@FiveHourMarathon's banner p

FiveHourMarathon

You can get anything here except red ink

13 followers   follows 6 users  
joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

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

				
				
				

				

					13 followers  

					follows 6 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC
				


				
					

					
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


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom New Old Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
...So "they" made him take the Benzos?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Babtists in Georgia very much wanted to forbid gays from getting married in California, DOMA, until they lost that battle.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So... No elected Republicans, nobody who is part of mainstream conservative politics. Just to be clear.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
https://www.emorybusiness.com/2021/07/08/why-working-class-americans-struggle-to-make-it-and-why-it-matters/


https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/may/why-white-working-class-decline


https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/10/ban-povertyism-same-way-racism-and-sexism-un-expert


Moreover, it is all over the implied policies of wignats that the working class will and should benefit from instituting racist policies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't understand your argument here. Human Bio-Diversity, on its face, says nothing about race. Only about humans. If humans are of different ability levels, and it is correct to discriminate based on them, I don't see why I should only choose to discriminate based on race and not on other useful parameters, like education level and income.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One of my personal betes noires is people confusing Inflation, a rate of change, with price levels, a numeric value. "The inflation that happened is still around." No, the price changes are still around, the Inflation is the rate of change in prices over time. Yes, after a period of inflation, prices will remain permanently elevated relative to their prior levels, unless we hit a period of sustained deflation (which will have all kinds of other, likely worse for most people, negative effects). It really grinds my gears.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The end goal of white nationalists, as opposed to white nationalism, is to jerk themselves off to a vanilla variation on we wuz kangz to make up for their otherwise sad lives, until they die alone in a dilapidated old farmhouse somewhere.


White nationalist influencers compete to be the most extreme, offering up ever hotter takes and ever fewer deliverables. Trapped in the iron law of institutions, their status within extremely online white nationalism is worth more than the status of white nationalism, or of the white race more generally.


White nationalist followers, they follow for the same reason devotees of any conspiracy theory (most extreme political beliefs are indistinguishable from conspiracy theories) follow, to make up for the sadness in their own lives. The vast majority are failures in one way or another, socially or financially or romantically or professionally, who find in grand racial narratives a reason why their lives are so hard when other people's lives seem so easy. Blame it on the Jews and the niggers and suddenly everything seems so much simpler, there's no blame left for the white nationalist himself.


Just like the Communist imagines that his own life will be so much better once the eschaton is immanent, or the Palestinians imagine that life will be so much better if they just owned that other patch of desert instead of the one they are on, the white nationalist imagines that life will be peaches and cream when they are around people whose complexion is all peaches and cream. They haven't just tried Vermont, "the leaves change colors but the people never do," because they'd still be losers there.


Bio-Leninism doesn't stop when you get to the right of Lenin politically.


There is no realistic universe in which white nationalism succeeds. First, after all, white people would need a cohesive definition of whiteness. White nationalism lacks even a unified understanding of who and what they are fighting for. The census data cited elsewhere in this roundup includes most Hispanics, Aryanism includes Persians but not Arabs, Turanism includes the Turks but not the Chinese, what sense does it make to include Sicilians but exclude spaniards if they lived in Caracas too long, my learned friend in argument Hoff seems to include the damn Japanese. The imagined community is simply too imaginary for anything beyond masturbatory scheming.


On white nationalism, see @HlynkaCG below.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Trump could absolutely have chosen to sue her for defamation for her claim. There is no legal double standard in that, beyond claims of "the rules don't matter."


Trump can also call her a liar without committing defamation, he has repeatedly chosen not to. The framework for the non-apology apology is so well known at this point that it's practically available as a template on EForms next to promissory notes and ground leases.


