledge segregation within the Greek system. She finally did what the university had refused to do back in 2001: she ordered the sororities to essentially redo Rush with an extended timeline and open admissions policy, all under university supervision. In the aftermath, ten Black women were admitted to traditionally white sororities — including Kennedi. Let’s not forget that this all happened — and I cannot emphasize this enough — in 2013. Rush did return to normal the next year, but the message was clear: maintain this trajectory, or we’ll intervene again. And although the controversy in (again) 2013 was focused on sororities, the changes enacted in its wake affected fraternities as well.
Now, what’s missing from this story, and an alternative explanation I’d like to offer: the Divine Nine.
To clarify, Greek Life at Bama wasn’t entirely white at the time — just the “top tier” houses, many of which were founded as exclusively white organizations in the post-Civil War South. There was also the Divine Nine, a flourishing system of Black houses also called Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs). Of those nine, eight have chapters at the University of Alabama. Like the historically white Greek Organizations, each of these BGLO houses has stereotypes and traditions and tremendous pressure to follow in the paths of your parents.
These traditional black houses had their own organizations, and may soon boast a president among their national alums. Nowhere in the news stories about the liberal “heroes” trying to integrate the top sororities at UA were there any voices from these organizations. No one seemed to want to ask them their opinions. But consider: when you take the hot, rich, sophisticated, smart black girls and you go to them and say “hey, you’re good enough that you can rush the White Sorority instead of being stuck in the Black sorority;” you’re implicitly denigrating the Black sorority, and you’re permanently dooming it to obscurity. Without the hot, rich, Black girls coming in, the Black sorority will slowly lose prestige and power, left with only the poor, ugly, or those obsessed with race issues, a second tier pick. I’d love to know if the presidents of the BGLOs wanted the white orgs to integrate, or if they demanded that they not integrate behind the scenes.
The founders of the Hells Angels, who only admitted white and hispanic members, said later that they had the restrictive clause in order to avoid conflict with the black prison gangs over membership: the blacks would have responded with violence if the Hells Angels had recruited black members, as blacks prisoners were a patrimony of the black gangs and an integrated gang would threaten their hold over them. Similarly, promising black freshmen were the patrimony of the BLGOs. It was in the interest of the BLGOs for the best black candidates to end up in their houses, the worst outcome for them is for the white orgs to admit only the cream of the black crop. The last thing they want is for the university to handpick a hottie with a 4.0+ and pluck her out of BLGO life into the “real” sorority. That kills the BLGOs, slowly or quickly, knocking them out of top-tier contention. Suddenly the BLGOs are the only racially discriminatory greek orgs, and they are only racially discriminatory Greek orgs, they offer nothing else. It’s the tragedy of how affirmative action has impacted the formation of black communities in the United States, the Talented Tenth is pulled off and fawned over by whites, handed easy diversity positions, when they could be improving the quality of black neighborhoods and communities. Rather than the university demanding that the BGLOs be accorded more prestige within the system, they chose to tell the white kids: you have to have at least a few black friends. Another token black friend forced into the frats:
Enter Jared
Reading this substack author talk about Jared Hunter filled me with a level of disgust it is hard for me to properly articulate. I’m still grappling with just how much I hate this guy from his words and the descriptions of his actions, given that he is just some kid. A portrait of a grasping uppity hanger on:
[Jared] saw a different path to power: one that went straight through the big, old school, incredibly white fraternity houses. Jared has understood himself as ambitious from an early age. He went to a prestigious prep school; he did debate and mock trial; he did Boys States, the nerdy statewide program for kids hell bent on going into politics. His dream was to go to Georgetown University, a key feeder program for the federal government. But when the University of Alabama offered him a full ride and then some, he took the deal. Jared’s father had been a member of Omega Psi Phi, one of Divine Nine Black houses, and was dedicated to the fraternity. After graduating, he continued to pay his dues, helped organize their annual New Year’s Eve fundraiser, and religiously attended fraternity meetings. “Like, literally every Sunday,” Jared told me. It was a big part of his father’s identity. But Omega Psi Phi didn’t interest Jared, in part because he didn’t feel like he’d fit in there. He’d grown up as one of the only Black students in a wealthy — and mostly white — community outside of Montgomery, Alabama. These were the types of guys he knew; he’d gone to high school with them and wore the same clothes as them from the same bass fishing shops. He knew, in other words, how to be the one Black friend to the rich white people who’d swear there wasn’t a racist bone in their body (just in their family graveyards).
Jared accepted the bid with no delusions. He knew they were getting something from him — the appearance of diversity. And he was getting something from them. It’s the primary reason Jared was so intent on joining one of the more elite white fraternities. “I thought that being in an IFC fraternity, I would have opportunities to be more involved with SGA [Student Government Association] and other organizations on campus that I was interested in,” Jared told me. One of those other organizations was even more elite than the fraternity itself: The Machine. The way Jared first came to understand the Machine, he told me, was as a “pipeline” for Alabama politics — Jared’s ultimate ambition. Joining the fraternity was just the first step in that process. Next would be getting the Machine’s backing and winning the SGA presidency, thereby firmly positioning himself for the political future he’d imagined. Which, just a year after the system had rejected him entirely, is what he set about doing.
Tons of kids come into undergrad with these kinds of political ambitions. And Jared was far from the only one to come in willing to do the most disgusting things to achieve them. Maybe, like Caro said of LBJ, he took a perverse pride in wheeling and dealing, in being cynical, as though it made him better than the others. But I just can’t stomach this:
When I asked Jared how it felt to be aligning himself with a historically very racist secret society, he paused, and said: “You know, it's shitty and unfortunate, but where I'm from, that could be said about so many different entities.” He pointed out that the high school he attended, St. James School in Montgomery, was founded in 1955 as a direct result of the Brown v. Board decision. It’s what’s known as a “segregation academy”: a private school that opened to white students after public schools were forced to integrate. For Jared, when it came to the Machine, the ends justified the means. As he put it, their history is “worth reflecting on and acknowledging. But I don't also want something that's going to prohibit especially Black and brown people's career furtherance.” In other words, if the Machine could offer an opportunity, especially an opportunity that people like Jared had historically been denied, then he was gonna take it. But first, he needed to convince an organization hell-bent on maintaining the status quo… to change. And there was still plenty of change that desperately needed to come to campus. We went in depth on [Jared’s] campaign earlier this week, but we didn’t mention the unusual move he made during it. He published an open letter in the Crimson White, openly acknowledging that he had the Machine’s support and backing. “Running for office with the support of a group with such a checkered past was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made,” he wrote. Jared saw the acknowledgment as a way to build more transparency into the system: yes, he had the backing of the Machine, but he promised to represent all students. “Not only does the Greek community not fully define our campus,” he wrote, “it does not fully define myself as an individual.” It was a bold move, and I’m guessing it raised eyebrows among some Machine members — remember, this was the group that had allegedly stolen an entire run of that same newspaper to prevent its members from being publicly named, and which refused to even publicly acknowledge its own existence.
