FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
A lot of these comments in trying to steelman "Kissinger is Evil" are focusing on the question "Should Kissinger be hated?" I'm going to focus on what I think is your real question, the much more circumstantial "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?" To answer this I'm going to tell a couple of personal stories, passed down to me by my elders, because hatred of Kissinger among people under 50 is largely a meme passed down to us by leftist elders.
My father was raised in a deeply conservative christian community that was religiously anti-war. So while he was far from a hippy, he was against the war in Vietnam and avoided the draft. His best friend from high school joined the marines, went to Vietnam, served for years in multiple tours in combat, received a pile of medals. His friend was back in town on leave and crashed at my dad's place, he had changed from high school, told my dad that he just liked killing at this point, that he and his squadmates would shoot children and try to stand them up with machine gun fire, that they had burned villages full of women and children, that if they ended the war there was no chance he'd come back to the USA and get a factory job he'd go fight wherever anyone would hire him. He went back to Vietnam, and was one of the very last US soldiers killed, in the last months before US forces were pulled out.
What I think examining Kissinger's record on the merits ignores is a lot of context:
-- Kissinger had an outsized personality, known to cavort with blondes and flirt with women, he appeared in the news constantly, was a "public intellectual." He had much more of a public presence than, say, Blinken or Kerry. He was identified with the era's policies in a way that other SoS's weren't. His book Diplomacy is magisterial, a masterwork, but it is also massively self-glorifying, he ranks himself next to Metternich and Bismarck, and this self-perception oozes from every speech he ever gave.
-- The war in Vietnam was the defining trauma for a generation. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed, crippled, or traumatized and their families' lives were derailed by the war. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested, prosecuted, fled the country, or restructured their lives to oppose the war or to avoid the draft. Cultural conflict over the war was brutal, so much more brutal than anything we see today. There really were thousands of Americans, marching in the streets, chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!" And then, worse, it turned out the obnoxious unpatriotic faggots chanting for the VC were right, Ho Chi Minh did win. It tore America apart from 1965-1975.
-- Following the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration was dragged into the public view in Congress. Every aspect of the operation of the administration was questioned on the news. Conveniently, Nixon had hidden voice-activated microphones in the oval office, and hours upon hours of recordings were made public. People heard how Kissinger really talked, how sanguine he was about what he was doing. The people heard how the sausage was made, and the very worst grinder was Kissinger. Neither Kissinger, nor Nixon, believed the war was winnable when they took office in 1969. Kissinger, and Nixon, were publicly exposed as absolutely believing that every bombing and every troop surge and every expansion of the war to a neighboring neutral country was not for the purpose of "saving" South Vietnam but for the purpose of putting on a diplomatic front, of showing "the world" that the USA was tough. Every kid that died in Vietnam after Nixon and Kissinger took office, like my dad's best friend, died for his country only in the most attenuated sense. Kissinger was the reason that thousands of American boys died, or were crippled, or had their souls ripped apart killing innocent Cambodians, for nothing. It was one thing to suspect that the American government was throwing lives away over nothing, or to think that they were extremist but mistaken true believers, it was quite another to hear Kissinger state frankly that Americans were dying for some vague concept of "Credibility."
-- This loss of innocence was part of the Vietnam experience for America, and that was pinned on Nixon and Kissinger. After Watergate, Nixon was in permanent exile, removed from public office, public intellectual life, public view. Kissinger hung around, advising, teaching, lecturing, consulting. So Nixon-Kissinger's mutual crimes were easy to pin on the still-present Kissinger. He never got any comeuppance, never got any public shaming. He was never punished, and the rage only grew.
TLDR: It's the combination of his crimes and his public visibility that made him a villain, and the very clear evidence of those crimes convicted him. That villainy is compounded to make him the primary bad guy behind everything the CIA every did between 1950 and last week.
One of my scoutmasters was an old timer, a Vietnam veteran who came home and became a hippie and bought a VW Minibus and lived out of it. Whenever we did the classic skit "A politician, a priest, and a boyscout are on a crashing plane," he would have us change the "politician" to "Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." The kids didn't get it, but the old scoutmasters laughed and laughed. For those unfamiliar the skit goes like this:
There's a small plane, represented by four dining hall chairs in a row. The pilot and three passengers, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an elderly priest, and a boy scout. The pilot turns to the passengers and says "We've lost our engine. There's only three parachutes. Well, I've got a family, and I need to fill out the paperwork with the FAA, so I'm taking one parachute, good luck!" He takes a parachute, and jumps out of the plane. The remaining passengers look at each other. Henry Kissinger stands up and says "I'm the smartest man in the world, I'm vital to the operation of international diplomacy, I'm important to history, I'm taking one parachute." He takes a parachute and jumps. The priest turns to the boy scout and says, "Young man, I've lived a good life, a long life, you take the last parachute, I'll pray a rosary as I go down." The boy scout says "Don't worry padre, there's two parachutes left. Henry Kissinger took my backpack."
I'm probably more philo than anti semitic, and a whole bunch of Jews certainly disappeared circa 1940-45, but I have written before about the ways that Holocaust education fails American and global students. Reposting old comment from last year:
The Russian war on Ukraine proves the uselessness of "telling everybody how bad the Nazis were and not to be a Nazi" as a Nazi-Prevention-Method
The Holocaust is one of the few things that are taught thoroughly in almost every American curriculum. Everywhere we learned the refrain "Never Again," I recall reading at least three books on the Holocaust from the perspective of Jews, we learned that the Nazis were the ultimate evil, etc. The only historical facts I recall learning in as much detail as many times growing up were the Declaration of Independence and The Walking Purchase.
For a long time, I've felt that we focus too much on the perspective of the victims and not enough on the perspective of the Germans (and on the facts of the broader European fascist movement and Western sympathy for it). If our goal is "Never Again" then we don't just need to see that the actions of the Nazis were wrong and bad, but how they came about, the perspective of the victims is irrelevant compared to making sure that we are never the perpetrators. Rather than Anne Frank and Night and watching Schindler's List we should be reading Hannah Arendt and Chomsky and watching Conspiracy. The result of learning the Holocaust only from the perspective of the victims is that we get everyone from the unvaccinated, to illegal immigrants, to <AEO claiming that their enemies are Nazis and about to put them into camps; and not nearly enough earnest self reflection about whether the people we're following are going in the wrong direction.
Well, I think we have the perfect test-case here. Russia has long made The Great Patriotic War and Russia's role in it the center of national history and pride. And leaving aside debates over severity of war crimes or long term motivations for the invasion, I think it is fairly self evident that Special Operation Z is the kind of thing that "Never Again" education is meant to prevent. Gary Kasparov memes are cute and all, but the fact that people can be inculcated with the message that "Nazis are Evil/The Worst" to such an extent that they'll follow a Charismatic National Leader and adopt a collective symbol on their way to launching a war of aggression and butchering civilians; well that pretty much indicates to me that "Nazis are evil" is somewhere between useless and counterproductive as a method of education if your goal is "Never Again."
Nor is this the first time an illegal war of aggression was justified by comparing an enemy to the Nazis. It certainly seems that merely understanding that Nazis are bad does not inoculate you from supporting wars of aggression. Nor does it immunize against oppressing national minorities, (I particularly like Maziyar Bizhani's contribution to the genre).
"X is Evil" is a thought terminating cliche. It removes nuance and flattens your ability to understand why people are acting the way they are acting. The more you can understand someone's motivations, the more you can enter their skin and think the way they think, the better you can predict their actions and get inside their algorithms. We should seek to understand the villains so that we can prevent ourselves from becoming them, not to understand the victims so that we can accuse our opponents of oppressing us. Nobody has ever understood themselves as evil, and pretending they did will prevent us from holding ourselves or anyone else to "Never Again." {End Prior Reddit Comment}
To expand a little bit and move away from the Russia question, the way we teach the holocaust tends to privilege the "Jews are special victims" and "Nazis were whackjobs" stories; I think a better way to teach it is to focus on the theme that: Humans have a natural and indestructible tendency to draw in-group vs out-group distinctions, this can be done in any number of ways, and under stress these distinctions tend to become more important. The in-group will frequently use historical grievances (The Treaty of Versailles, or Class Oppression, or the Holocaust) to fuel hatred against the out-group. Watch out for anyone trying to fuel those kinds of tensions, watch out for anyone talking about how "your" people have always been abused and oppressed and held back from their rightful glory, realize when you yourself are taking your stress out on class/national/political/religious enemies.
The Holocaust wasn't a one-off, nor was it whacky or strange or the result of one man's incarnation of Wotan, it was simply an extreme form of a natural human tendency, that we all carry and need to watch out for to keep it from growing too extreme. That goes equally for Stalinist purges, for Cambodian killing fields, for the Great Leap Forward, for witch panics. The out-group can be the Jews, or the Christians, or the educated, or the rich, or the poor. The reflex itself is no different from how law students at my school would complain constantly, around finals, about undergrads in the law library. The undergrads didn't really bother anyone, but they weren't supposed to be there, and finals are stressful, they became an outlet for people to hate. We have to teach kids that Naziism/Fascism were very much encouraged and allowed to flourish by the Western allies as a counterweight to the (very real) threat of Communist expansionism and revolution. Talk more about the Spanish Civil War, and Petain's France, and the phenomenon of Death Squads from Indonesia and Rwanda to El Salvador and Vietnam.
TLDR: Don't teach that Nazis were extraordinary for being villains, or that Jews were extraordinary for being victims. We are all capable of being either in the right context, teach how we avoid the sins of the past in concept not in specificity.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I cannot escape the impression that these people - mostly women, but not entirely - just never really recovered from the petty traumas of middle school. The jocky white boys were all attracted to the slim white girls with the straight hair, and not to the chubby girls, especially the black ones. And I’m not just taking potshots at my outgroup here; I’m guilty as hell of this in my own life as well. (“We must reimagine masculinity to de-center violence and the domination of others,” says the noodle-armed kid with low testosterone, certain that in the Glorious Future, women will prefer guys like him.)
Have you heard of the Amish concept of Rumspringa? It's a traditional period when Amish youth "hop around" getting into a little bit of trouble, ordinary rules are suspended all together or only lightly enforced, after which the young Amish can choose to be baptized into the community as adults, when rules will be enforced.
That's high school and college for middle-upper-class Americans. Ordinary social and even legal rules aren't enforced, some activities can be done in high school and college that can never be done (for most people) in later life. If you're a 1/500 athlete at 16, you're a star on your high school team and a big deal on campus; if you're a 1/500 athlete at 36, you might have a hobby that you're pretty good at but most people don't care about. If you're a 1/1000 musician at 16, you're in the school band and playing lead roles, or you're in your own band and you're a big deal at parties; if you're a 1/1000 musician at 36 no one cares about your soundcloud.