That he's failed to do so is a matter of temperament.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Because it is instrumentalizing the suffering of the population to pressure the government. Terrorism at its most basic definition.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No. It's not. It's ineffective at delivering results. We can tell because identity politics projects fail, consistently， to deliver results.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The whole thing feels like taking the piss to me. Genuinely, this is all so bizarre. I've traveled to major cities, for school and work and for pleasure, typically by myself, I nearly always end up having booked a hotel in a worse neighborhood than I thought I had because I'm cheap and pick a cheap one, and I've never experienced anything like this. I've never taken any particular effort to "protect" myself or to avoid bad neighborhoods, I've nearly always walked where physically possible. NYC, DC, SF, Baltimore, Philly, Pittsburgh, Chicago. I've never experienced anything remotely close to this. Closest I ever came was the first time I was in Boston, ten years ago, I saw two homeless guys get into a knife fight. No one has ever accosted me, people who ask me for money generally respond just fine to a firm No, or if I'm feeling the spirit I'll offer to buy them a sandwich which they will occasionally take. The only time I can recall ever having a really negative interaction with a street person was at 18 getting talked into spending $10 on somebody's struggle rap demo at Penn Station. I've walked miles through the Bronx or Brooklyn or Harlem drunk in the middle of the night, I've wandered around SF aimlessly. I've gone to midnight concerts in the wrong part of town and wandered back at 2am. I've gone to games, concerts, fight nights, bars, parties, walked around drunk and high and stupid. I've always looked like a preppy white guy, I'm not tough, I've more Hayseed than Street Smart about me, I should be a target in a what they say of "bad" neighborhoods, yet I have never had the slightest bit of trouble. The residents of "bad" neighborhoods have generally been friendly to me. The last "bad" experience I ever had was a black guy on the Broad Street Line trying to sell me liquor on the Septa train after an Eagles game; I told him I didn't drink because I was Muslim, we had a brief conversation about that and he asked me to subscribe to his Youtube channel. He later tried to steal somebody's duffel bag, another black guy's, but was chased off.


These diatribes feel like two movies one screen to me, at best. I'm reminded of a trade show I once attended in Baltimore, years ago. I was going to a bar to meet a friend of mine from high school, as I was leaving a guy from West Virginia who I had met at the show latched onto me. Wanted to go out for a drink. He walked with me. Nice enough guy. A little drunk already. Every time we saw two black guys standing next to each other, he would grab me and hustle along, say don't look at them, MOVE. And then say "phew, really dodged a bullet there, you're lucky I was here dude." We split up at the bar after he got bored of the conversation, I walked back drunk, by myself. Somehow, despite being alone and not following his advice, no one accosted me. This has been my experience over and over: actual violence is vanishingly rare, and has never touched me despite my best efforts to make myself vulnerable, but some people perceive violence all around them.*


Objection 1: But FHM, you might think of yourself as a giant pussy, but be fair, practically speaking you are a male of average height and you've lifted your bodyweight overhead every year since Obama's second term, you are not factually a soft target. Maybe you carry yourself like less of a pussy than you perceive yourself as?


Sure, this makes some degree of sense. Maybe I'm not perceiving my own privilege. But...this kinda flips the political valence of so much of the argument? Does it make sense to say that the Red Tribe is the tribe of tough, independent, masculinity if the online whinging about urban crime seems to consist of people scared by all this, while the girly effeminate or feminine Blue Tribers walk around feeling fine? If women and the weak are the ones threatened, why is the pro-police party so masculine?


Objection 2: Maybe you've just gotten lucky? Odds are...


Sure, but people who whinge about this kind of thing online, like my learned friend in argument @2rafa , seem to run into this all the time. While I have, over my entire adult life, never once. If merely traveling to these cities gives one person a dozen experiences in a day, living in them for years, attending school and going to parties and events, should have given me at least one.


Objection 3: You're the one taking the piss!


Fair enough. We're at an impasse.


*All the actual crime I've suffered from has been of the annoying, pissant, middle of the night variety. I reckon I've had more stolen from me than most around here, but it's been people kicking in the door of a house we were working on and walking off with wire and a table saw. Or catalytic converters! God the catalytic converters I've lost. Recently someone broke into our junkyard and graffiti'd an old trailer. Honestly, I was unlikely to catch them, and the cops would never give a shit, so I left a note: "Hey, I don't really care if you put your name on the broken down stuff, your art ain't bad, but no penises, no swastikas, no swear words. Don't make me do something about this." So far, they've listened. Go figure.