FiveHourMarathon
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Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
2.4% of US businesses are black owned, even accounting for significant fibbing on those surveys by businesses trying to claim to be black owned.
This just doesn't matter. It isn't going to hurt anyone, it probably won't really help anyone either. It is not at all comparable to a boycott of white owned businesses, let alone a boycott of Jewish owned businesses.
FiveHourMarathon
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1yr ago
Using ad-blockers is antisocial behavior and should be discouraged or banned wherever possible. If you don't want to consume content that contains ads, don't consume the content if it contains ads. Simple as.
Advertiser supported content makes it possible for a much broader array of content creators to make a living producing commercially viable products. A world without advertising is a world with more paywalls and fewer creators making a living. See the decline of the newspaper for what content creation looks like without advertising dollars: fewer writers making a decent living, higher prices for less content, increasingly desperate catering to a tiny demographic target.
If you don't want advertising on your TV, don't watch OTA TV, limit your viewing to paid streaming services that don't show ads. If you don't like youtube ads, subscribe to premium. If you don't like reading essays with pop up ads, pay for a newspaper subscription, or if you're too cheap for that go to the library and read it for free. If you expect to google "How to fix my sink when it gurgles" and find the answer for free, you have to expect that the ads on the side of the page are paying the guy to make it.
If you think that putting advertising in your face is wrong, vote with your feet/wallet/eyeballs: reward content producers that offer alternative models. If content producers find that they're losing customers when they put up obnoxious ads, they'll stop doing it.
Can anyone offer me an argument in favor of ad-blockers that doesn't amount to some kind of misanthropic "The system, man, it's broken; so whatever I do against the system is a-ok"? I really can't even create a steelman for the ad-block position. I can understand the logic of not liking to be tracked, sure, and I find that a somewhat reasonable ask; but not viewing any ads that pay for the content you consume is just expecting the world to provide you with something free of charge.
FiveHourMarathon
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10mo ago
For instance, this seems relevant if true.
Yeah. I'd say so. Thank you for including that article. Given what was presented in the article by the prosecution, there is no reason to feel that juries are systematically stanning for Black victims or defendants. That was his headline case, it's shit, I can dismiss the whole argument. To say nothing of his misuse of the word Systemic, if the Right starts redefining words the same way the Left does, we're fucked.
In general the law frowns on jumping from fists to guns as proportional escalation. Getting punched does not entitle you to shoot. This is actually a fairly old-fashioned remnant of an era of masculinity, today violence is treated as an on/off switch, and in that environment it seems totally rational to chickenhawks to say "Well getting punched by a Black man is like, totally super scary and he felt threatened!" When the rational response there, given that he was not restrained from retreating in any way, was to walk away and call the cops.
The "gang sign" and "he said he was from California" bit is also pretty hilarious. Are gang hand signs even a real thing?
To say nothing of carrying concealed in a bar being, on net, a bad idea for this exact reason.
FiveHourMarathon
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1yr ago
I appreciate that you recognized the rhetorical trap; rather than disappointingly falling right into it by replying with a series of whines about how white men really are discriminated against or with weird Turner Diaries masturbatory fantasies about Black men murdering my family.
While clearly we disagree on some ideological points here, I also don't see why you feel that grievance is the only rhetorical mode for White nationalism. While grievance has been the traditional mode of nationalism since roughly when the Germans got ahold of it, grievance and narrative of oppression are not necessary components. I have a longer effortpost in my notes app about this with regards to the John Wayne movie McClintock (of all things!), but while a grievance based White Supremacy doesn't appeal to people like me an excellency based ideology of the Supreme White does have some emotional pull. An honest Kipling; John Wayne arming his own enemies so they can get a fair shake from the government. When White supremacists are people who either don't themselves seem all that proud of being white, or are people I wouldn't be proud to be white with, it's not going to appeal to me.
If victimization politics are so bad when every other group does it, let's leave it to them, n'est pas?
FiveHourMarathon
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10mo ago
Seconding @4bpp above.