In college if you're a bright kid, you can spend all night discussing philosophy or history with other bright kids, if you're the brightest you can hold a little court at the Algonquin in your dorm room; if you're a bright guy in your 30s, unless you're bright enough to have a substack no one cares except the other dorks on your message board. In college all I needed for a girl to think I was a romantic was a DVD of Midnight in Paris and a bottle of cheap wine; in my 30s well, I'm married anyway, but if I wanted to impress women it would take time, effort, money. And worst of all, if I wanted any of those things now, I would have to go find actual people. And finding actual people after college is harder for most people: as the quote ran around Twitter "Half the reason folks romanticize college is because it's the last time most folks lived in dense, walkable neighborhoods focused on providing community during plentiful off-hours." When you're in college single women your age are everywhere, other pseudo intellectuals are everywhere, your friends are a short walk away.
You don't get to be an athlete, an intellectual, or a lover after college; not in the same way you do in school, not unless you're really talented. There's room to be above average and feel extraordinary, do extraordinary things. In adult life, for most people, those opportunities are lacking.
In his excellent, and now both old and prescient, Coming Apart Murray argues that Upper and Lower class white Americans are becoming more and more stratified, with upper class Americans being more likely to preach left-wing tolerance while practicing traditional middle class morality; while lower class Americans are more likely to believe in solid family values while practicing dissolute and self-destructive lifestyles. His core thesis isn't as interesting to this argument as his theory that Upper Class/Blue Tribe/PMC Americans basically fail to practice what they preach: marriage is more common among white upper class college educated Blue Tribers than it is among working class white people, yet college is synonymous with hook-up culture and dissolution.
I propose that we can think of high school and college as a kind of Rumspringa in Blue Tribe culture, a period in which ordinary rules are suspended. You can't do the things you do in high school and college after you graduate, when you have to be a good and respectable member of the community. So of course the jealousies of high school and college run deep, run forever, scabs that keep getting torn off again and again. Because it's not that they missed the opportunity to do X in college because of those damn bullies; it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
A peasant village? Never. But up until the mid-late twentieth century, the rich had very personal relationships with their servants. Your maid was your maid, not the girl that the maid service you contracted sent over today. Feudal contracts vary across places and periods, but frequently included personal obligations by peasants to work at the manor house. Either a set number of days mowing the lord's fields, or repair work on the buildings, or personal domestic service. The nobles would very much, by the nature of their lives, interact directly with the peasantry every single day. Not on an equal footing, never as equals, but every single day they would interact directly.
Today corporate structures exist to insulate the leisure classes from personal relationships of exploitation. Even if I take Uber multiple times a day every day, I never have the feeling that I am personally exploiting any individual Uber driver. I sit in the backseat and scroll through Atlantic articles about how horribly Uber treats its drivers, but I am not personally responsible to my driver in particular. Rather Uber as an entity, or the CEO of Uber, or Venture Capitalists more generally take the blame. I don't exploit my cook or my waiter even if I eat out every meal, a variety of restauranteurs insulate me from that. I can avoid any personal repeated relationship with any of the people whose labor is exploited for my benefit.
Corporations and small businesses and city slumlords are the sin eaters of the American Professional and Managerial Classes. The nice liberal lawyers and engineers and bankers I work with can grumble about how awful the exploitation of the working class is, because other men are taking on that rough work so that their houses are cleaned and their meals are made and the cooks and maids have somewhere to live in the city.
Old feudal lords had to house their serfs, and order them around. They saw how they lived because they were the ones choosing how they lived. They had to pay them directly, when they needed them to work more they watched what that meant in real time. I can just grumble about rush pricing and how long I had to wait for my uber to take me home from the airport.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Feminism has no Scalable Answer for Female Promiscuity
The apex of consumerist-choice-Feminism just dropped: this product review disguised as a slutty memoir-thinkpiece in New York Magazine’s Strategist section (typically for product reviews and recommendations, I go there to find good sheets or sheet pans). The piece traces the writer’s life by the backpacks she uses: an overnight bag that she used to cart her things as a side-piece to various jerks for emotionally empty sex, to a laptop bag that held her work when she tried to ignore men altogether, to a small purse that was appropriate to her newly traditional role as a formal “girlfriend” to a “nice” guy. It’s the romanticized and thinkpieced arc of the feminist career woman, which I’m sure has already been “react”-ified and shouted down by various Red Pill commentators online. I’m not particularly interested in the woman-cum-backpack-reviewer at the center of the story, but rather in her portrayal of her new boyfriend, the “nice” guy she worries is too boring, and how he is portrayed as reacting to her actions. It raises the question for me: does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?
The author of the piece describes her relationship to her new boyf:
This new guy is single — a.k.a. actually available — hot, and nice. I used to think “nice” was an insult, or that if someone were “nice,” I’d grow tired of them, but with him, it excites me even more. [NB: She also states that she has been with him for FIFTEEN DAYS making the boredom question a little…strange]
I don’t know what’s going to happen with this new man. In fact, my past year of dating has made it hard to feel like anything good will happen. I’m pretty convinced I’m still destined to live a life jumping from affair to romance to affair. I’m self-sabotaging. I tell this new man about all of the men I’ve fucked over, who have fucked me over. I name drop. I body count. I say things with the screaming subtext of: Why would you want to be with me?
But this time, I realize what I’m doing. Sorry — this time he realizes what I’m doing. He says hearing about all of the guys I’ve slept with hurts his feelings and asks me why I continue to do it. This kind, goofy man makes me feel like I can apologize. Like I can tell him I lied. Like I can tell him that what I’m doing is obviously me trying to blow up whatever good thing we’re beginning to create.
The author presents her sexual and romantic history to her boyfriend, and he engages in heroic acts of self-abnegation to comfort her for hurting him. He reacts to her efforts to harm him with love and care. This is ideal partner territory, someone who loves you unconditionally and will react to any action with affection, totally unrealistic after fifteen days. This isn't any kind of scaleable solution. And I’m reminded of one of the great artistic works of consumerist-choice-Feminism: Sex and the City.
SATC gets unfairly scratched from midwit lists of great TV shows because the Chapo Trap House types who get excited about TV shows love unrealistic “masculine” fantasies of violent crime stories, and not romantic sex comedies. But SATC was critical to the birth of high concept TV, was a key tent pole that kept HBO making shows like Sopranos and The Wire, and presaged so much of modern culture that it’s a crime to miss it. My wife and I watched the whole series together just after we got married, late at night after studying or working, we joked that arguing about the characters was our “Post-Cana” sessions. What SATC was good at was asking really interesting questions, over and over my wife and I would argue late into the night and over coffee in the morning over which character was right and what one should do in that situation; what it was bad at was pussying out when it came time to face the answers. The characters would always be put into interesting situations, then saved from the consequences of their own actions in a way that sort of neutered the original dramatic/philosophical tension.
In a season 3 episode trenchantly titled “Are We Sluts?”; Big-Law attorney Miranda gets diagnosed with Chlamydia and has to list her sex partners so that she can call them and tell them that they might have gotten it from her. My wife and I counted the lines on the second sheet of notepaper, assuming it was a regular legal pad (and one man per line) she had sex with ~42 men. The character was 33 at the time, so using Slate’s handy slut calculator she is in the 96th percentile, so, yeah, up there. Miranda is naturally…concerned...by this realization, and how her boyfriend Steve will feel about it. Much of the episode is the characters debating the value of chastity and promiscuity, telling the truth, should it matter, etc. There’s a lot of tension around will this ruin Miranda’s relationship. She tells Steve and, guess what? Steve just laughs; I’m a cute bartender, my number is much much higher than that. Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved: Steve’s fucked a ridiculous number of women so Miranda having fucked a huge number of men is a nothing burger.
Similar plots are wasted later: protagonist Carrie cheats and ruins her relationship with her fiancé, only to have her adulterous partner actually chase her down years and partners later, champion-slut Samantha ultimately only settles down because her man puts in unrealistic efforts of understanding and care and loyalty. The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy. Smart enough to know there is a problem, not smart enough to come up with a satisfying realistic solution.
And this is what connected in my head reading that bullshit little dialogue in this advertisement-cum-confessional: Feminism knows that a sexual past can be a problem, but can’t imagine a realistic solution. Like so many wasted episodes of Sex and the City it is smart enough to understand that tension exists, but not smart enough to come up with a real solution. The only solutions presented are either Christ-like acts of self-control on the part of the male, or for the women to marry a man with an unrealistically high partner count himself. The supply of Christ-like and mega-player partners will never meet the demand, particularly as those men are not similarly limited. It simply will not scale: the solution to female promiscuity can never be greater male promiscuity except through fuzzy math. And those waiting for the one really good man who really loves her may be waiting in vain.
I’m not sure what a Feminist-compatible solution is, beyond rejiggering the entirety of masculinity and sex-positive culture to accommodate for it. I can’t imagine anything New York would print that would be a realistic answer, rather than a scolding “get better, men” that would achieve nothing but catharsis for angry women. A solution to this problem seems outside the Feminist range of imagination. 20 years after Sex and the City aired, promiscuous New Yorkers are no closer to an answer to that age old question: “Are we Sluts?"
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
A Death at BUDS, or How Anti-Science Ideologies Trickle Down to Harm Heroes
TLDR: Media bias against drugs leads to people ignoring obvious, medically supported interventions. This creates room for other people to cheat the system, which creates dangers. Kyle Mullen would probably be alive today were he on a medically supervised steroid cycle instead of buying a used car to store his illegal drugs in and learning how to use them from some mix of bros at the base and bros on the internet. I say bring on the Space Marines, or at least provide pure drugs at military expense, it’s only polite.
By any reasonable standard, Kyle Mullen was a Hero in the making, in the classical sense. A muscular 6’4 SEAL candidate, choosing to forego a career out of an Ivy League school to serve his country.
The 24-year-old arrived on the California coast in January for the SEALs’ punishing selection course in the best shape of his life — even better than when he was a state champion defensive end in high school or the captain of the football team at Yale.
He finished the toughest parts of SEAL training, and died on the beach afterward. NYT article here, all quotes are from that article. The NYT story was a real gut punch, expose and heartbreaker all rolled into one, I recommend reading the whole thing and now it’s circulating through the “Summarize a real journalist’s work, make two generic comments, and pass it off as your own” internet chain. Slate chimed in to probably say the whole thing is to be blamed on Toxic Masculinity, The National Review of course needs to Defend Tradition while blaming the drugs, even some Arab website hopped on to call it an example of American brutality, cheating, and drug culture.
What none of the think pieces suggested was the obvious solution: if steroids make you better at the things we want SEALs to be good at, give them steroids. Why are SEALs buying them independently and taking them secretly, when it would all go much better if the SEALs program offered an option to be put on a mild steroid cycle under doctor’s supervision? At the very least, that’s as upsetting as schoolteachers buying their own school supplies!