God this kind of whinging bugs me. There’s something so self-satisfied about this, knowingly taking advantage of systems that you claim to be better than. There’s a full throated defense one can make of The Machine, or any other institution whose past you don’t approve of. And if you want to make it I’m not going to mock you. But this is just being an open Uncle Tom, and expecting Johny Reb to reward you for playing coon while the white liberals tear up at how oppressed you’ve been. Disgusting.
Jared was willing to put himself into a box in order to get into a fraternity— he just didn’t realize how small that box still was, or how much of himself he’d still have to hide. As he described this all to me, I started nodding my head. “Ahhhh, so what they actually wanted was… Clarence Thomas,” I said. Jared immediately started laughing. “Yes,” he responded, “Yes! That’s exactly what they wanted. They wanted somebody in their Wrangler jeans to roll up in their F-150 and basically be them, but Black.”
White kids wanting to have friends who are like them is a Human Rights Violation. They don’t like white kids who aren’t like them either! And Jared was just saying how much he was just like those guys.
Kappa Alpha Order, commonly known as KA, was co-founded by a soldier who shot himself in the foot and actually had to sit out most of the Civil War. But that hasn’t stopped members from openly fetishizing its Confederate roots. Their website still lists Gen. Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” for, among other things, his “exemplary ideals.” And from the 1950s, it began designating one week in spring “Old South Week” to celebrate this dubious history, the climax of which was the Old South Ball. A bacchanal of antebellum nostalgia, the ball was where KA brothers could play beer pong in rebel uniforms while sorority girls outfitted in Scarlett O’Hara-style hoop-skirts and ribbons took photos draped over the fraternity’s decorative cannon.
One does have to laugh at shooting himself in the foot. But what’s so wrong with the myth of General Lee? I’ve talked before about growing up, in the 90s in the North, with myths of General Lee giving up his train seat to an old black woman. There’s a version of Lee, and the war between the states!, that lets us all have our pride and our brotherhood! That’s how you bring the country together! But Jared doesn’t want to make this argument, he wants to victimize himself for liberal sympathy while dancing in shoe polish for his frat brothers.
No one’s under the illusion that the Greek System at Bama is inclusive. Acceptance still hinges on your willingness to bend to the status quo — and not just when it comes to race. There’s part of Jared’s story I didn’t include up top. During his first year at UA, when he was being courted by ATO, and before being dropped… Jared posted to Facebook about gay marriage (this was the mid-2010s, remember, so college students were still posting things on Facebook). It was pretty innocuous, and said nothing about the fact that Jared — who, at the time, was very much closeted — was also gay. But Jared believes it was enough to immediately stop all overtures from the various fraternities that had shown an interest.
There are obvious, mechanical reasons why someone may not want to live in a frat house with a homosexual. That is not discrimination in and of itself. It’s not clear to me what a gay kid would really want out of fraternity life, other than, you know, the obvious. As the series continued, I was increasingly convinced that Jared had a weird fetish.
He would ultimately win the Machine nomination for SGA president, and win the position, but when he got there all they seem to want is to get good tickets to the football games:
Jared didn’t have to run any of his appointees by the Machine. But that’s not because the Machine was more open-minded than he’d expected. It’s because the Machine, he quickly found out… kind of doesn’t care. Which reminds me of Alex’s experience, in that basement, being told to vote for people with no further reasoning. It feels like something nefarious is going on — I mean, this is an organization that insists on meeting in basements late at night and dedicates so much energy to controlling the SGA. But as you keep digging, you begin to realize: there’s no secret agenda. The agenda is just…winning.
Ultimately any successful political organization has, as its number one goal, winning. Movements with ideological convictions among its members are unstable, prone to splitters. A laser focus on winning and maintaining power, on in group loyalty, allows for the careful husbanding of power, and its spending on carefully metered goals as needed. The author comes to a similar conclusion:
And here’s my theory: The Machine and its influence waxes and wanes in cycles. It exists to support Greek Life’s interests, so when Greek Life is under threat, it gets active. In the late 1960s and early 70s, fraternity and sorority enrollment nationwide fell sharply. Blame it on the counter-culture, blame it on institutional crackdowns, blame it on feminism or refusals to take part in such glaringly white institutions….for whatever reason, Greek Life’s hold on campus culture was loosening. Cue: the most active and violent period in The Machine’s modern history. Right now, Greek Life seems to be thriving at UA. Since 2000, the percentage of Bama students in fraternities and sororities has nearly doubled — in part due to the influx of out-of-state students in search of a “traditional” college experience (e.g., one where they get to “act like campus royalty”). The Machine has nothing to worry about, so it's gone relatively dormant, like a well-fed bear. But bears don’t hibernate forever — and when they wake up, they wake up mad.
Jared would finish up his character arc dropping out of SGA and Greek Life after getting a DUI going to Taco Bell and coming out as gay. He’d go on to law school at noted anti-racist institution…Washington and Lee (Shock horror!), where he no doubt remains the token black gay conservative. I’m convinced one of the reasons conservative find affirmative action so distressing is their experience with affirmative action in conservative politics. Nowhere can a black person rise farther with less talent than by claiming to be a Republican. Clarence Thomas is both the most eloquent arguer against, and the most persuasive example against, affirmative action. Jared might be a close second, though.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8mo ago
I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign.
This feels like it rhymes with the argument that because most gun deaths are suicides, it's net negative for my own well being to own a gun.
It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9mo ago
On The Edge of Glory Disconnected Thoughts on Nate Silver’s New Book
TLDR/Judgment: Nate Silver’s latest falls flat in a pale imitation of the kind of thing that is done on the Rat-Adjacent internet. He plods through soft-rock covers of Moldbug, SA, Big Yud on his way to no particular conclusions. Nate strikes me as a man without a country, who doesn’t know who his friends and who his enemies are, able only to observe and unable to understand changing.