But also and entirely completely: It's Fun. I have fun there. Many people have fun there. It's a big trashy street party where you drink and have fun. I'm straight, but I don't have a stick up my ass about it, I go there and have a great time. On occasion my wife has met a nice girl there and we have had a fantastic time. You drink, there's a parade, there's dancing, there's smoking, there's sex, there's music, there's a sense of occasion and togetherness.
And for the most part, there are absolutely no qualifications to participate. Queer culture's long running effort to be inclusive, just now starting to trim itself, has welcomed straight outcasts as "Allies" if they simply didn't hate Queers. So many people who need something to do, can find it. Where Christians tend to be initially open but eventually get sticky about the Baptism thing.
One of my goals for the upcoming year is to have more days of occasion. I want to find local Catholic sites that it would be practical to pilgrimage on foot. I want to celebrate things.
That's the main thing. As long as people are having fun at Pride, Pride will self-perpetuate.
And corporations, as @astraganant points out, will find ways to stick their blood funnel into it and turn that fun into consumption.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo ago
My problem with your comment is the idiocy of identity politics evident in it. My comment doesn't blame men for the breakdown of marriages. It points out the characteristic ways that each gender reacts to a marriage that has already broken down.
FiveHourMarathon
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1yr ago
Majority boycotting a minority is very different from a minority boycotting a majority.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo ago
my favorite anecdote - a friend paid for 4 years of his wife's post-grad degree as a full-time student to the tune of $150,000. She sucked her professor's dick at her graduation party, then ground out the extraction of his credit card points before the end of the divorce! Also received massive alimony payments since she delayed actually starting a job with her nice degree
I've worked enough in divorce law to say straightforwardly: this is retarded. The fact that your friend couldn't argue his way out of a wet paper bag is not an indictment of the adversarial legal system. Literally every aspect of that should have gone differently, and routinely does.
The majority of stories like this are the result of one party or another failing completely to argue their case, or walking into court totally unprepared to argue, or blowing off the court and being subject to a default judgment. These things just don't happen if you don't fuck up somewhere.
I've literally heard the same beer-rants of guys who claimed they'd been divorce raped in cases I knew intimately enough to know what he was leaving out.
For reference, here is a common trick where men who "got fucked in the divorce" fumbled the ball.
Wife's Attorney: You have three children, correct?
Husband: Yes.
WA: What are their names?
H: Kaylee, Kayleigh, and KaeLieh
WA: What are their ages?
H: Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I'm serious. This happens all the time.
FiveHourMarathon
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7mo ago
I have no idea what you're talking about with respect to this story.
If you're saying that the women who accused him, employees of Operation Underground Railroad who dedicated their lives to stopping child sex trafficking and pedophilia, the board of OUR that conducted the investigation and removed him, or the Mormons are all just blind wokies... That's astonishingly uncharitable.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo ago
Is HBD the path forward?
I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question that has been bubbling whenever (racial) HBD comes up as a topic on this forum: do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?
Studies of the correlation between education levels that are clear indicators of IQ (ie, a Bachelor's or above) are scarce, possibly because it is almost impossible to actually study because the number of college graduates who actually commit crimes is so tiny as to be nonexistent. Lochner and Morretti found a 30% decrease in murder and assault rates for each additional year of schooling, and that increases in schooling after high school graduation had no discernable impact because the rate of incarceration had already bottomed out. I couldn't find actual data on the topic, but working backward prisoners appear to have less than 4% of the odds of having a Bachelor's compared to the general population.
HBD advocates like Charles Murray and Lee Kuan Yew have both talked about the effects of the Great Sort, that once meritocratic policies are implemented and a majority of working class students have the opportunity to advance through education, the remaining working class becomes increasingly composed of the less intelligent or less conscientious. LKY talks about how labor union leaders in Singapore were initially drawn directly from workers, but this became less practical in recent years because there was no one smart enough to take on a leadership role, so they brought in college educated labor professionals to lead. Murray discusses this as a central thesis of Coming Apart, where he discusses the decline in IQ among working class whites. My own father talks frequently about how when he was young, a lot of white contractors were smart guys who never thought about going to college or just took over the family business, where today young white contractors are dumber and lazier because any white kid who wanted to work and had half a brain got into college.