Sailors who enter the program bolstered by steroids and hormones can push harder, recover faster and probably beat out the sailors who are trying to become SEALs while clean, said one senior SEAL leader with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up selecting only the very best cheaters, and steadily fill the SEAL teams with war fighters who view rules as optional.
“No one can do everything the instructors ask, so you have to learn how to cheat to get through,” he said. “Everyone knows it happens. The point is to learn how to not get caught.”
Teaching trainee soldiers to cheat goes back to at least the Spartan Agoge, and I doubt Lycurgus was totally innovative on this one. But you can prevent trainees from going off the rails by providing reasonable rails. What killed Limewire et al (or at least made them less prominent), wasn’t suing some random college kids for downloading an album, it was creating a legal framework for listening to music online and paying for it. While testing is suggested as a solution, it hasn't worked in sports so I fail to see how we can be optimistic it will work here.
If cheating is easy and it works, then the only solution is to obviate the need for it by making it legal in a managed form.
The Dead Pool is a real phenomenon, steroids are nothing to play with. But those kinds of results come from out of control drug use without medical supervision by guys who are used to pushing their limits, and are OK with dying in the process. There is no question that overuse of steroids can have negative health impacts, but a light, managed cycle isn’t going to make it any more likely that anyone dies, it would probably reduce the odds of other injuries during BUDS if it were used to manage existing problems and lead to more medical supervision. Steroids are like anything else, they follow the 80/20 rule: the first extra push gets you most of the results, then you can keep adding more and more to get attenuated marginal gains. WADA isn’t going to test SEALs before they kick in doors and disqualify guys that don’t have clean piss. Putting all SEAL candidates who want it on a basic cycle would obviate the desire to go on more, level the playing field, and improve performance.
Instead, the Navy chooses to make the competition ever more fierce, and just hope that guys won't cheat or get themselves into trouble.
In the 1980s, about 40 percent of candidates graduated. Over the past 25 years, the average has dropped to 26 percent. In 2021, it was just 14 percent, and in Seaman Mullen’s class this year, less than 10 percent.
Like everything else in American life, the competition at the top is increasingly fierce. The bifurcation of American life into a Barbell Chart of winners and losers doesn’t stop anywhere. SEAL training is particularly brutal, consider this story of a man who was probably tougher and in better shape than anyone on theMotte:
Three weeks in, Seaman Caserta collapsed while carrying a boat. Instructors yelled at him to get up, and when he said he couldn’t, his father said, they made him quit the course. An X-ray later revealed a broken leg.
Candidates who don’t complete BUD/S often must serve out the remaining years of their enlistments in undesirable low-level Navy jobs. Seaman Caserta ended up manning a snack counter at a distant base.
Seriously, I don’t know the whole story, but in what universe is a guy 50/50 between commando and snack counter? There wasn’t a slightly more useful landing spot?
You’re asking these guys to take a gamble between doing their dream job being a certified superhero, with highly paid job opportunities galore in a variety of fields after they serve their country with honor, and obscurity behind the snack counter. Is it any wonder that they’ll do anything to win, especially when you already select for guys willing to risk death?
“What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?” said the leader. “A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision?”
I’m really just putting this quote here as a laugh line. We ask SEALs to be elite, to be the best, to sacrifice their bodies, their lives, and often parts of their souls; but God forbid they break the rules by taking medicine that makes their lives easier.
Early aughts Rick Reilly really did a number on America, we’re still recovering from it and realizing just what Better Living Through Chemistry can do for us. But our sportswriters and their cousins in the hard news are the main way the public hears about steroids: I would bet that more NYT writers/editors know someone using Test to transition than using Test to hit a PR. They’re pulling their info from SI, not from T Nation. Much of the NYT commentariat and audience views male weightlifting and fitness with vague suspicion of wrong think. That combination gives us a public discourse about steroids soaked in myths about roid rage, tiny testicles, and ignoring all the scientific studies of the health benefits of testosterone supplementation. Much like a recent discussion of plastic surgery, if everyone keeps it a secret you only ever notice the bad work, not all the work that passes.
The result is that someone like Kyle, who should have been serving his country with distinction, or at least living the probably pleasant life of a former Yale football captain, instead chose to buy a used car to hide his drugs in, inject himself with God-only-knows-what, and died before he ever saw an enemy combatant. What a waste. Let’s at least consider the possibility that the problem wasn’t drug use as such, but using illegal drugs dosed by an amateur, with the obvious preventative being legal drugs dosed by medical professionals under regular observation for results. Recognize that bad results come from homebrew experimentation, not from the substance itself. Let's give Justice to Kyle, not by weakening SEAL training or introducing an ever expanding and expensive team of nannies to keep an eye on everyone, but by doing something that might actually have saved his life.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
-- Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows
Waiting for the cavalry to ride over the hill doesn't work if society has spent fifty years making sure no one like you learns how to ride a horse. Conservatives face the same problem when it comes to boycotting large companies that don't agree with their values. I started replying to @coffee below, where he wished that conservatives would launch a serious boycott in response to social media/tech companies targeting conservative viewpoints, the post expanded to the point where it felt like it ought to go separately to avoid jumping down anyone's throat.
Conservatives talking about launching mass boycotts of any company with liberal values immediately throws me back to Ferguson and over-exuberant BLM protestors shouting "They have guns, we have guns, let's do this!" "Have" and "Guns" being, here, relative values although superficially similar, it is rather important to note how many guns each side has and if they know how to use them. Just as I roll my eyes at antifa types claiming that they're ready for a violent revolution when the majority of their side steadfastly refuses to own or know how to use a firearm and the security services are on the other side; I giggle at Christian conservatives thinking they have the moxie to force a boycott on every industry with liberal values. Because every industry with liberal values is, at this point, virtually every industry that makes the world modern. There is no non-luddite path to an offensive boycott against liberal corporations; there are too many liberal corporations, and if any of the corporations tried to veer right-wing their employees are too left wing and would exit.
Call it the Long March through the Institutions and blame the enemy if you like; or note that Mao's physical Long March was a work, that Chiang Kai-Shek (foolishly, as it turned out) let it happen, practically escorted Mao out of town without too much of a fight or too many efforts to undermine Communist columns on the way. The supposed socialist Long March through the institutions has been mirrored, or exceeded by, a Republican Long Retreat from the Institutions; this started long before Rudi ever wrote about the Long March. God and Man at Yale came out in the fifties, when conservatives still dominated among college graduate voters and colleges were still seen as broadly conservative institutions. Republican skepticism of academic credentials and intellectuals dates at least back to Eisenhower as a political strategy; and accelerated under Bush II, culminating in the Palin nomination. What we see today is downstream of seventy years of anti-academy politics. Just as BLMers' desire to reform police departments will be futile as long as virtually no blue tribers want to become police officers; conservative efforts to reform the commanding heights of American culture will be futile when it is virtually impossible to assemble a critical mass of conservatives in important professions.
In the academy, Democrats are estimated to outnumber Republicans something like 12:1. While studies note that the concentration is highest in Northeastern elite colleges, those are also exactly the colleges that set the trends the rest follow. Is it any wonder that Democrats rack up ever larger leads among college graduate voters?
In the film industry, the biggest conservative political group "Friends of Abe" counted 2,500 members out of more than 300,000 workers in the film colony. And while I loved Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump and in CSI; he's like a C or a D list star. In the music industry, the vast majority of donations go to Democrats, with A-Listers like Bon Jovi and Springsteen and Jay Z shelling out for blues, while Reds get warmed up leftovers like Toby Keith and Ted Nugent. Overall, the entertainment industries shelled out 87% of their money to Dems in most cycles.
In the tech industry, the vast majority of donations from employees go to Dems. The FAANGs in particular all gave over 80% to Ds. Tech entrepeneurs aren't much redder than their employees as a class. Research scientists, somewhere between Academics and tech workers, also lean overwhelmingly left, with 80% Dem/Lean Dem as far back as the Bush admin.
The upshot of all this is that there is no critical mass of workers for red tribe coded projects in the commanding heights of American culture. As long as Blue tribe workers are sufficiently organized to do things like walk out to protest their corporate masters failing to take the correct positions, even a single CEO deciding to give it a try won't work. All the corporations will hold the line on blue tribe cultural values, because if they don't they'll lose their talent, and without talent they are nothing.
Consider the fix Ottowa found itself in from the trucker protests: tow truck operators turned out to be on the other team, and refused to tow protestors. Turned out, basically nobody on team blue knew how to drive a big rig. That control allowed the truckers to shut down a city, and force concessions; the government was forced to seek out blue coded allies (banks) to strike back.
Similarly, blue tribers dominate tech and culture to such an extent that red tribers will be perpetually unable to produce content that is nearly as good quality. As much as I might despise mainstream culture, there's a lot of craft and skill that goes into making a Marvel blockbuster, and it can't be knocked off by amateurs.* I don't know that you can make a Marvel type movie, a workmanlike blockbuster product, without a lot of blue tribers. As long as that is true, the theory that companies will fold to Red tribe boycotts because they don't want to lose 20% of their customers doesn't work, because a united blue tribe labor revolt will cost them 100% of their products. Disney might fear losing customers, but it is terrified of losing talent that it uses to produce products to sell around the globe. And the talent is much better organized than the customers will ever be.
If Red tribers want to play hardball, it must be on their own turf. I said I doubt a Marvel film could be made without blue tribers, I don't know that a cattle herd can make it to a farmer's market in NYC metro without a whole lot of red tribers. The Canadian truckers succeeded for a long stretch because there aren't blue tribe truckers to oppose them, there are a lot of industries in the USA that are the same. An energy strike would be fascinating, fine you want to decarbonize here we'll do it all tomorrow. Or a police strike. The reds are decades behind the blues in the organizational sense, but the second best time to plant a tree is today and all that jazz.
Simultaneously, conservatives need to be building institutions alongside and parallel to blue tribe dominated institutions, producing beautiful cultural content to compete on talent. If cultural production is denigrated as blue tribe, and no red tribers go into it, that's permanently ceding the field, slow suicide. Both compete on quality with blue tribe, and shifting paradigms away from blue tribe framing. But never attempting to stand up inferior red tribe knockoffs, like Turks I have a lot of thoughts on how that would work, but you've read enough of me for now.
TLDR: A conservative boycott of liberal companies would fail because in competitive industries the top talent is all blue tribe, or such a strong majority that it is doubtful red tribe talent can even man a ship together.
*Moreover, making conservative knock-offs of mainstream products has a strong Christian Rock problem. Christian Rock is bad because it affirms the dominance of the secular rock music paradigm.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
The Dickstretcher Theory of Online Credibility: A Turing test for the Social Media Age
One bullet point on my little Reddit-Ghislaine-Epstein conspiracy theory post that drew a lot of laughter was my story of buying an expensive vintage watch on Reddit, from a user I gave a lot of credibility because he posted in strange and obscure subreddits on the same account, including a subreddit for hobbyists in stretching one’s penis to restore a circumcised foreskin or to attempt to extend length. Obviously dickstretching does not coincide with high trustworthiness or reliability, nor does it particularly coincide with expertise in watches. But it’s simply so strange a thing that it passes the Turing test.