I’ve been a Nate Silver fan since the PECOTA days, so I won’t pretend to total neutrality. Nate is, to be simple, my kind of dude. I bought his new book on a trip to the beach and just finished it. I enjoyed it more than my thoughts here will probably imply, but the pop-sociology and science here just doesn’t add up to a cohesive thesis. I’lll comment that I’ve gotten addicted to poker, again, as a result of reading it, evidence of its infectious joy. But the core thesis of the book is so thoroughly muddled, that I’m left agreeing with Hanania that a lot of books could be better as blog posts.
This Would Have Been Better as an Email
At core I agree with Hanania, a lot of nonfiction books I read today seem like blog posts that have been collected, or a special series of blog posts or podcast episodes that have been collated into a book. Much of it has to do with consumer spending habits. Spending on books is in decline, but many consumers (your humble commenter included) will rarely if ever spend money on a blog, but will spend money on a book quite happily. I’ve rarely subscribed to premium on a podcast or substack, and when I have I’ve nearly always unsubscribed within a month or two disappointed with the cost vs the premium content I got access to. Occasionally I’ll get talked into subscribing, but my net spend is pretty low, and to be honest I feel like kind of a dope when I do it, like I’m wasting money. I think it’s just hard for one or a few content producers to make enough standard content to attract subscribers, and then squeeze out enough premium content to make subscribing worth it. On the other hand, at this point in my life, I’m actively happy to spend money at my local small bookstore, I feel good about spending money on a book to support the store, and I’m happy to buy one from a writer I already like. Meanwhile, my subscription to Audible means I end up buying one audiobook a month, and I’m happy to buy something from a creator I like. Perfect example would be Karina Longworth’s Seduction, which was essentially identical to a slightly-longer season of her podcast You Must Remember This, covering similar topics in a similar way. I was happy to buy it, I love Longworth’s podcast and want to support her work, and enjoyed it; even though I’ll probably never pay on her Patreon for the main podcast. So the phenomenon of books that feel like blog posts, for me, ties back to customer willingness to pay for books vs blog posts. I’d be more likely to buy a physical Scott Alexander or Richard Hanania. This strategy makes sense even if you’re already making good money on your premium substack, as the existence of some subset of customers that will buy the book but not the podcast gives you a chance to hit more customers; I’d also imagine that for example Seduction sold well to people who read every book about Howard Hughes who might never have heard of her podcast.
Overall, this book might just not be meant for me, or other Mottizens, in that it is an intro course to so much that I already know about, Effective Altruism and the Trolley Problem and the idea of Expected Value. But as is, I just don’t think it did enough to justify its efforts.
Describing the Elephant
Which brings us back to Silver and On the Edge. This doesn’t feel like Silver’s online work, Silver has always been more small scale and topical in his blogging. But it feels like someone’s blog posts, maybe because of the core conceit of the book, and how it fits into other blogs I’ve read over the years from Moldbug to SA. It felt like a riff on an internet conversation that happens all over the DR and rat-adjacent internet.
Silver’s core thesis is that one can distinguish between two school of thought in American industry and intellectual life: the River and the Village. As near as I can tell, the River consists of Risk Takers; Silver labels everyone from Wall Street traders to professional poker players to sports gamblers to US Army generals and astronauts. The Village is largely coterminous with the Liberal Establishment, the Cathedral, the Blue Tribe elite, all the other terminology that has been mooted around to talk about the media/academia/Democratic Party policy complex. Silver identifies himself as a “Riverian” (a rather unfortunate neologism), while identifying most of those who criticized his election forecasts as Villagers.
The place where I fit in is what I call “the River”. It’s a place for people who are very analytical but also highly competitive. The archetypal activity in the River is poker...There are other communities in the River, though: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sportsbetting, crypto, even effective altruism, all of which are covered extensively in the book. And I found I had a lot in common with these people too, even if I sometimes disagree with their politics. There are traits like decoupling, contrarianism and a high risk tolerance that I share with the River, for better or worse. And these seem to be correlated with extremely high-variance outcomes: tremendous success or tremendous failure (as in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is sort of the antihero of the book).
The Village is portrayed as more risk-averse. And this is my first problem with Silver’s thesis: one of the archetypal activities of the Village is electoral politics (largely from the D ballot) and nothing is a bigger risk than electoral politics. The average state-house candidate in a coastal-urban state is spending thousands of dollars, and months of their time, on what is often at best a fifty/fifty proposition. This is making bets on a level that would gag a professional poker player, not just the money but the time and the reputation; you risk not just monetary loss but potential disgrace and embarrassment. You’re risking making your family a laughingstock. Friends of mine who ran for local positions, got tangled up in school board politics about trans kids in bathrooms and CRT; you risk not just your money spent running, but that some portion of your neighbors thinking you’re a transphobic nutcase obsessed with genital testing, or another portion thinking you’re in favor of boys committing rape in the girl’s bathroom! The risk goes for safe seats just as well as for contested ones, where the result in the general is already determined then the politics reverts to the primary. Where the primary is fixed by the local party machine, the politics reverts back to maneuvering for years prior to the seat opening up. If you want to be a judge, or a city councilman, or a mayor, you’re often spending years sucking up to the right people, going to the right parties, giving money to the right committees. That’s a series of investments, long term slow bets that might never pay off, that would look absurd on any VC spreadsheet. Similar Villager occupations like Academia and Media are positions that one reaches against vast odds (leaving aside nepotism) with enormous odds of failure, and extremely high variance between successful outcomes. A successful hedge fund investor might hit a few 100x deals and might lose 1x, a popular writer or musician hits, what, 1000000x what an unsuccessful writer or musician gets?
Meanwhile, some of the model Riverians* he cites strike me as rather weak in their risk tolerance or in their calculation of expected value. US Army generals get where they got not through bold risk taking, but mostly through careerism and political maneuvering, though perhaps you could cite their risk-averseness as the problem with US Military performance in the past sixty years. Maybe we need to increase upside for great generals, rather than putting them in situations where the upside to success is largely identical to while the downside to apparent failure is large.He cites Bill Ackman’s twitter tantrums about supposed academic anti-semitism as symbolic of the conflict between the River and the Village; I can think of nothing more Villager (collectivist, tribal, risk averse) and less Riverian (individualistic, analytical, risk neutral) than advocating for your ethnic and tribal interests to be privileged over those of others. Nate doesn’t really talk about Idpol, and where he does reference it he associates it with the Village, but Ackman (and Trump to some extent) are clearly engaging in classic Idpol plays, just for a different team than the Village.