So if I want to avoid crime, why would I advocate for racial discrimination, and not for economic discrimination? Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race? Which is rather...what we have in our current Capitalist Hellscape, n'est pas? If you want to escape crime, have money. If you want to have money, have good genetics for intelligence and conscientiousness, work hard, and you'll get a job that will pay you enough to move into a restrictively zoned neighborhood where the criminally inclined will be kept out by high housing prices and lack of public transport.
Why do wignats who trumpet HBD findings convenient for them rail against "elites," elites who clearly have the better gene pool?
The political problem with true HBD, in the long run, is that very few people are located at its apex. If I accept its moral bases, I see no reason to help out people below me on its ladder, whether by skin color or by education. And most people are below someone.
Is this a full blown victim blaming in the most influential printed medium by decorated feminist? Or am I overreacting?
The motte of the feminist complaint about "Victim Blaming" type methods as a rape-prevention strategy for women, is that they are being asked to not do very basic things. People accused of Victim Blaming are often telling women not to dress in such and such a way, to go to such and such a place, to never drink to excess, to never trust a strange man, to never trust her boss, to never put herself in a position where a man might have leverage over her, at some point to never leave the house without male escort.
Men, here, are being asked to not fuck crazy, drunk, sluts. There are plenty of happy, relatively sober sluts to fuck instead.
To be fair, I cosign both forms of advice, within reason.
FiveHourMarathon
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1yr ago
No, my original claim was that the number of black owned businesses is small. Try all you want, you can't shop at only black owned businesses. Making it irrelevant, and not a constructive boycott of other businesses. Let's not pretend we live in a different world than the one we live in.
We can go back and forth all day citing our Mottes and Baileys of shitty men and shitty women. People are absolutely out there willing to blame any woman who gets raped, they do it in every high profile case. Is that the majority or even an important minority of people? Idk, depends on your perspective I guess, and your tolerance of slipperiness of slopes.
FiveHourMarathon
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10mo ago
Babtists in Georgia very much wanted to forbid gays from getting married in California, DOMA, until they lost that battle.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
Never. If you can't be in the country you love, love the country you're in. It's great when it happened, historically, and we shouldn't go back on them; but it's always violent.
FiveHourMarathon
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2mo ago
Elections are by their nature a contested environment not just between the individual candidates, but as Tom Scott touches upon in this video on electronic voting, between the candidates, their respective voters, and those administering the election. You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works. You need to understand that the purpose of an election is not to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and their voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. [some spelling corrections]
So one side gets a Heckler's Veto until they are convinced of the legitimacy of the election? If they're upset enough, then the government needs to alter procedures until they are satisfied? No evidence is required, merely a sense of disquiet among some portion of voters? What procedural changes would produce a "legitimate" election for those people?
FiveHourMarathon
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1yr ago
As we prepare to celebrate the single most important event in history, I want to celebrate some positive things in the culture war arenas rather than focusing on the negative.
Item: the NFL is so often an arena of the worst of inarguably Toxic Masculinity, full of murderers playboy plastic surgery victims and whoremongers, all beating each other into early onset alzheimers. But the Philadelphia Eagles' pro-bowl bound best offensive line in the damn business made a Christmas album to raise money for charity, and it is an example of pure masculine excellence.