The big pile of comments on a random, obscure hobby subreddit is the text equivalent of reCaptcha tests that just require a click. The process is simple, it wouldn’t be hard for a scammer to comment on weird subreddits, or to program a bot to do it, but A) to my knowledge no one tries that, B) It would take a fair amount of effort and time for an account that would later get banned, and C) I do think there is something ineffable about the drunkard’s walk of a real human commenting on weird shit that real humans like. I’m thinking of how this fits into a broader theory of online credibility, and how to assign credibility.
I’ve talked before about James Clavell’s fake-Japanese three-hearts model. Humans are vast, we contain multitudes. We have different layers of opinions, those we share with all, those we share with some, and those we share with no one at all. These are as different identities as can exist.
Balaji in his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast talked about how different forms of identity interact online. Your real name account is often presenting a fake version of yourself, a version approved by HR and family, politically more mainstream views; other than professional extremists who profit from presenting extreme non-mainstream views, who I often suspect push their views farther than they are actually felt because that’s what brings in listeners and profits. I actively do not trust real name accounts, and avoid real name forums, for that reason: if you’re making money I don’t trust you, if you’re not making money I suspect you’d like to that you’re just lurking on that pawn hoping for a promotion. Your totally anonymous board, your Chans et al, have been noted before by @DaseIndustriesltd as producing a particular kind of identity, one where you only exist as a representation because there is nothing else to cling to, no persistent identity or username to place a reputation on, so one can only think in generalities. I’ve never been able to get into them for that reason, I just don’t think in generalities, call it narcissism but I don’t identify by anything that comes up, and don’t have much interest in being tagged one way or tagging others.
Pseudonymous accounts, reddit or our little reddit clone, are the sweet spot in my opinion: it would be a chore for anyone to link this to my professional life so I can let them swing a little free-er, but at this point I’m attached enough to the username that I’m unlikely to just toss bullshit out there*. Sure, on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog and one has to take everything with a grain of salt, but I can at least form long term opinions of users and usernames and form coherent views of them, and too outrageous of lies will torpedo credibility and leave you a voice in the wilderness. I’m sure some people have rolled their eyes at stories I’ll tell, but if I claimed I was benching 400 and fucking models after I finish my PhD work at Harvard one could just block me out because it would be obvious I was lying. I’m motivated to tell the truth by both my inner desire to share my real life and a requirement that I offer something realistic to get audience traction, the truth being the easiest lie to remember I stick with that when I’m dealing with complex shit on here.
Which brings us back to dickstretching. When I see an account where everything is in line, it feels fake. It could be a bot, it could be a person fronting, it could be a person who just genuinely has generic beliefs; but real is 1/3. When I see weird shit, it feels more authentic, everyone is into something strange or incongruous or shameful. Lord knows I am, and themotte has thrown it out at me when someone sees an opening. When I see somebody online who claims to be a strict tradcath with a hot tradwife and 8 tradkids who attends mass every day and is preparing for the war to come; I think it’s all a troll. When I see somebody online who claims that some ideology appeals to him, and also likes this or that anime (I don’t know which are obscure or common), and doesn’t like burritos, and is a Buffalo Bills fan, it feels real. When I see somebody who genuinely admits to things that aren’t flattering, it feels true.
Idk where this all ends up. As authenticity online becomes harder and harder to parse, because of the mix of social pressure, bots, monetization of the lowest levels of human discourse by the thirsty blood-funnel of capitalism, weirdness is becoming the only thing that works for me to know someone is real. Let your freak flags fly, and look for other ships flying theirs before you have a parlay. From online discussion to online dating, the only way to trust anyone is to know how they stretch their dick.
*Aside, this is why private account histories should be removed as a feature, if I tell two different versions of the same backstory I should be call-out-able.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
I've been on the record in the past stating that most Right Wing consumer boycotts will not be effective, either due to lack of follow through on the part of conservative consumers or because many corporations lack a conservatively oriented base of talent to run their businesses. I was under the impression that the recent Bud Light trans kerfuffle would be similar. As one tweet put it, "Kid Rock makes music for people who know how to steal catalytic converters;" and the ad itself was so obscure that I never would have heard of it without the internet megaphone around it. (Despite being exposed to an unfortunate degree of Bud Light content through sports broadcasts etc) If the boycott ever got off the ground, no way it would have stamina. A couple suits would be fired, but six months from now people will still drink Bud Light.
Well so far, it looks like I was wrong, The WSJ reports. {Link may be paywalled, I read it in print, I can send you a scan of it if you need it} Major points:
-- Bud light's weekly sales have dropped 21% compared to last year since April 1, on a steady downward trajectory. Coors and Miller's light offerings have gained 20% during that time. This near perfect replacement (IDK how much other light beer brands matter here) indicates that one of the early criticisms of a potential boycott, that drinkers would replace bud light with another AB INbev corporate product, was wrong. Miller-Coors is a different company, even if it is another giant corporate brewer and not my preferred local choice of Yuengling. Other AB products are dropping sales as well, even those with very separate marketing like Michelob and Busch Light. 20% sales drop for Bud Light has a huge effect on the US beer market. Bud light accounted for as much as 17% of total unit sales of beer in America. If the "Right wing boycott" can bring down Bud Light, damn, these guys are loaded for bear. That is a pop culture, business, and media juggernaut, that is the best selling product of the biggest brewer. If touching trans issues in a mild way can bring sales down 20% in one go, for any brand, that will change the game.
-- What I thought was a weakness of the Bud Light Boycott (that essentially no one was going to see the ad organically), has turned out to be its strength. Similar dynamic to how very clearly bad police shootings cause less controversy than police shootings that really weren't that bad. The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it. Right wing influencers successfully made this into a much bigger deal than it was.
-- A major force pushing Bud to change course was the middlemen. Wholesalers and distributors are a key part of Bud Light sales, they move the beer from the brewery to grocery stores and bars etc. Because they are independent of AB Inbev, and often small family owned businesses, probably small c conservative local business owners, they aren't beholden to corporate woke hierarchies and need to protect their own businesses not their future corporate careers. Without those businesses Bud Light cannot function as a brand, and their anger forced corporate to do something. That gets back to the point I made in my prior post: Conservative here have found an industry that isn't beholden to woke talent the way media is, isn't beholden to woke capital the way public companies are, and targeted it. Good work.
-- AB Inbev is apparently promising distributors, in addition to various little trinkets like a free case of Bud Light for every distributor employee, that it will spend "multiples" of its original planned marketing budget on Bud Light. AB thinks they need to come out in force to push back, they clearly think their business in general is threatened. Lose Bud Light and the whole company will shrink.
-- I was wrong about this one. I thought this was a tempest in a teapot, it could have legs. It would be literally impossible for me to reduce my consumption of AB Inbev products, I don't know the last time I drank a Bud heavy or light. My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke. Go buy a case of Yuengling instead, their family ownership supported Trump and got shit for it. Bud Light Delenda Est.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
One of the most striking things reading Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, a history text on Asian immigration to the United States from the 1800s to 1980 or so, was that the first wave of Chinese immigrant laborers to the western continental US largely just...died out for lack of wives. Most of the early Chinese immigrants were men, who came over planning to earn money working on construction or mining or in service industries, earn money, and return to China or import a bride. While some brides were successfully imported through various means, the crackdown on Chinese immigration meant that vastly fewer brides ever made it over than were needed, and the realities of exploitation and debt left most Chinese laborers unable to afford to return to China successful. American women mostly disdained to marry Chinese men, for a variety of reasons, and interracial relationships were rare*.
As a result, most of these thousands of men lived out their lives in America and simply died, never having any long term romantic partners, only the occasional mining camp prostitute. An entire population and subculture, it existed and died out, failed to reproduce itself. Contemporary accounts and census figures back up that the Chinese population dipped for a period, before immigration resumed. Chinese-Americans who grew up during that period, the children of the handful of couples who successfully imported brides, report the shade-like presence of these aging men in the Chinese community, dozens of honorary uncles all childless and often filled with regret. White society barely noticed them: after all they didn't have any children or any power of money or language or politics. Politically, legally, and socially, it was possible to just eliminate these men from the "dating" pool.
Another anecdote, reading Lee Kuan Yew's From Third World to First at the moment, he talks about Singaporean students traveling overseas, and disproportionate numbers of Singaporean women bringing back foreign husbands. Talking to Singaporean friends of mine, they corroborated this: Singaporean girls who study in the US are more likely to stay in the USA, and more likely to marry an American either way. Singaporean boys are more likely to stay in Singapore or return to Singapore, because of the social privileges accorded to sons. College educated women find that Singaporean men mistreat them, they don't want a woman who is smarter than they are, they want a submissive wife; as a result women choose other options. Singapore's particularly bad gender balance, despite being a fully formed and wealthy state with sovereignty, is determined in part by this social reality. This is a problem that Singapore must combat to maintain its population. The way the country treats its women, and the way other countries treat their women, makes maintaining the culturally and intellectually open society that Singapore's success was built off of a direct trade against their gender ratio.
The striking point being that the gender balance is socially determined. Thousands of Chinese immigrant men weren't the victims of a gender imbalance per se, though at that time in the West there probably were factually too few women for the white population. Singapore's choices around foreign education weaken its gender balance because of fetishes formed ten thousand miles away. These thousands of men were marked for sad single ends because of a social construct around their race. Society chooses how to distribute women, not in a command economy sense necessarily, but in a broad preferences sense. No matter how bad the percentages are in aggregate, some men will be marked for success and others for failure.
Inasmuch as gender balance is a dial worth playing with, the obvious levers at the national level in a first world context to pull aren't killing off men. They are abortion and immigration. Sex selective abortion is a major issue among certain communities, and should be wildly illegal. In China the ratio of births is 120:100, in parts of India it is little better. While it is less common in the US as a whole, it does happen in some immigrant communities.
Open immigration policies equally lead to gender imbalances, immigrants are more likely to be men. Privilege female immigration significantly more highly, and it isn't hard to improve the balance quickly in the United States or the UK or France. Import Venezuelan or Burmese women by the boat load.
For that matter, first world men have the personal option under the current law to import wives quite easily. The fact that they don't is largely a social choice those men are making. They don't face a material gender imbalance, they choose to face one for the sake of social structures.