The softness in the categorization, along with the way that Silver’s categories overlap and intersect with other versions, gives me suspicion that we’re dealing with the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Silver’s Village is very like SA’s Blue Tribe, Moldbug’s Cathedral, the various Republican conceptions of the Liberal Establishment and the Woke or of Cultural Marxism, even elements of Richard Florida’s Creative Class. Every version gropes towards a vision of the Them, this great other that is suffocating, strangling the writer. They can feel this out group out there, they can feel Them, but they can’t see Them, they can’t properly describe Them, even if they think they can. The way this out group becomes such a potent Them, the way they describe some things exactly the same but others completely differently, the way it includes or excludes those the writer and his friends, tend to tell me that none of them are exactly accurate, rather that all are grasping at some aspect of the Elephant, and none are really describing it. SA and Yarvin and Silver all want Sillicon Valley in their friends, and outside the Them. Most MAGA Republicans very much categorize Sillicon Valley elites as the core of the Them! Alexander, Yarvin, Silver, and Florida are all Smart Guys, so the fact that they keep trying to come up with a new concept to describe what is largely the same concept rather than building off of each other should tell us that they don’t think the concept has been properly described yet.**
Silver’s River, in turn, has more in common with SA’s Grey Tribe, Moldbug’s Dark Elves, and other elements of Florida’s Creative Class. While Yarvin talks of most people being Hobbits, Silver doesn’t make room for most people at all in his worldview. It might simply be that he doesn’t intend the book to be all encompassing, but at times it feels weird that his map doesn’t include anything outside of these two power centers. Where are the Mountains, or the Deserts, or the Plains? He shares with Florida and SA a tendency to smuggle into his classification system a glorification of a group that he identifies with, places free from the flaws of the rest of the hierarchy. It’s unclear if The River is a classification, or an achievement. At times Silver seems to treat it as a qualification, saying Trump “doesn’t quite make it” on several occasions. So to some extent, it feels as though Silver kicks you out of the River if you lose on too many bets, which is obviously problematic to Silver himself as he points out how randomness can cause even a skilled Poker player or sports gambler to go through long cold streaks. It also calls out a glaring blindspot:
The Only Game in Town
The finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn't see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'I know. But it's the only game in town.' And he went back to the game. — Neil Gaiman
Inasmuch as there is a clear concept at the heart of The River, I’d say that Silver identifies it as a focus on Expected Value, the River is risk-neutral on postive EV bets. If you’re ruthlessly thinking about finding the odds, and happy to make a bet that has only a 5% advantage making it +EV, then you’re a Riverman. Nate’s assumption is that the games are completely fair, if random in nature. Where the odds are unfair or predictably -EV such as slot machines, it is predictably unfair.
There’s one incident which is discussed in the book in which a woman may have cheated on a poker stream. She made an incredibly lucky move, causing her opponent to lose a lot of money to her. As a result, many thought that she cheated. No one ever made it clear exactly how she supposedly cheated, or why, merely that they were certain she had done so because otherwise her actions were irrational. Evidence free, the accusations ultimately flounder, Nate lands on the alternative explanation that she forgot what was in her hand. But I think the implication was that she cheated by knowing what was in her opponents’ hand, and reacting accordingly.
What Nate doesn’t stop to consider, is why he assumes the cards were dealt at random. Why one would go on a poker stream on the internet, or watch one, and assume that it is all fair and on the up-and-up. What stops your host from stacking the decks, marking the cards subtly, rigging the whole room with actors like The Sting to take your money? This grimly appears in the section on VC money, where frauds like Theranos or WeWork are hand-waved as a cost of doing business. Oh, sometimes somebody steals a few billion, but it's fine as long as the whole system keeps rolling along.
Nate’s system can’t conceive of systematic cheating. We get an extensive view of sports gambling, but only the vaguest glance at the idea of cheating. Consider: Kyle Juszczyk, fullback for the 49ers, was a popular prop bet at +/- 4.5 yards receiving Week 1 on Monday night against the Jets. The theory was that Juice was quite likely to get a few extra targets with Christian McCaffrey out for the game, and 4.5 is really low, just one reception could easily break that. But 4.5 is also so low that it would be comically easy for just a few actors to force Juice to get the yards. If Shanahan or Brock Purdy decided to fix that bet, not the game just that prop bet, they could call a few plays designed to get the ball to Juice, and get him the yards pretty easily. Hell, if Saleh from the Jets and a couple linebackers on the defense decided they wanted to give Juice 10 yards, they could leave him open pretty easily. Juszczyk would finish with 2 receptions for 40 yards, winning the bet easily.
He spends a lot of the end of the book examining SBF and FTX, and how overconfident EV calculations about the unknowable are dangerous. But never does he consider the base-rate of unknowability that underlies the simple games he loves. Sports betting lines are no match for a career backup in the NBA with a "sore" knee. Online poker counts on code you can’t see to guarantee fairness, as you play against people you can’t even really prove exist; it could just as easily be a sophisticated slot machine pretending to be an online poker game while slowly taking your money.
Silver tries to cite NFL players as Riverians, but it falls flat again. Football players aren’t making +EV calculations in their decision making, or they never would have dedicated themselves to football in high school and college, knowing that the odds of making it to the NFL after college are just 1.6% while the odds of suffering a chronic injury as a D1 athlete are over 50%. (This calculus probably alters with NIL deals but I don’t follow college sports enough to really say). Rather than taking the odds, NFL players make their own odds. One of the paradoxes of the Moneyball revolution in sports, is that while the analytics are often very useful for analyzing the professional game, every player who arrives in the professional game did so by ignoring the analytics. The core axiom at the heart of most analytical approaches to sports management, the intuitive false hope that is called out over and over again as the core of “dumb” sports fandom is that players don’t really change outside of decline. Analytics is a world of entropy. Players don’t reliably tweak their swing, improve their plate approach, find a new pitch, get in the Best Shape of His Life in the off season, etc. Those stories are the chaff in the mill of traditional sports journalism, and the constant chatter of WIP sports radio call ins sure that if the coach just played this other player who looked good in limited time…
But no player gets to the pros by accepting things as they are. Every player who makes it to the Show believed that he was different, special, and he did change when he needed to. He did get in The Best Shape of His Life, he did adjust his swing or learn a new pitch, he did improve. He did exactly what they said you can’t really do.*** They, by definition, did not accept the odds. Dumb money can drive out smart money. If people are willing to take -EV odds, for reasons outside your model, then you’ll never get the edge you need to make +EV bets. This is the case in many risky professions, acting or athletics or politics, you have to take the long odds, they’re the only game in town.