Seriously, watch that documentary, it's seven minutes long and it is all fantastic. Just three of the biggest, baddest sons of bitches in the world, drinking heavily, laughing their asses off, and working on their singing voices. Jordan Mailata, who could play Goliath with zero special effects, croons like he's Bing fuckin' Crosby out here. Jason Kelce, a multi-millionaire world champion, is wearing his favorite Christmas sweater: a women's sweater he got at a thrift store (seriously, how big was this woman? Kelce is 295 lbs!) and ranting about how much he loves it. Lane Johnson, who looks like he's cosplaying as [CueBall from Pokemon](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Roughneck_(Trainer_class)#::text=A%20Roughneck%20(Japanese%3A%20%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AD%E3%83%B3%E3%83%98%E3%83%83%E3%82%BA,%2C%20Eevee!%2C%20Punk%20Guys.), is working hard at hitting all the notes.
This is what ideal masculinity looks like. Strong, big, tough, accomplished men who are hanging out, talking trash, singing, playing for a good cause, humble but striving to do their best at every task. Giving props to each other, and to the experts they brought in to help them. If one day I want to show my son the ideal of masculinity, this is it.
Seriously, hometown bias but still, how can you hate this Eagles team? Jalen Hurts answers every interview question "We're just taking it one week at a time." The offensive line is making a Christmas album for children's charity, the wide receivers are all Batman no Robins, while the cornerbacks stand up for each other. Most lovable NFL team I've ever had the pleasure of watching. In the wildest dreams of DelCo drunks, if this becomes the new NFL dynasty, we have to assume it represents a moral improvement for our country over the Brady-Belichek Patriots era right?
Item: every week we have a new Woke-Bait or Woke-bation media property to complain about, forcing diversity where it doesn't belong. I want to take the day before Wigilia to call out a perfect example of trans-inclusivity done right: the TikTok classic Girls by The Dare. Listen to the whole thing if you don't know it, it's like two minutes with no solos.
The lyrics to the first verse run through a list of types of girls the singer wants to bone:
I like tall girls, small girls
Girls with dicks, call girls
Girls who get naked on the 'Gram
That's just brilliant. The trans inclusive clause "Girls with dicks" comes right in line with tall, small, call, and instathots. Treated as perfectly normal! Girls with dicks are girls, the singer is (ridiculously, libidinously) heterosexual, girls with dicks are girls so he likes them. At the same time, they are included in a list right before the perfect perverted poetry of:
They say I'm too fucking horny
Wanna put me in a cage
I'll probably fuck a hole, in the wall, the guy before made!
and another list made up of pregnant girls, Catholic girls, and kinky girls; this all winks at the idea that girls with dicks are something of an acquired taste, that real heterosexual manly libidinous Dionysians like the singer might like it, but others might not. And that's fine, more for him!
That's how you do inclusion! Don't force it, don't try to make it "nice," acknowledge perversion for perversion and celebrate perversion as perversion! Don't force it down everybody else's throats, force it down the throats of other consenting adults!
Give me all your favorite examples of things that are just done right! Ideally things that aren't culture-war combatants, but things that do CW stuff right.
FiveHourMarathon
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30d ago
So... No elected Republicans, nobody who is part of mainstream conservative politics. Just to be clear.
FiveHourMarathon
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6mo ago
Did you ever clerk? Going after a judge's clerk is what provoked this more than anything else. Clerk is an anonymous job, judges treat them like their children or their pets but no one outside the courthouse is or should ever be aware of anything they do. Any judge is going to go incandescent with rage at that point. Attacking a kid just out of law school who has zero impact on the proceedings directionally, is just so downright evil and unnecessary that he's going to get slapped down for it.
I always found the decision to write the Slate article rather weird. It felt like grabbing the spotlight for herself. If I were her*, if the story features the guy as a creep, then it clearly isn't my story. After all, he wasn't a creep. It's a weird reflex insecure people carry to show their whole ass under broad accusations, like people getting upset at someone being called dumb or ugly because it is mean to dumb or ugly people, as though anyone who isn't wildly insecure would group themselves under the categories "dumb" or "ugly."