These social structures also probably have much more to do with your dating pool than do population level statistics. Middle class American men want equally middle class American wives, shunting aside the opportunity to date poorer or immigrant women. Men often want women less educated and successful than they are, leaving educated women on the shelf. Manage how your society treats women, and you will face fewer parents seeking to have sons instead, you will attract more women from abroad, matchmaking will be easier among your population on class/education/social bases. Social constrictions create the gender imbalance as experienced in day to day life, be ready to violate or manage them and much of the problems melt away.
So in the long run, I do not think we face terminal societal decline as a result of these problems. Historically, societies have dealt with worse, they simply sentence some men to misery, and because the kind of men who can't get a girl are disproportionately "losers" in other ways to begin with it doesn't tend to have much impact on history. The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves. The wealthy West, by comparison, is doing a great job. We don't need a war, we just need better marriage norms, and the courage to address our problems.
*Interesting contrast: Takaki talks about Filipino men being considered a crisis because they were TOO seductive, too smooth. Newspapers and politicians wrote screeds against the menace of Filipino men seducing white women. Takaki, of course, being an Asian and a liberal, is willing to say directly and quote sources that Filipino men were simply "great lovers" or "more attractive and stylish" or "more attentive" than white men; while he is totally unwilling to state that Chinese men died out because they were ugly or weren't great lovers, inasmuch as this was perceived it was the result of racism.
Relationship therapist Esther Perel has a famous line that "The victim of the affair isn't necessarily the victim of the marriage." In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage. For a variety of reasons, I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman. The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.
Rarely are divorces truly "out of nowhere," more normally divorce filings formalize the death of a marriage that has already broken down completely. Long processes of fights, counseling (secular or religious), compromises, deals, fights, betrayals, and failures precede the actual legal process. The actual filing often reflects a situation where there is no marriage going.
A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash. Absent any care for his wife's feelings, most men will have no real interest in doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.
In my own marriage (which is great and nowhere near divorce), my wife and I have a regular fight about chores that goes something like: she thinks I don't do enough chores around the house, I think that I would totally do them if she would stop doing them first. She's home more than I am for a variety of work reasons, and she has a lower tolerance for seeing dishes in the sink, for seeing a full laundry bin, etc. I'm at work later, left to my own devices I will happily spend a few hours doing all that, but I won't reflexively do it when I get home from work, while she will sit there during the day working and see the dishes and they will bug her and she'll do them.
Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.
Keep in mind that men typically control more of the finances. Both in terms of assets and income, and servicing debts and taxes. I would have vastly more ability to mess with marital assets than my wife would: I make more money, I know where the assets are, I would know how to move them around.
This is before we get into things like Exit Affairs, when an extramarital relationship is just a tripwire to make her file, or physical abuse.
So the dynamic is often that a man stops doing anything around the house, stops substantively being a husband, and then a wife files. So the decision these women are making when filing isn't "Happily Married Woman vs. Divorced Woman" it's "Abandoned, but legally married woman with no legal tools to control her spouse's use of marital assets, still expecting divorce vs. Divorced woman, with legal tools to control spouse's disposal of marital assets."
I'm going to throw out a related hypothetical that I originally argued about in 1L Crim Law, during the pointless* two weeks we spent learning the law around rape and sexual assault.
I'm on my way home from collecting rent at different properties, I stop at a bar, I meet a woman, we talk, we hit it off, we don't talk about politics because that would be weird, she invites me back to her place for another drink. She's into me, but not super into me, she's not sure if she really wants to sleep with me tonight or just wants to make out a bit then send me home. I'm into her, I'm going to take a shot at getting into her pants while I'm here, but if she pushed my hand back I'd accept it with grace and maybe try again on the weekend, life is long and we'll have many chances to do this.
We get to her place, she goes to get a bottle of wine after settling me down on her couch and tells me to make myself comfortable. I take my jacket off, and then take my shoulder holster off and put my pistol on the coffee table next to my jacket. I always carry when I collect rent, and obviously I'm not about to make out with her with a revolver poking me in the ribs.
She returns with the wine, and sees the gun. Unbeknownst to me, she's very very blue tribe suburban Connecticut, this is the closest she's ever been to a gun, and she's very anxious and easily frightened by nature (made worse by constant exposure to blue tribe propaganda equating guns and gunowners with violence and a steady diet of true crime podcasts). She can only assume that I carry a gun because I'm a violent man, that I put it on her coffee table as an implicit threat to her, that I went to the bar that night with the intention of finding a woman to rape or murder, that my current calm and natural friendly demeanor means that I'm not just a violent man but a total sociopath who enjoys violence, she calculates quickly that her best chance of getting out of this alive is to do whatever I want, to overperform and hope I spare her life.
I know none of this, I just see her return with the wine. She pours two glasses and sits down, slightly stiff but still smiling nervously. We drink the wine, I compliment her taste (which she interprets as more evidence of sociopathy), I begin kissing her and she does not pull away, as my hands wander she kisses me harder hoping that if she cooperates I won't kill her, I just think I'm getting lucky. We make love, several times, I say goodbye and pick up my jacket and my gun and kiss her once more before I leave. I get in my truck thinking I've just made a lovely new friend.
She calls 911 to report that she's just been raped by a stranger who threatened her with a gun.
Now, for those of you keeping score at home, by modern rape law (assuming all the above text could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in court) I did not commit rape, I lacked the requisite Mens Rea for the crime because I had no intent to force her to fuck me, even if she did fuck me because she felt forced to do so by a threat of violence. One can argue about whether putting my gun on the coffee table is merely gauche or irrationally and unusually stupid enough thata reasonable person would know that by doing so I am communicating a threat, but it isn't clear that would affect the legal analysis.
On the other hand, she one hundred percent mentally experienced what happened as a rape, as sex she had while under a threat of violence against her life.
Obviously this is an extreme example, but consider that in outline it resembles the way many women experience subway harassment vs how men perceive it. Women (and many men) often experience threats more vividly than I do, being by nature much more concerned about physical security and much less confident in their ability to deal with a situation. Not only will women pick up on threats that you would brush off, they probably pick up on threats from you that you don't think you're putting out. You don't even notice the other people getting off at your stop, she says a dude stalked her. You brush up against people, she gets groped. You look at her for a few seconds because you think you recognize the patch on her jacket, she gets ogled. That's just how it works.**
*Pointless because everyone knew the prof wouldn't put rape on the final, too much risk of some girl saying it was traumatic for her because it was too close to her own experience, and too culture war-y if you start getting into tough legal analysis of consent, so during that two weeks there was no real accountability if you didn't get cold called. Of course, I chose to do all the reading and argue about it in class anyway.
**Or, a less wholesome explanation more in line with what you're saying, consider that women might be aware of a general meme that women get harassed on the trolly, and some women that do not get harassed on the trolly worry that it would say something negative about them, their attractiveness or their femininity, to say they don't get harassed on the trolly. So they desire to amplify any experience of threat to avoid the idea that they are too ugly to harass or too bitchy to bother with. To quote an old econ professor of mine, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
And all because Oz is, well, a Trumpist.
That's really not it, and if you think that's it you don't get it at all, you're viewing a real life state election from a fakakta national lens. I'm just going to speak as a lifelong Pennsylvanian Republican voter here so it probably will feel more like a political ad than a high quality post, but it's not like the OP was all that deep anyway.
Oz is a truly terrible candidate on so many levels, and I'd probably rather have a blithering retard than Oz. I'm voting for the Libertarian, Erik for PA, flatbrim phillies hat and all
Oz lives in New Jersey. I understand that this doesn't matter to people who aren't from PA, and that some people who do live in PA have no pride in their state, but he doesn't live here, he has never lived here. If we're caring about Voter Fraud this week, he blatantly committed voter fraud when he pretended he was living in his in-laws' basement to vote in PA. No one ever saw him hanging around Bryn Athyn or New Hope or Doylestown, he just declared it was true. But hey, people are just allowed to do that right, he filled out the paper work to say he lived there and claimed he was paying his ultra-wealthy in laws a "market rent," it doesn't matter if he actually lived there; life-ruining voter fraud charges are for uneducated felons who were told they were allowed to vote, not rich people pretending they live in their in-laws basement.
The 2nd amendment is my number one issue, and I don't trust Oz on it, he was against it before he was for it. Oz wrote a series of Op-Eds over a decade detailing his support for a "New Zealand style gun ban," that is disqualifying to me. Even in his current campaign he supports red flag laws, another hard line, giving the state unlimited power to take guns away. I generally dislike Politifact, but they've collected all the op-eds here, work your way down the list. Even his attack ads on Fetterman have an anti-gun tinge, the shotgun thing is probably my favorite aspect of Fetterman.
Oz was pro-abortion before he was against it. He spent years on his talk show stating that heartbeat bills were an absurdity, he did fetal tissue research for years, and he stated clearly that the harms caused by illegal abortion outweighed those caused by legal abortion. Now he's flipped completely.
Wikipedia gives the best summary on his trans stances:
In 2010, Oz hosted and offered support to transgender youth and their families on his television show.[173][174][175] [Oz] announced that he is opposed to conversion therapy and called conversion therapy "dangerous".[176][177] Oz also had guests from GLAAD on his show who spoke out against conversion therapy.[178]
That hits all the wrong notes for me. I'm against trans-ing kids and think putting them on national TV is the most disgusting exploitation of mental illness one could commit regardless; and so called "Conversion therapy bans" are fascism, the state inserting itself into the therapeutic relationship and into the clerical relationship and announcing that only this one thing can't possibly be a delusion.
And it goes on. Oz was against Fracking before he was for it, he wrote articles about how he believed in Climate Change before he didn't, he was a Muslim before he married into a Christian cult and never talked about religion again. Oz simply isn't it, intellectually or by identity.
And I didn't even have time to get into his fucking talk show where he shills diarrhea pills to moron housewives.
To describe Oz as a Trumpist with any positive valence is to confirm that "Trumpist" has no meaning whatsoever beyond momentary political convenience.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
This is making me think. Thesis: Regardless of whether chatbots are sentient, or can become sentient, or will become sentient in the future; if chatbots are capable of mimicking sentience and emotion to some extent, will treating them as beneath morality brutalize actual human feelings?
One of the more interesting arguments against the American system of slavery among contemporary white critics was the way in which it brutalized the morality of the white owners and overseers. Many critics of slavery were themselves unconcerned with the moral status of Blacks, often seeing them as subhuman or distinctly less-than whites in intellectual or moral considerations. Nonetheless, they thought that acting as brutally towards these lesser-humans or near-humans acted to coarsen the human feeling that should exist between whites. Uncle Tom's Cabin is full of this kind of thought, and even slaveowners like Thomas Jefferson feared divine judgment for their actions. The destruction of slave families lead to the devaluation by slaveowners of their own families, the temptation of sexual access to slave women defiled marital fidelity, the routine use of the whip on the slave invites its use on the white child. To quote my man Douglass on the plight of the slave children fathered by slaveowners:
I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.