And of course that brings us to Silver’s most famous project: election prediction. Nate spends a lot of time trying to defend his record on election modeling, pointing out that his “edge” over other models would be huge for a sports gambler or a hedge fund, even if he can’t predict with 100% accuracy. But how useful is it compared to the ability to steal an election? The polls all become so much noise if the vote counts aren’t real, just like calculations figuring out the correct number of yards that Kyle Juszczyk will run after catching a pass from Purdy becomes noise if the team decides they want him to get those points or if they don’t want him to get those points. This is a massive blindspot for his project, and inasmuch as it is coherent for the entire Riverian concept. Positive and negative EV assertions can only be reached by creating a closed universe, analogous to a poker game
Leaders don’t accept polls and determine a +EV path through them. That’s the path of the risk averse, the noise before defeat. Leaders don’t accept the facts, they change them. Trump didn’t accept the issue polling, he changed it. Tariffs were almost dead as a policy tool in a world where the Ds and Rs agreed on free trade, Trump has moved the needle to where the question isn’t whether tariffs will be imposed, it is how many and against whom. Problems are changeable, and then the polling will follow.
And of course leaders and sports stars don’t accept the rules. “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’!” Silver can cite to his polls all he wants, and he can try to model them to reality, but they’re little use unless we grapple with the realities: examining the fundamentals of the race doesn’t matter if voters don’t really believe in reality anymore. If the same people look at the same data and see a good economy and a bad economy, what can economic indicators tell us? And if there were widespread cheating, how would Silver ever know? Eventually he’d just adjust the model to show a shift in the vote to mirror the persistent cheating, and have a good enough model, and be satisfied. But that wouldn’t get us much of anywhere here in the real world.
*One of my minor quibbles with Silver: I feel like he does the woke-writer thing of shoehorning in “diverse” characters wherever he can. He’ll say openly that most of his Riverdwellers are male, and hint that they are disproportionately white and asian in many cases; but his examples are plucked disproportionately from women for the group, and his hypotheticals are often female. Just enough to be noticeable, and sticks out to me a little.
**An alternative interpretation is that Silver is engaging in Hidden Power Levels, utilizing what is largely ripped from Yarvin or SA, but not acknowledging their influence to avoid being stoned by association with them.
***This is why fitness is, at some level, inherently associated with Rightism and individualism, by definition anyone who has achieved some level of fitness has personally put in effort and overcome adversity through hard work, in a visceral way, no one else could do the work for you.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1mo ago
That being said, I am hopeful that the uneasy alliance between the new conservative, Trumpian movement and traditional Christians is finally fracturing. To bring in another CW point, Trump recently posted an AI generated image of himself as the Pope. This understandably pissed off a lot of Christians, and led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)
May I ask why? I'm a Catholic, and not a particular fan of Trump, and I found the picture both inevitable and mildly amusing. I'm seemingly one of the few big fans of the late Pope Francis, and of the papacy in general, but "I should be pope" just seems in the universe of a mildly irreverent joke. In the same way that a local church used to have a sign up saying they were looking for a new pastor, and I joked about applying. If anything, joking about becoming the Pope is, in my mind, a positive in that it places the papacy as a position of value.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
The steelman against taking harsh illiberal action towards any particular target over a rape panic is that one needs to talk about averages. What's the Value Over Replacement Rapist (VORR) that the Paki immigrants are bringing to the table here?
Frequent panics have been had on American college campuses about rape, and particularly about Fraternities, with the result that colleges have forced organizations dating back decades to close their doors, and that campuses set up kangaroo courts to persecute young men who were even vaguely accused of wrongdoing. Activists continue to beat the drums about Rape Culture, and accuse campuses of providing impunity to rapists, promoting disrespect of and aggression against women. But, inconveniently, the numbers show that girls in college are much less likely to be sexually assaulted than girls in the same age group not in college. Whatever bad things colleges and fraternities were accused of doing, they weren't delivering much VORR! It's tough to make the argument that colleges were particularly bad on sexual assault (at least not without making the kind of racist/classist arguments on demographics that campus feminists would sooner be raped than make out loud).
Similarly, as an American Catholic I've endured a thousand lazy pedo-priest jokes, and probably made quite a few myself though I think mine are clever and cutting rather than lazy. And while the abuses of the Catholic church are horrible, they've turned out not to be nearly unique. Rather, Catholics suffer for being the largest and most organized denomination in America, and as such the abuses are larger in scale, and are easily attributable to The Catholic Church, where stripmall startup Evangelicals and Megachurches only represent themselves. The Southern Babtist Convention, the second largest denomination, and Jehovah's Witnesses have turned up similar piles of cases. And the independent evangelical megachurches haven't done much better. This clown got caught in a sting operation soliciting a minor for sex and showing up to meet her at a motel, plead it out in some corrupt bullshit where he went to counseling, and now he's back in the pulpit every Sunday in Virginia Beach for a huge congregation. So, has the Catholic Church done wrong? Sure. But do they have much VORR over other denominations? That's a tougher question.
Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.
Or it might be a case that genuinely delivers a great deal of VORR, I haven't actually read much about it in years and years as this case is so old at this point, and I have no idea where one would find an unbiased source.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2mo ago
This is great tinfoil. I love it.
Somehow the kids are having less sex and doing less drugs but no one who was upset about the kids having sex or doing drugs is happy about it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10mo ago
Steelmanning the Strawman: Trump Has A Point About Kamala
OR
Bill DeBlasio is Blacker than Kamala Harris
TLDR: Trump’s attacks against Kamala, while characteristically garbling a more logical point, get at a deeper truth: why should black Americans (or anyone else) vote for Kamala as a Black Candidate when her experience of blackness (inasmuch as such a thing exists) is atypical? This demonstrates how progressive racialists lack a cohesive philosophy of why diversity is good, and who qualifies for diversity points and why.
Trump’s instantly infamous remarks* at the NABJ conference have been universally decried and only sporadically defended. As is typical, Trump has made a mush of a very incisive argument: when progressives tell us that Kamala Harris is an historic candidate for being a black woman, what does that mean? When they say, or at least imply, that Kamala Harris’ Blackness gives us a reason to vote for her, what are those reasons and why should we care about them?