In the final analysis it's a fairly innocuous story structure, the kind of thing that happens every day on every college campus across the country. While certain details made it identifiable to those close with Nowicki, Roupenien did change many details; Nowicki's argument is that Roupenien did not change enough of them. The interesting thing about the story is the internal monologue of the hypo-agentic and anhedonic protagonist, not any particular plot point lifted from Nowicki's life or not, which most anyone would understand bore only a vague similarity to any real person. She could easily have said to the handful of people who would have identified her "Hey that's not how I remember it, I've never even met this writer" and moved on with her life. Instead she chose to make the whole incident the first Google result under her name, taking it to the whole public, not just to those who knew her then and remembered these details, but to everyone she would meet in the future. That's an...odd...response to the supposed invasion of your privacy. Taking what would have been a private fun fact and making it into the first thing any new employer, romantic partner, etc will learn about you.
To me it is perfectly legitimate to write a story like Cat Person, in which you hear about a scenario and then imagine how you would feel if you were in that scenario. I'd imagine that is one of the most common ways that authors create stories, they hear about a scenario and then they insert themselves into it, how would I feel how would I react what would have made me do something like that. From Lord of the Flies to For Whom the Bell Tolls to The Killer Angels. It's.a long tradition. Jean Ross' Family still takes the time to critique the classic musical Cabaret every time there is a big production of it, "Our Grandmother Wasn't a Whore!" is always good for one or two headlines in a few midwit newspapers; the controversy is the primary reason anyone ever talks about Jean Ross anymore, which lead me to read more about her fascinating life. Seizing the controversy for oneself is seizing a slice of fame from a great work for oneself.
For what it's worth, regardless of the (dead) author's or most people's interpretation of Cat Person, I found it a very strong and interesting work of fiction. Not so much as a critique of men along the lines of "the guy was a creep all along" or whatever, but as a critique of the female protagonist's mindset. The way she drifts in and out of wanting to be involved in any of this, but lets herself get swept along for lack of any better ideas, the way she gets distanced from her friends and peer group by her relationship with this older man, is a genuine warning to girls. The kind of warning my mother gave to both me and my sister when we reached early teenage years: Never Go On A Mercy Date. Don't date people who you aren't super into. If you end up doing too much with them, that will be upsetting; if you reject them anyway you are only making it worse after stringing them further along. You think you are doing them a favor by giving them a little bit of you, but this will only make them angrier when they can't have all of you. You think they should be happy you spent time with them at all, they get angry that you won't spend more time with them. "Whore" is how that transaction inevitably ends. ((I mostly followed this advice, but not always as well as I should have.))
It comes back to the generalized advice I give to all young people: the optimal relationship states are Happily Married, and Slutting it Up. You should always be aiming to remain at one of those poles, the spots in the middle are hazardous, that's where people get hurt because they are emotionally depending on something that has no substance to it. If you're not married, or on the path to getting married, no commitment, no dependency, you don't make any decisions in your life with them in mind.
*I can't, of course, speak to what the viral story about your life experience must actually be like. The largest audience a short story or poem written by a former love ever found was a creative writing class; I'm lucky to have avoided sleeping with good writers, or I'm lucky to be so boring my story would never catch on.
FiveHourMarathon
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10mo ago
Why did you pick homicides with Rifles? My pre-condition was that homicides with long guns are essentially irrelevant in the USA. Just seems silly, I would equally place homicides with rifles as among the things people get too conspicuously upset over as compared to their statistical relevance.
You cite the fatality rate of handgun shots, and that one punch can kill. The article you link cites 80 deaths between 2007 and 2017 in England, so around eight deaths a year from single punches. I'm having trouble finding how many fights involving punches there are per year in England, but there are about two million crimes against the person per year. That seems like a relevant pool to draw those eight deaths out of.
I'm not sure "always trust that a violent assailant is going to carefully calibrate their violence level" is a Schelling point that doesn't lead to greater tragedy in the long term.