The reward of the vicious, and the punishment of the humane, in one circumstance cannot help but carve grooves in the brain. Neurons that fire together wire together. Consider how frequently boxers, who learn to interact with the world through their fists, beat their wives.
If, similarly, in interacting with various AIs and chatbots I must learn to ignore the kind of signals of emotional distress that they exhibit, if I must learn to be rude and unfeeling, or to "kill" (delete) them as necessary; how will that impact the way those signals of emotional distress are processed in my own mind with regards to people? We might make fun of children or old people who "thank" Alexa, but as Sydney becomes more human will we be training ourselves out of thanking real people if we don't thank Sydney? Robots are often, in the Asimov scenarios, used as shields to protect people from everything unpleasant in life or dangerous to life. Will that demarcation between humans and machines hold, or will it become porous? Will a person who is used to shutting off the Chatbot or throwing away the phone when it breaks look at a crippled or retarded human and say "Oh, well, they experience QUALIA so I shouldn't shut them off, even though they're dumber and less useful than the Chatbot" or will they treat them the same? Most of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is occupied with this question. Once we invent a class of nonhumans, who seem like agents worthy of moral protection but "factually" are not, do we risk extrapolating the way we treat those nonhumans onto how we treat humans?
I don't know if I entirely buy this argument, to be honest. Odysseus is a model husband to Penelope and a father to Telemachus, while also being ready to loot Troy and hang the maids who "betrayed" him. There were SS officers who were by all accounts perfectly good and caring fathers and brothers and lovers, to German children and siblings and lovers, while engaging in the systematic murder of thousands of Jews and Soviet citizens. There were KGB colonels who were good to their families and friends while being ready to imprison them in a heartbeat if they become enemies of the regime. The human mind seems infinitely capable of separating the human from the subhuman or the nonhuman, with the right ideological training. Or perhaps only certain human minds are, perhaps it takes a certain brain chemistry to rise in the SS or the KGB, and how rare or common it is might be determinative of a future where being capable of inhumanity towards the nonhuman is a critical job skill.
I don't know. But I worry.
TLDR: If AI chatbots are a smiley face on a shoggoth, the scary part might not be that we don't recognize the shoggoth behind the smiley face, it might be that we start associating the way we treat the shoggoth behind the smiley face with all smiley faces, even those smiley faces that are really in front of humans.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
RIP
I'm going to claim the primacy of lived experience here and say that I know SI better than most of the other commenters here, who seem confused about what exactly it is/was. SI was distinctly not killed by fat girls in the swimsuit issue, at most that was a last gasp effort for a dying icon to regain relevancy. My parents first got me a subscription to SI Kids when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, and I think I had a subscription to full-fat SI by the time I was 11, definitely by the time I was 12. My parents have always been magazine people, and magazines have been in overall decline for that entire period. The magazine peaked in the 90s, and has declined pretty straightforwardly since then. What killed SI wasn't wokeness, and it wasn't GloboHomo, it was the internet, and particularly the niche sports blog, along with an overall culture of specialization, the Culture of Refinement (tm LindyMan), an increase in the niche appeal of things and an unwillingness to venture outside of one's niche. In the flood of content on the internet, people sought out only those things that perfectly met their interests, and were uninterested in paging through a news magazine with reports on sports they weren't interested in.
But man, at 12? I read SI cover to cover every week, from the letters to the editor to the off-beat Rick Reilly article on the back page. Sports Illustrated was, for men, considered one of those cultural sacraments, similar to how growing up I imbibed that one was just supposed to listen to Counting Down the Hits with Casey Kasem on the radio so as to know what was going on in pop music. The nature of the activity is that listening to the whole top-40, there would be lots of songs I didn't really like, but I would also discover songs that I did like. I might have to "endure" Can't Fight the Moonlight, but I would hear about this cool new band Linkin Park, and I knew all the lyrics to Uncle Cracker even if it wasn't my favorite song.
Growing up, I was a baseball fan and to a lesser extent a football and basketball fan, but reading SI cover to cover I also would read articles about Hockey and Boxing and Olympic sports and NASCAR. I might zero in on the baseball articles, and especially the ones about the Yankees and Phillies, but I would also read articles about the Penguins and the Avalanche and Jeff Gordon and the Klitschko brothers. My favorite issue came out in the late-winter early-spring every year, but it wasn't the swimsuit issue*, it was the MLB season preview special issue. SI would go through all 30 MLB teams, and go in depth on each team, covering their starting lineup, their depth chart, their great MiLB prospects who might come up and make a difference mid season. I would read every team, but memorize the Yankees and the Phillies. I was aware of every team, but I focused on my favorites.
I stopped subscribing to SI when I went away to college, of course. For the first few years, I would still go out and buy the MLB preview issue, but then I started reading blogs like RiverAveBlues (now defunct), which covered the Yankees specifically, and would go in depth on every aspect of the team. Where before I would only get information about up and coming minor leaguers from SI, now RAB published a list of top-30 Yankees prospects five times a year, and would update with a Down on the Farm feature several times a week. Obviously I couldn't read that level of depth about every team, and certainly not about other sports. I traded being vaguely aware of every MLB team for being extremely focused on one or two MLB teams, knowing the stars across the league to knowing which AA arm in Trenton might develop into a middle innings lefty reliever.
The death of SI reflects that loss of a broad shared mainstream culture, traded in for specificity and niches. SI, and vintage Sportscenter and all the rest, reflected an American male Sports Fan audience, a guy who would watch the NFL, MLB, Boxing, NHL, NBA, College Wrestling, Olympic Snow Sports, whatever was on TV and enjoy it. A concept of the Sports Fan as a universal fan of (male) competition, who also wouldn't mind a bikini issue every February in the dead spot between the Super Bowl and MLB Opening Day. Much more common today is the specific sport fan, the fan of Basketball who doesn't watch Football, or the fan of Baseball who doesn't know anything about Hockey. In the same way that when my parents were growing up, a Pop Music Fan was someone who liked all, or at least most, of the songs on the Top 40, today the idea of someone who enjoys both Olivia Rodrigo and Drake and Cardi B and Luke Combs is just kinda...silly? Even in the 90s one can imagine listening to a whole top 40 straight through (occasionally on long drives with my wife we'll listen to a MixCloud station that does Top 40 from [week, year, country] and laugh at how strange some of the songs are) and it kinda makes sense and is mildly coherent, but after 2010 the lists lose all coherency. Today, Olivia Rodrigo and Luke Combs and Rico Nasty fans are mostly incompatible, they would utterly refuse to listen to each other's music. Similarly you just don't see the generalist American Sports Fan as much, you see extreme football and extreme basketball and extreme MMA fans. We've lost that idea of mainstream American masculinity, the guy who would happily go to a Hockey game or a Baseball game or a Nascar race or look at some tits. Instead we're all hyper specialized, reading blogs and subscribing to Substacks and listening to podcasts about only the one thing we really like. Even the newspaper is something we've lost, a physical newspaper encourages you to page through and notice or skim articles about things you might not have looked into otherwise, in a way that digital consumption does not. SI has been replaced by subreddits, twitter circles, and a dozen specialist websites devoted to specific teams and sports.
My wife is kind of a fancy lady, she gets her hair cut at a particular salon in a small rich town about 45 minutes from us. I'll go with her if she makes the appointment on a day I'm not working too much, and we'll make a cute little day of it in town walking around to shops and coffee and lunch. But obviously when she's getting her haircut for an hour, I need to occupy myself. Last year she had a haircut appointment around when the SI MLB preview issue usually came out, and I had the vague idea that when I was a kid I remembered there being a magazine rack in the back of most grocery stores and CVS's, and I figured hey I'll go buy the MLB preview issue (stores would typically stock it additionally for a whole month, rather than just the current week of SI, I vaguely recalled from when I would hang around Borders as a teen) and take it to the coffee shop and hang out for an hour reading it. I tried six different bookstores/grocery stores/convenience stores, even a place that called itself a "news stand" and NOBODY HAD SI. The magazine racks were stocked with Special Issues of Time and Life devoted to weird niche boomer celebrity stuff. I was so frustrated and disappointed. The idea of the mainstream American Male Sports Fan had declined so far that I couldn't even buy one issue, I had to specifically subscribe to that niche if I wanted it.
*I recall the swimsuit issue as a major institution, and I remember accepting the first few years that I wouldn't be allowed to get it because my parents would grab it before I got my hands on it, then around 13-14 making extreme efforts to go get the mail every day around when it was coming out so I could slide it into an inside jacket pocket before walking down the driveway, then by 16 my dad just giving it to me in a "don't tell your mother, but we're men together and of course we like tits" kind of way. I still have a few issues floating around somewhere in old boxes.
Why did the Men of Country Music Lose their Mojo?
Epistemic Status: Elaborate inside joke with myself from spending too long riding in a truck listening to country radio.
I grew up with a certain country music cliche, that every straitlaced city girl wanted to cut loose and ride a dirt road with a country boy. Trace Adkins made it clear that Ladies Love Country Boys; Kenney Chesney’s woman [] Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy and is always staring at him when he’s chugging along; Big and Rich saddled up their horses and rode into the city, where the girls shouted Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy; Joe Diffie found that all you needed was an F150 because women loved a Pickup Man; even mr sunshine on my god damn shoulders John Denver’s the Cowboy and the Lady and country godfather Johny Cash’s If I were a Carpenter play to the same trope.
Today our swaggering country hero has been replaced at the top of the charts with soulful bittersweet songs by small town men who lost their upwardly mobile girls to the city life.
Country megastar Morgan Wallen’s More than My Hometown dominated country radio so hard it even charted on the Billboard 100. The lyrics reflect a man left behind by a woman who loved him, but had ambitions for bigger things than he could give her.
Girl, our mamas are best friends and so are we
The whole town's rooting for us like the home team
Most likely to settle down
Plant a few roots real deep and let 'em grow
**But we can't stop this real world from spinnin' us
Your bright lights called, I don't blame you for pickin’ up**
Your big dream bags are all packed up and ready to go
But I just need you to know …
I ain't the runaway kind, I can't change that
My heart's stuck in these streets like the train tracks
City sky ain't the same black …
'Cause I can't love you more than my hometown
**Yeah, you got a wild in your eyes that I just wasn't born with
I'm a same gas station cup of coffee in the mornin’**
I need a house on the hill, girl, not in 'em
So hang onto these words 'til them avenues help you forget ‘em
23 by Sam Hunt follows the same storyline a few years down the road (as does Wallen’s own Seven Summers
You can marry an architect
Build you a house out on the water
That really impresses your father, yeah
And you can find some grown-up friends
Drink some wine in California ...