To be clear, Kamala Harris is of course, literally half black and has never hidden that fact or pretended otherwise to my knowledge. She had a Jamaican black father, an Indian mother, attended Howard University (the premier Historically Black College), where she joined a black sorority. We can’t rule out that she lied about her race in some small way at some small point, perhaps lied to somebody in high school, or misreported her race on some official documents where she thought it might benefit her. But let’s compare her to another Democratic politician who traded on a questionable claim to blackness, one who I think was very briefly her competitor in the 2020 presidential primary:
Bill Deblasio is Blacker than Kamala
Kamala starts the comparison with a significant lead, on DNA and her Howard degree and whatnot. But let’s consider some other metrics! Bill has more black kids than Kamala does. Bill has more black spouses than Kamala does. Bill’s immediate family (prior to his divorce anyway, but we’ll ignore that for the exercise) had more black people in it than Kamala’s. Kamala hasn’t had a close relationship with her black father in decades, leaving only her sister; Bill had a black wife and black kids. Even if we expand a bit to give Kamala credit for her brother in law and nieces and nephews, Bill pulls away further: his wife had three siblings who probably also had some kids. Bill DeBlasio had more black loved ones than Kamala has now.
That may seem meaningless, but think about how black advocacy groups construct the idea of a leader being “one of [us]” as an important factor. Barack Obama said Trayvon Martin would have looked like his son. Bill DeBlasio could say that. Kamala Harris can’t. In all honesty, many of my friends have talked to me about “the talk” that their parents had with them, that cops would not treat them well and shouldn’t be trusted. Bill had that talk with his son, Kamala never has. When you hear about hate crimes on the news (let’s assume they’re a real fear ad argumentum) Bill would be worried about his wife and his kids, Kamala wouldn’t be worried about the Emhoffs or her mother.
So if DEI, in the sense that its important to put Black Women in charge, is about experiences, then DeBlasio should get more points than Kamala in some ways. But clearly he doesn’t, and no one would say he does. So what does it mean? It’s not in the blood, because no one would say that Harris or Obama before her are less black than Clarence Thomas. So it’s a minimum blood quantum, the one drop rule, but then after that nothing else matters. Which is either a silly way to insist that I make judgments about our country’s leadership, or an offensive one. Silly, because there’s no logical connection between the one drop rule and leadership if we don’t consider anything else, not experiences or percentages. If it's a DNA trait, we should see some who have more and some who have less. Offensive, because if the theory is that leadership is tied to non-Yakubian blood, then they should say that out loud, that this is a racial hierarchy. This dilemma becomes immediately apparent once we strip away the idea of questioning one’s experiences.
The question that Donald Trump is brave enough to ask, even if everyone else is too PC, isn’t “Is Kamala Harris Black?” It is, why should we care? If diversity is good, we should be able to measure its effects, and when it appears and when it doesn’t. I don’t know that Kamala ever lied about her heritage or altered her history. But she has certainly chosen to emphasize one aspect of her heritage where it offered her political advantages dating back quite a while. I’ve heard a hundred times that she grew up in Oakland, never that she spent a lot of time in Canada growing up. I’ve heard a lot about how she identifies with her distant father, little about the mother that raised her. And that just strikes me as, for lack of a better word, corny. I don’t like being told who to vote for based on race, but if you’re going to do it, then it becomes a political question that can be discussed, and it isn’t offensive to bring it up.
If only we could be having that discussion instead of a birther rehash.
*For what it’s worth, here’s how I would script an answer the question asked:
Republicans didn’t give Kamala Harris the label DEI candidate, Democrats did. Republicans value Americans as Americans, Democrats value people by the color of their skin. Republicans choose the most qualified person for the job, Democrats choose by the right skin color. So when Democrats say they’re going to make DEI picks, that they’re going to pick people by the color of their skin, then their picks are going to face that accusation. What Joe Biden did to Justice Jackson! Ketanji Brown Jackson, I might have some disagreements with her politics and how she decides cases, but she is a very smart very accomplished very qualified woman. And what Joe Biden did to her, he went out and he said he would appoint a Black Woman. And he did that for himself, he did that to try to buy votes, he did that so people would think he was a good guy. But when he did that, he helped himself, but he gave Justice Jackson an asterisk she’s going to carry around for the rest of her life. She will always have to deal with that comment that Joe Biden made to benefit himself, that she was only chosen for her race and her gender. If Joe Biden hadn’t said that, if he had chosen her and said she was the most qualified, she wouldn’t have to deal with that. So you have to ask, when Joe Biden talks about DEI, is he trying to help you, or is he trying to help himself?
Idk, just playing Sorkin, I’m sure Trump is better at this than me.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1mo ago
Growing up I never thought I would be so rich as to own an automobile, or so poor as to lack a maid. -- Agatha Christie
Rich people should hire more domestic servants, it is the normal course of life that has been derailed by the universal American pretension of being Middle Class.
Wouldn't encouraging rich people to hire more staff to help them raise more kids be one of the most profoundly eugenic changes we could make to culture? Shouldn't we be happy that they are having more smart kids, and spending their money on that instead of whatever weird dumb crap they'd spend it on otherwise? By having more smart rich kids they're raising the IQ of the next generation, by paying child-oriented young women money as nannies and babysitters they are helping those young women accumulate resources that will hopefully lead to their reproductive success.
-- Being raised largely by a succession of nannies, maids, servants, babysitters, boarding school headmasters, and seeing your father as largely a distant Zeus-like figure is pretty normal throughout human history for much of the upper class. Most of the trad upper class of the old European Aristocracy imagined by the reactionary right was raised that way.
-- Domestic service is a clearly positive sum transaction in which people whose skills max out at watching babies or doing laundry or scrubbing floors get paid to do that, while people whose skills are much more highly paid avoid wasting their time on those tasks. An upper class that doesn't hire servants is in a sense failing the lower class by not providing that employment.
-- Related to this: Successive administrations have made Au Pair programs more onerous and difficult. This is the worst administration policy imaginable: Au Pairs are essentially the best immigrants imaginable, employed family oriented young women. There is no number of them you could bring in that would be harmful the country.
-- I just can't see where Nanny-Envy splits from envy for any other material good or marker of upper class status. This seems like a good place for Scott and his wife to put their resources, a better place than most other things rich people do with their resources! It seems odd to say that a rich person can do whatever they want to do with their money, freedom and capitalism and whatnot, but that it's wrong if they use that money to hire people to make their lives easier. Would the people who are jealous of Scott's nanny, which we'll say costs him $100k/yr, be similarly up in pitchforks if he owned an expensive house or car or bought his wife jewelry of the same value?