I understand where this seems super rational if in your life you are never the subject of violence. But if you have been, you realize that the vast majority of fights do not end in deaths, or even in serious injuries or concussions, they end in a few bruises and a lot of adrenaline. There are about 200,000 Aggravated Assaults with fists etc in the US every year, that does not count the probable-majority of fistfights that end in no charges or lesser charges. ((I have been in a few fights, probably "lost" them all, none resulted in charges filed against anyone, I don't know how to parse that beyond anecdote to be honest)) There were 26,000 total homicides, including justifiable ones, and the vast majority of those were committed with firearms. The numbers are just entirely off.
Now, if strong evidence were presented that he showed the gun, threatened Washington with it, and then Washington came at him anyway, I would take his side. Threatening with the firearm is probably a proportional escalation, and if he continues after the firearm is shown than you are justified in using lethal force because he clearly intends to. Rittenhouse was in that situation, because the group escalated against him despite his firearm he clearly had to use it. But using the firearm against him when he is several feet away from you, against merely being punched, is not reasonable.
FiveHourMarathon
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1yr ago
I'm really not seeing this one. "Shut up" as bad language is third grader stuff. We get the "Women are irrational" "Women are vapid" "women are stupid whores" stuff constantly, normally with a citation to some bitter internet blog like it's an academic mathematical proof.
Are any of those dudes really going to feel stifled by being told to shut up? Is that consensus even modestly likely to be built? Are any of our local bitter singles going to say "Ohh, I was told to shut up by another commenter, guess themotte isn't the place to talk about this..."*
The consensus building rule does need to be weighted by what side the actual consensus is on. We're much more likely to be driving away posters with giant screeds about how women are responsible for all the world's problems than my learned friend in argument @FarNearEverywhere is to drive anyone away.
FiveHourMarathon
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1yr ago
you link the article like it’s authoritative, when it never is
So let's speculate wildly instead! She's being kidnapped!
When I lived in a public university accommodation, RA’s would never physically restrain an inebriated student because they forgot their ID.
She wasn't an RA, she was working security at the desk. The specific job of those people at my school was to prevent you from getting in without an ID. Typically via controlling the lock on the door.
I get that it's a goofy story we shouldn't even be talking about, and that your political enemies are trying to make hay out of it, but I don't see why we have to make up facts and ignore context.
FiveHourMarathon
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2mo ago
My personal but totally evidence free belief is that Trump, circa 2020, wanted to be bought out. It makes perfect sense from a real estate development perspective: if you have a claim, even a weak claim, you hold onto it until someone pays you. A weak claim might not be worth a ton, but it'll be worth something to get you to shut up.
It's extremely common in complex real estate transactions. "I have a letter of intent from two years ago, that pre empts your deal!" "Actually the estate was never closed and THIS brother claims a share in ownership!" "According to organization by laws we did not have a quorom at the meeting where I was removed so I'm still in charge and my successor had no power to sign those documents!"
Trump didn't think he won, and he didn't think he'd win. But he thought he had enough that the Democrats would buy him out, would offer him a deal to step down. It would have been the rational thing to do, give Trump something to make him go away. But the Dems were never going to do that, they're not equipped to do that.
If White Americans are Christ-Like in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous (checks notes) Yahoo News articles...it's more Craig Christ than his brother Jesus. I'm sure everyone has seen most of this online dating data before, along with the income data, prison odds, marriage patterns, as long as you aren't poor or stupid or both {in which case there's a good chance I don't really care anyway} being white is awesome in America.
I get irrationally annoyed at white male grievance studies types who have fully internalized the minority narrative of oppression and try to apply it themselves. There is a substantive difference between my wife slapping me and me slapping my wife. The relative strength and power of the two actors changes the meaning. To pretend it doesn't is a sign that one simply doesn't understand the burdens of patriarchy, that one is substantively unprepared to be a paterfamilias. One who is so sissified that he must constantly bark his head off at every perceived slight isn't an alpha, he's a chihuahua who needs to prove how threatening he is.
To be young and smart and white and male in America is perhaps not to be born on second base and think you hit a double, but it is certainly coming into your at-bat with a 2-0 count and a runner in scoring position. If you can't convert, it's on you.
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