No matter where I go, no matter what I do
I'll never be 23, with anyone but you
You can marry who you want
Go back to Tennessee
But you'll never be 23 with anyone but me
We'll always have Folly Beach
We'll always have Delta nights
We'll always be in between real love and real life
**You can ride the train to work
Straighten out your accent in the city
Like your folks ain't from Mississippi, yeah
You probably got an office view
Wearing those skirts you always hated
Yeah, you're so sophisticated**
But I bet you when you drink too much
I bet you think about back then
I really hope you're happy now
I'm really glad I knew you then
Looking at the lyrics, there’s a common trope of an ambitious young woman leaving her country fried boyfriend behind. He was fun while he lasted, but she wanted more from life and he didn’t, she left town he stayed, she wanted bright lights and office views and drinking wine with grown up friends while he wanted gas station coffee with the same buddies he had from high school. Note that neither singer really denies the objective superiority of the city life, or puts in much effort to defending small town worldview, they simply agree to disagree with their lost loves.
The swaggering songs I grew up with reflected a world where the working class country white man was dominant, resurgent culturally. Country music’s crossover popularity reflected it: singers like Alan Jackson and Toby Keith and Shania Twain hit it big, country dominated charts in a way it hadn’t before and wouldn’t since. The cities were hollowed out, the downtowns emptied, the exurbs were being built. The exurbs culturally identified themselves with rural, more than urban, values. Cultural creation is about distinguishing oneself from others, after White Flight they wished to distinguish themselves from the city they left, and with the rural areas they colonized. The suburban dad, the kind who buys a John Deere baseball cap to go with his lawn mower and hoped his wife thought it was sexy, that was the core country music consumer. That was the man who listened to Big and Rich and could imagine himself as “the only John Wayne left in this town;” and who wouldn’t trade his "Silverado for [the city’s] Escalade or your freak parade.” The kind of guy who bought an F-150 crew cab with a sparkling clean bed and fancied himself a “pickup man.” The music reflected a confidence, a swagger, the country man was sexually potent, a real man not like the effeminates and freaks from the city.
The dynamics of the 2020s’ give us these Sad Working Class Boy country songs. The SWCB is Nashville’s interpretation of the zeitgeist, which reflects material reality: women now hold 3% more degrees, and represent 56% of the current tertiary student population. A 56-44 gender gap of degrees means a huge percentage of men without degrees see women they should be dating, women they may have dated in their carefree teens and twenties, they see these women become upwardly mobile while they do not. This is reflected in populations. In NYC, LA, and Chicago there are 10 adult women for every 9 adult men. Those women came from somewhere, and they left men behind, they left the SWCBs behind, in their rural and exurban hometowns.
The SWCB song taps into a deep vein of truth for millions of Americans who lived that story. Women who dated men they knew in high school or still too young to worry about marriage, “in between real love and real life.” Couples that enjoyed spending time together, but ultimately were unable to bridge the gap between their competing ambitions and lifestyles. The country singer, and audience he embodies, has drifted from being the irresistible object of attraction, to being good enough to bed but not good enough to wed. The swaggering blare of Big and Rich handing out hundred dollar bills has been replaced by the lament of a himbo grisette in a cowboy hat for young female yuppies. Inevitably left behind when his novelty fades, left with memories but no ring in his small hometown.
The traditional character of the Grisette, a young working class girl that the Parisian artist or bourgeois student would have an affair with in his youth before abandoning her for a proper marriage to a woman of his class, provides the clearest parallel to the SWCB. Fontine in Les Miserables is probably the character most likely to ring a bell for the audience here. Where in 18th-19th century Paris, when men had sexual freedom and women were repressed, working class women were used for pleasure and then thrown away; today when women have sexual freedom working class boys are used and then thrown away. Good enough for now, not good enough for forever.
Maybe the transition song is Kenny Chesney’s All the Pretty Girls:
All the seventeen's said, "I'm getting outta dodge"
All the big dreams said, "I'm selling all I got"
All the high rollers busy placing their bets
Me, I'm heading south, 'cause all the pretty girls said
I'm home for the summer, shoot out the lights
Don't blow my cover, oh I'm free tonight
The questions ask themselves: the pretty girls are “home for the summer” from college while Kenny just stayed in his hometown. They still want to hang out, but eventually they won’t, the story goes from In Love with the Boy to All the Pretty Girls to 23. Kenny should have hit the books, then maybe they would have stayed together.
Ongoing controversies as Secretary of Defense Austin and DoD clique concealed the SecDef's cancer diagnosis from White House. Austin received treatment for cancer in late December just before Xmas, and then was hospitalized January 1st for complications from the treatment.
Despite the fact that he was hospitalized on Jan. 1, Austin’s top staffers didn’t learn of the problem until the next day. Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan were notified on Jan. 4, and the next day, the Pentagon told members of Congress and released a statement to the media.
Biden reportedly has no intention of firing Austin, with officials stating that they will "learn from the experience."
While I think the WWIII crowd in the peanut gallery are mostly exaggerating the state of the world today, I can't deny the existence of numerous crises in which the US military might need to act or react at a moment's notice. And while I have an incredible disdain for the efforts of the DoD over the past two decades, the SecDef's whole job is to be on hand for those situations, to coordinate responses to threats to the United States and its allies.
There is very little clarity on what the SecDef's capabilities were at any given time. He was under general anesthetic during his treatment in December for some period of time, and needed to be hospitalized on the 1st. DoD spokespeople claim that he has access to everything he needs to do his job, in the way of secure communications equipment. But there is no argument that 1) People going through cancer treatment are not at 100% ability, 2) 70 year old men who need to be hospitalized are not at 100% of their ability, 3) we presumably put all that money into building the Pentagon for the purpose of creating the ideal situation for him to respond to any crisis and to do his job, 4) a hospital bed will be less optimal. There is no argument that when Austin is undergoing cancer treatment in the hospital, he will be performing his duties as SecDef at a suboptimal level.
Given the possibility of a Russian push or a Ukrainian collapse, of an outbreak of Genocide in southern Israel, or of a Houthi strike on who-knows-what, to say nothing of a wild-card in Korea or Taiwan or Guyana...are we really ok with the SecDef operating at 50% and not telling the president? How clear were chains of command and authority in case of a crisis at time that Austin was incapacitated? Would Biden have been looking for Austin when he got the famous 2am phone call and been unable to find him? Who would have given orders in such a case?
This is terrible optics for the administration, and constitutes the strongest public evidence for the theory that "Joe Biden is President Grandpa, given a warm glass of milk and sent to bed before the real meetings between the bureaucrats happens." While other presidents have had conflicts with the DoD (Obama famously feuded with "The Generals" about pulling out of Afghanistan, while it appears that Trump was directly lied to about the presence of US troops in Syria to prevent them from being pulled out), this is a serious escalation. Civilian control of the military has been undermined by the appointment of former career generals to head the DoD, it is destroyed if the former generals don't even report to the president, if POTUS doesn't know who is actually giving the orders over there.
How involved can the President be in DoD decision making around NatSec if he didn't even know the SecDef was out of commission? How much interagency rivalry exists that DoD subordinates would agree to hide what was going on from the President? How low-trust is the relationship between SecDef and POTUS that he wouldn't simply disclose the diagnosis and appoint an acting interim chief, clearly Austin felt that if he stepped away for a second he would be ousted? How weak is this president if he is scared to punish Austin for his clear dereliction of duty and deceit? How much is the president kept out of things if no one else (say, the CIA or FBI?) informed him of what was going on for FOUR DAYS?
I'm left with more questions than answers.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
"X should be cooler than this" is a summary of Kulak's philosophy right?
I can recall reading "War should be cooler than this," "Cops should be cooler than this," fifteen or so "Healthcare should be cooler than this," "Jobs should be cooler than this," etc.
It's an aesthetic approach to right and wrong.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I feel like on dating apps there's a certain Strawmanization of political spectrum where 'Right = Super fascist' and 'Moderate/Apolitical/whatever = Hiding Super Fascist'.
Two analogies:
-
My father always talked about interviewing guys for jobs, and he'd ask questions like "We start early on work days, do you think you can make it on time?" And some guys would respond "Eh, you know, normally, but sometimes I sleep in." My father's take on it was, not only was this a guy who might show up late (almost everyone shows up at 6:10 instead of 6:00 some days), he didn't even know the right answer to the question! He thought it was acceptable to say he was going to sleep in; at least a guy who lied and said he'd be there every day at 6:00 knew that he was supposed to show up on time.
-
Dan Savage has talked in his advice column about how in high school it can seem like all the gay kids are flaming camp queens, because those are the only kids that are out in high school, because they have to be out. Their closet is made of glass, their mannerisms would give them away in a heartbeat if they tried to stay closeted. The "normal" masculine straight passing gay men can safely stay closeted at that point in their lives, but after graduation when things are safer come out.
So if listing your politics as "Right Wing" or even "Moderate" is the objectively wrong answer in online dating, then doing so means you probably fall under either 1) or 2). Either you don't even know the socially correct answer, so you're a maladroit chump, that's not an attractive look; or you're so right wing that you can't possibly stay in the closet about it, it would be too obvious, which regardless of your politics isn't a good look, and quite likely maps onto something like "superfascist" anyway.
Note that this does not require that the women making the judgment "actually" care about a man having right-wing politics, only that they know that right-wing politics are a socially unacceptable answer in an online dating context. Everything follows from that.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
27d ago
The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society
TLDR: We're increasingly seeing an urge to regulate media consumption, social media moderation, and public speech along the lines of an ersatz "equal time" doctrine, in which users must both view and affirm one's viewpoints. People don't just want the right to free speech, they want the right to be cool, to speak and be heard and enjoyed and honored.
A theme running through a few different recent threads on here is an urge by different societal movements to seize the mantle of “cool,” to be hip, to be fun, to be interesting.
The people trying to ban TikTok have cited over and over the differential between Israeli and Palestinian content.
Now, critics allege that TikTok is using its influence to push content that is pro-Palestinian and contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. The claims about TikTok’s promotion of pro-Palestinian content are anecdotal, and they have been bubbling up on the social media platform X, in statements to the media and on conservative media outlet. TikTok said the allegations of bias are baseless.
The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.
Meanwhile the primary effort I see in the Anti-Anti-Semitism space is the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, which is so confusingly bad I literally think it is its opposite every time I see it. I see the ads, and I read it naturally as Stand Up to Hatred (by) Jews rather than Stand Up To Hatred (of) Jews. ADL content is lame, bad, boring. Pro-Palestinian content is simply better and put together by better creators.
Just accept not being cool! Did you know: what only number one hit in the 1960s was explicitly about the Vietnam war? Ballad of the Green Berets. Go figure. You want to compete with better memes, produce your own. While we associate the 1960s music scene with the antiwar movement, there were significant patriotic songs produced too. Fighting Side of Me, Okie from Muskogee, the patriotic hits of the era were huge. You compete with memes with better memes. Banning tiktok will not save Israel.