-- Gambling. I thought when my state legalized gambling, what's the big deal? It's legal in Atlantic City and Vegas, plenty of people travel there to gamble, and everyone knows someone with a poker game or buddies who keep a pool of NFL bets going. Why not keep that revenue in the state? I miss the old equilibrium. When one had to take, at least, a two hour trip to Atlantic City to gamble, there was at least a certain occasion to it, now there are guys gambling away their paychecks to a video poker machine in the back of a truck stop. And don't even get me started on phone gambling. The idea of people losing huge sums of money without ever leaving their house or talking to anyone is horrifying to me. All the old forms of gambling that lead me to view it as harmless had strong social elements: your local poker night was really everyone hanging out together, the office super bowl pool was a bonding experience, even the casino in Atlantic City had the advantage of travel and adventure and glamour. Legalizing it in every state removes the glamour of the destination gambling trip, and turns it into just a straight suck of money from the foolish to the pockets of casinos. If we're going to have sports gambling, we should just make it a state monopoly like the lottery, and shuffle all the profits into the education system.
-- Aging. When I was a teenager I bought into the Sex and the City-era framing for how the first half of your life path was supposed to go: a series of romantic adventures, serial "serious" monogamous relationships, and then at 30-35 getting "serious" about settling down. Plenty of time! People getting married later was treated as an unalloyed good in the media, and I should note that my own parents married late and had me late. Now, a few days from 33, great Odin's raven how did no one tell us how fast we were going to get old? The number of single friends I have who got unbelievably fat or have aged out of their looks! I talk to my friends, and especially my wife's friends, and they have these romantic problems, and the sad grainy truth is that they should have made hay while the sun shined and hooked someone ten years ago when they were still hot. There are girls we went to college with, and they were reasonably in the same league as my wife at the time, and now they're completely unfuckable, to the point where effort will never get you back where you were.
And it's blackpilling, because there's no advice to give them on their relationship strategies that doesn't run back up against that cold hard fact: you're fat now and there's nothing you can do that will deliver what I would consider good results for them at this point. And I knew that there would be some point where that would be true, but I thought it was 40 or 50 or after the third kid. Not 32. It hits women harder, but hits men too, the curves that online dating sites show men getting more attractive only in relative terms. The media told us at 32 we'd just be hitting the peak of our hotness, not that better than half would have fallen off.
Somebody needs to warn the youth, we need to be sending our freshmen to college this fall with a copy of Princeton Mom as required reading. In media I felt like the point at which one really aged, in the sense of looks, was at least 40. Certainly, though I wouldn't watch the show until after I was married it was just in the air at the time culturally, Sex and the City's girls dealt with the idea of aging in their 30s and 40s, but they didn't even have friends or side characters who got fat, or were completely aged out of attractiveness in dating. There's a huge number of women, and a decent number of men, in my social circle where I look at them and I'm like wow you've already missed the window. It's not "over" for them, after all they might find each other, but their championship window has closed and that's indescribably sad for me. I can't imagine not being hot at your own wedding, that should be near the hottest you've ever been, and some of the weddings I've been to lately it's a joke. And these people are only in their early 30s! You have a narrow window to really maximize your talents in looks, narrower if you don't take care of yourself. Pick ye rosebuds while ye may!
-- Donald Trump (on foreign policy). I voted for him in the 2016 primary after he got up at the debate and said that Iraq was a big fat mistake. While I'm a bit more of an internationalist, I bought into his America First isolationism as at least reasonably peaceful. In office he mostly got captured or railroaded by neocons in his administration, or turned out to lack the temperament for peace. Continued most of the bad policies of his predecessors, while adding a few new ones of his own, and reducing the reliability of the USA as a global partner around the world.
-- Dress shoes are dead, and my decade of resistance has been pointless. No one wears them anymore.
-- Church. I sort of thought church would always be there. That I could wander in and out of religion as I chose, and there would always be other people who kept the place going while I figured my shit out. Now we're seeing churches die out in my town and it's dawned on me that I, me, personally, I'm responsible for maintaining these things. That if I don't do it no one will. I'm back at my church, but even then it makes me sad seeing the parking lot at the historic lutheran church near my house and knowing that they're dying. And it's not like I can do anything for two churches at once. There's got to be a German word for the sadness at seeing things that you didn't like die out? These assumed bedrocks of our lives just aren't as secure as we thought they were.
-- Marijuana, from the opposite direction. I didn't use weed until I was married, and I didn't get it, I was a straight edge teen. Legalized marijuana has been a Good Thing. Notwithstanding my immense dorkiness, when I was a teenager, I could get pot more easily than I could get alcohol. I knew guys who dealt pot from the Boy Scouts or from basketball or from debate club, it was normal to know someone who sold pot. Because the marijuana distribution system was already illegal and underground, so they weren't exactly checking IDs, and a teenage could go buy a half pound and chop it up and sell it, where alcohol had to be stolen from an adult or a store. Now, marijuana is mostly distributed through legal channels, so you equally need a 21 year old willing to get you weed or beer, and fewer teenagers can swing that. And we've seen that decline in youth drug use. See attached image. Youth drug and alcohol use has continued to drop during the process of marijuana legalization. The kids are, by that standard, alright. Further, traffic deaths have not correlated with weed legalization driving high is probably bad, but it's not as bad as driving drunk so we see a replacement effect.
In general, Marijuana is and was normalized already, even before legalization. And I'm of the opinion that there is a deleterious impact on civic fabric from ordinary, law abiding citizens being anti-cop, in the sense of breaking the law and hoping not to get caught by the police. The policeman should never be the enemy of the citizen, the citizen should always see the policeman's presence as a positive. That's why I'm also in favor of more reasonable drinking age laws. There should only be laws against things that the average person would find morally blameworthy. Laws that over-reach and criminalize the conduct of ordinary citizens set up a conflict between the state and the citizen.
And, for that matter, I use thc these days, and I think done right it is the conservative family drug. The effects are, in context, ideal for relaxing after a hard day with people you love. Alcohol leads people to get into fights with their family, to sleep with people they shouldn't. Marijuana leads to hanging out with people who annoy you and just laughing it off, it makes sex with your spouse better but sex with anyone else unthinkable.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9mo ago
I'm convinced that unless one has strong philosophical priors related to either the sanctity of life (life begins at conception) or bodily autonomy (woman's right to choose), the intuitive moral answer is one that you almost aren't allowed to say in public: there are capital-G Good abortions, there are bad abortions, and there are meh abortions. There are times when it is close to murder, there are times when it is a mitzvah, and there are times I don't really care one way or the other. And there are a hundred virtually unprovable factors that go into that determination.
But by altering what kind of abortion you are talking about, you rapidly change people's opinions on abortion.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9mo ago
Football season kicked off last night. I missed the game, at work all night, but I'm excited for my Philadelphia Eagles to kick off in Brazil tonight.
How're my fellow sports fans on the motte feeling about their teams this season? Any degens placing longshot parlays this week?