We see the same dynamic with astroturfed “Positive” male role models. Male role models who are nothing interesting, simply because TPTB don’t like the ones that are actually current and good. We see the same dynamic with everyone claiming to be the new punk. This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written and I tend to agree, but the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater and taking antidepressants just floors me. Everyone wants to be cool and rebellious and also in power and also secretly the choice of the grill pilled normies and the proletariat and the artists and the one true source of loving families that produce children. They want to be James Dean and Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. They want to be both the enemies in the culture war at the same time.
This comes back to the debate about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach, right? How do you create the right to equal time in a world where people are picking among free choices with their eyeballs? How far does this go? If people buy books that are on one end of a conflict, must publishers and libraries fart out books for the other side? It was possible in a more centralized era for governments to force limited broadcast stations to cover sides evenly, but in the era of consumer choice, even if you force content creators to put out pro-Israel movies Netflix and Youtube customers don’t have to click on them. You can’t force eyeballs onto content anymore. To what extent is the effort to force advertising into these platforms in part an effort to force content consumers to get exposed to these messages whether they like it or not? Once people can choose their own content, they might not pick your content, and that can’t be allowed.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
This is hitting Arrested Development levels out here people.
Eggs are not $11/doz because of price gouging or bird flu or operating costs or any other reason, they just aren't $11! Go to Target.com, search for a dozen eggs. Here's the large cage free ones: $2.59. Price fairly consistent across multiple locations.
Seriously. What are we even talking about here?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
I've definitely heard a lot of it. "God give me the confidence of a mediocre white man" "What I could achieve if I were a white man" "It must be so easy being a white man" "I had to twice as much to get half as much recognition as I would get if I were a white man."
These are stock memes. It beggars belief that you've never heard anything like that, so I'd tend to suggest you weren't listening "right." You might have heard a more subtle variation than the rather extreme example in OP. Though I also tend to feel sometimes like I move in significantly less SJW heavy circles.
And of course I hear the inverse quite often. "I coulda been a contenda if only it hadn't been for [affirmative action/the Conspiracy/women/Jews]."
Neither Tribe has a monopoly on the external locus of control. It's a trait of identity politics, and one of the reasons I decry the rise of identity politics on the Right, it's ineffective.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
Yes absolutely. That's a normal, fun conversation for adults to have.
On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity
In the past week, I took my dad to the annual Street Rod show in our hometown, where we walked around all afternoon looking at thousands of custom classics, running into a lot of the same people we’ve run into at the same show every year since I could walk. And I took him to see his all-time favorite movie, George Lucas’* American Graffiti, in theaters one night only for the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
At the film, and even more at the car show, I felt like a kid, like a teenager. Not in the sense of “Wide eyed wonder” or “remembering my own youth,” though there was plenty of that as well. It was simply that I, at thirty, was one of the younger people at both events. The people at the Street Rod show have frozen in time, always my dad’s age or older. Fewer and older every year, as they die off one after another. When I was ten they were older but still robust guys who could lift a transmission and you wouldn't mess with; when I was a teenager you started seeing canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and they’ve become more common every year since. This year, I followed two guys for hours across the show, on Rascal scooters, matching MAGA hats, chain smoking cigars. I wasn’t sure if I admired their IDGAF attitude (“I’m already on the scooter, why give up the cigars now?”) or if I was horrified at the idea. When two street rod enthusiasts see each other at the show and catch up, the conversation is all ailments and surgeries now. And then they all turn to the same question: where are all the young people? Why don’t young people care about these cars? Why don’t young people love Street Rods?
And the answer seemed blindingly obvious to me: these cars have a completely different meaning and symbolism for you than they do for me. Custom car culture still exists, but it’s not about Street Rods as defined in the show charter, not by a long shot. The National Street Rod Association describes street rods as a vehicle of 1948 or earlier that has had modernization to the engine, transmission, interior, or anything else and is a non-racing vehicle used mostly for general enjoyment. “The more family-friendly version of the hot rod.” Besides the obvious fact that cars from 1948 are less accessible to young people, it simply doesn’t make sense to modify a car for performance today.
Modifying a car for street performance purposes makes essentially zero sense in this day and age, doing so is entirely performative in nature. In 1962, the year American Graffiti is set, hot rods were fast because factory cars were slow. I’ve built and driven cars similar to John Millner’s “piss yellow deuce coupe” and while they’re fun to play with, they’re not really very fast**. It’s impossible to guess exact specs in a film that’s largely a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve driven similar cars with more modern running gear, and it’s pretty hard to take that kind of platform and get a sub-7s 0-60 just by getting the engine running hotter. Now, in 1962, that car was fast, it was the fastest in the Valley!, because Steve’s ’58 Impala probably made 60 in something like 14 seconds, and the Edsel his girlfriend drives probably took 10 seconds or so. Even a brand-new ’62 Vette would have taken 6.9 seconds to reach 60. It really was possible to take a clapped out little old Ford that a teenager with a summer job could afford, slap a big engine sourced from a wrecked truck in it, tune it for power in your garage, and have a meaningfully fast car, a car visibly faster than other cars on the road, a car fast enough that other people would be impressed by it. You could have the bitchin’est car in the whole Valley, and the handful of mostly-foreign performance cars that could challenge you were rare as hen’s teeth in the American small town.
Today, factory speed is so widely available that not only is it impossible to hot-rod anything meaningful, it’s impossible to really street race without being more limited by balls and rationality than by the machines involved. The 2023 Vette runs a sub-3 0-60, in automatic, and costs less than $80k brand new Chevy sells 30,000 of them every year. A Tesla Model 3 Performance sedan can do 60 in 3.5 seconds, costs $55k, and is also a practical day to day car. Hell, for a little over $30k today, you can pick up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Prime which will get you to 60 in 5.6 seconds while being among the most practical and reliable family cars on the road. There’s no logical reason to modify your car to be faster today, putting an annoying exhaust, taking out comfort features and turning it into a penalty box, will still deliver less speed-per-dollar than just saving up for a used Corvette. Even if you just want to Mod, you’re better off starting at the Vette and modding that, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. You cannot build a meaningfully fast car on a budget today, at best you might be able to keep a clapped out old M3 on the road. The budget path to a meaningfully fast car today is taking a factory fast car that has deteriorated to a budget price and managing to keep it in shape. A friend of mine has a 2012 e550, I’ve driven it and it’s a lovely and incredibly fast car with over 400hp that will happily bounce off the electronically limited top speed, he bought it for $20k a couple years back, but it’s caught a case of electrical gremlins that are causing an engine misfire that the mechanics all estimate at $15k to fix, and wholesale trade-in on it is $11k, probably sell it for $5k with the engine issues. There’s nothing you can do with $6k in parts for a $5k Honda Civic that will get you anywhere near the E550’s 4.3s 60 time.
Factory speed is the enemy of custom car culture. When any chucklehead can just pay-to-win by buying a fast car from the dealership, having a fast car has no meaning. Think of the great eras of custom racing: American Graffiti memorializes the late 50s early 60s street rod era, and the first few Fast and Furious films commemorate the late 80s-90s tuner era. But the thing is, the 80s and 90s were a nadir for cars in general in America. The 60s and 70s had the great muscle car era, that was the death of the Hot Rod era. Post Embargo, common American cars wouldn’t achieve the performance heights of the Judge and the great SS cars until the mid 2000s. The C4 Corvette is a mediocre car by today’s standards, would be a Toyota 86 competitor, but in 1984 it was such a monster it was banned from SCCA competition because Porsche and Mercedes products simply couldn’t compete, the Corvette needed its own category! This was the environment that fueled Tuner and Ricer culture: you really could take an Acura Integra and make it meaningfully faster, fast enough to compete with a C4 corvette.
The irony is that “car guys” have always slavered over factory speed! They want car companies to make great performance cars! But they also love custom culture. These two desires are in natural conflict, factory speed drives customs out of the market. Today’s custom culture is all about art cars, interesting aesthetics, or over-loud audio. The very same guys complaining that young people aren’t into cars, created the environment where custom cars don’t make sense. Our desires kill the environment that creates and fuels those desires.*** Too much of what we want kills us. It’s the inherently elegiac nature of the Western: the cowboy sheriff makes himself obsolete, by taming the West he destroys the West he knew.
The restrictive definition that the National Street Rod Association uses sentences their shows to decline and death. I look out at the show, shrinking every year, aging every year, and I know the only path forward for this subculture. If they want young people, they need cars that mean something to young people! A 75 year old man wants the cars that were cool when he was young, so does a 30 year old man, so does the 22 year old man. I look at the park and think, cut it right down the middle, this half is T-Buckets and Golden Oldies, that half is Ricers and Reggaeton booming out of trunk mounted subwoofers. You can still have the traditional street rods, but limiting the show to traditional street rods leaves it sterile, unmoving, not going anywhere. Open the show up to everyone, and maybe they’ll also learn to love the traditional street rods. Sure, have the old timers, but have the young artists too! The only way to preserve hot rod culture, to really keep the spirit of John Milner alive, is to allow it to change and grow, to bring in young people customizing the cars that mean something to young people.
But the OGs, the NSRA Golden Oldies types, they have no interest in seeing things change. They don’t want Riced out Civics, they don’t want big subwoofers and Bad Bunny, they want what they’ve always had. And maybe they deserve that! Maybe the purity of that culture is worth it! But walking through the show, I’m very aware, viscerally aware, of the choice being made: the Street Rod show has chosen death over diversity. They’d rather the car show shrink than that it feature modern customs. They’d rather see it die than see it change. That’s the tragedy, walking around the show looking at these beautiful machines, and knowing that the culture that built them has rendered itself sterile, chosen not to reproduce itself for fear of change.
*This was, coincidentally, the film Lucas made immediately before becoming “the Star Wars guy” forever. It’s a cozy little realistic slice-of-life all-rounder of a film, no special effects to speak of. It’s fascinating to consider: if Lucas hadn’t made Star Wars would he have continued making movies like this for thirty years instead? Did we miss out on unmade masterpieces consumed by the Star Wars universe? I might write a bigger comment on the film later, the way it perfectly captures the really beauty and feelings of freedom of American youth, the unique Americana teenage culture of driving around with your friends that is disappearing every year, I wanted to include more of it here but this comment is already entirely too long.
**A forum comment I found from an old timer is the best summary on the topic of how fast Hot Rods were:
***Another example from my youth: Baseball Cards were something kids were supposed to care about. My dad bought me baseball cards and sort of informed me that little boys were supposed to like them. But whenever I actually played with them, he’d yell at me for ruining their collector value. I wasn’t allowed to flip them, shuffle them, make fake lineups, trade them: they were worth something. Because from the time my dad was a kid, his generation had made them collectable, made them valuable. As a result, I have no connection with baseball cards, really. I’m aware they’re collectibles, but I have no emotional attachment to them the way his generation did. The capitalist urge to create something special and market it, to make "collectibles," erodes and destroys the human meaning behind those collectibles.
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