I'm thinking that by week 8, most predictions in this Eagles team are going to look pretty stupid. Last season they were the best team in the sport for half a season and the worst team in the sport for half a season. The spine of the team is pretty much the same. They swapped out OC and DC but kept the same head coach. They've added several young defensive backs and a few veteran linebackers, lost their most dangerous edge rusher and a team legend; they swapped out a Hall of Fame center but they had an in house heir so they just needed a new right guard, and signed a star running back they're hoping isn't old. At the end of the day the most important question is at quarterback, has the league figured out Jalen Hurts? If he collapses under blitzing every time, the rest is academic. Their outcomes seem likely to again be binary, but a lot of power rankings hedge by placing them in the middle. I wouldn't bet the o/u of 10.5 wins either way comfortably, but one could probably make money betting tail odds of over 12.5 wins and under 6.5 wins. This is either a team with a ridiculous unguardable number of offensive weapons or a team with no answer to extra pressure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Why are we all doing Top 100s of the 21st century this week? Seems like weird timing. Not a slow news week, in sports or in general. Not the end of the year, when it would hit the 1/4 mark. No one died who makes us assess legacies. So...what gives?
Anyway, the answer is either Steph Curry or GSP at #1. Until those guys nobody played like those guys.
Steph revolutionized the game of basketball in a way comparable only to Babe Ruth in baseball. The 3 point game has never been the same since Steph burst onto the scene. Lebron might be great but he is great in the same way that MJ was great, Steph is great in a whole new way. From the year he first got MVP votes (2012-2013) the number of Three Point Attempts per game in the NBA has increased 75%, from what was previously more or less flat for years.
GSP did something similar in MMA. Before GSP it was mostly still in a style v style mode, a wrestler against a boxer or a BJJ guy against a brawler. GSP came in and did everything, and he did it better than anyone else. Jon Jones is probably better P4P, and Anderson Silva at his peak was a legend, but GSP did it first, and the attitude problems that Silva and Jones have had mar their legacies in my mind.
Brady in my mind comes next, then Woods, then Federer, then Bolt, then Djoker and Nadal and Lebron and Jon Jones and Mike Trout and Messi. Then all the minor sports gods: Phelps and White and the other Olympic guys, the auto racers, the cyclists.
A Carnival of Bad Sports Opinions
I'm sure by now everyone has seen the 43-second fight between Khelif and Carini. Full 43 seconds here and the money shot in slow-mo here.
What a ludicrous display. The bigoted opinion most supported by this farce of a fight isn't anything about Khelif's genital arrangement or chromosomes, it is that women's boxing shouldn't be in the olympics if this kind of crybaby shit is going down in there and no one is immediately calling it out. I spent some of my teen years being a weak, wimpy boxes (coincidentally at about that height and weight!) and this is just not how a fight goes when you realize that your opponent is much stronger than you and get scared when you realize you don't have a chance. You shell up and avoid leaving yourself open, you get on your bicycle and run away, you throw tentative tight jabs while keeping your hands up to keep them on the outside, if they get inside you immediately clinch to avoid further punishment. I was a teenager bad at boxing and working out with a lot of grown men much better than me, I was frequently in this position. What you don't do is what Carini did. You don't attack, extend yourself, drop your hands, get tagged, and tap out. I'm not an expert on Olympic boxing, but I've never in my life seen any male fighter, from the level of muay thai smokers up to the pros, surrender like that for no apparent reason. If a male fighter tried that, I would assume it was fixed.
Carini may have been outmatched, but she easily could have fought the round out defensively, run away, survived to the bell, and thrown in the towel between rounds. Minimal shame in that. I'd even be a little less judgmental if she truly took a dive and faked a "phantom punch" and just dropped to the ground to take a KO loss. But to give up not even halfway into the round after taking one punch, when she was clearly fully functional and unhurt? It makes a mockery of boxing. The majority of the felt force of that punch wasn't even relative to the strength of the boxer, it was the near perfect angle given by Carini with her hands low and her chin out.
One of Khelif's former opponents Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst has stepped up in her defense. In one of the funnier twitter exchanges I've ever seen, a random user asks Broadhurst how she would feel if she had to fight Khelif; Broadhurst has beaten Khelif in the ring multiple times in international competition. Here's footage of Khelif looking significantly less manly when someone has the guts to stand and bang. The mick keeps her hands up, gets inside, and punishes Khelif, who clearly gets gassed from the punishment taken from the stronger Broadhurst. This presumably settles the old North Jersey debate over whether Irish or Italians are tougher? Watching these fights I probably drop my opinion on women's boxing, Broadhurst is willing to tank a hit and get inside and go to the body hard, and wins the fight handily.
This is, in my mind, one of the great unsung tragedies of the rise of the trans movement. A woman, born female in a country where homosexuality and gender transition are illegal, raised as a woman, but born tall and with a face and body that is undeniably a bit masculine (especially by global and eurocentric standards), is now under constant suspicion of being secretly male. I have no idea what intersex condition Khelif might or might not have been born with, and no public statement has been made that confirms any testosterone testing. The presumption must be, absent testing, that a girl raised as a girl is a girl. There is probably an inappropriate level of testosterone at which a female competitor should be removed from competition or forced to suppress the level, but we still have yet to see evidence that Khelif is in that category. Further, there is a moral hazard created by normalizing edge cases, in that a competitor will accuse their opponent of gender-violations. Some of the more insane red-state laws allowed any parent of a competitor to require testing of any opponent, which I have to imagine would be abused constantly to try to demoralize one's competition by having a weird judge examine your vagina before the big game.
The takes on the "Defend Women's Sport" side of the debate have been degrading in quality, as TERFs like Rowling have risen in prominence. My problem with the pro-trans "there's no difference" side has long been that not one of them has any knowledge of or enthusiasm for sport. I feel like we're seeing more of that from the TERF side here, with the idea that Khelif is just SO MUCH STRONGER that Carini was forced to quit for her own safety being parotted across Twitter without any evidence. I'm embarrassed for my side of the debate, if this is made a serious test-case for trans bans it is going to harm the cause for reasonable restriction in sport.
At the end of the day, I don't really object to transwomen competing in women's sport, I object to them winning. If they lose, then clearly it was no big deal. It's only if they win that it presents a problem, we got the science wrong. Given that binary, it would benefit the trans movement if they avoided trans women in sport altogether. But alas, here we are, in the carnival of bad sports opinions.
ETA:
https://apnews.com/article/angela-carini-imane-khelif-boxing-63e9dbaa30f1e29196d4162c72c2babf
Poor girl. Doesn't deserve some fat asshole from Pennsylvania going off on her for something she says she regrets.
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