FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
By his description, everybody involved wanted to invade Iraq, but the dynamic that resulted in an invasion seemed to be that of the Abilene Paradox.
This doesn't really square with widely shared testimony from people like Richard Clarke, talking about the Pentagon meetings immediately after 9/11, like literally the next day:
I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.
On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor—Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back.
By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq." Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. "I thought I was missing something here," I vented. "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response Evacuate the White House 31 would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor." Powell shook his head. "It's not over yet." Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.
Any stick will do to beat a dog. Dubya and his team intended to invade Iraq from the beginning, the GWOT and the absurd claims of ties to Bin Laden and the Axis of Evil and the invention of the WMD concept and the "welcome us as liberators" and madman theory and whatever else got thrown around at the time that I've since forgotten about; all that fundamentally didn't matter to the decision makers, they wanted to invade Iraq for mostly unrelated reasons. So for the rational planners further down the food chain, like the air force guys, the whole thing was confusing because the reasons they were getting for what they were doing were unrelated to the actual plan.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
And then you had to go and fuck it up.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.
Ok, cool, but what policy do we implement to fix it? Because there are very much people out there trying to use this tragedy to implement a variety of policies. It's amazing how many anti-gubmint conservatives turn into nanny state liberals when a natural disaster occurs. Which is why it's important not to get too caught up in tragedies, it quickly becomes a con designed to get you to buy into an agenda.
I'm sure the crash was awful for your daughter and you both, but I'm having trouble parsing how you told the story. Are you taking an excessive parental responsibility when you say that you "forgot" to teach her about the brakes? Because it's just hard for me to imagine not going over the brakes before you even get on the bike in a "parts of the bike" kind of way, or a curious kid just asking what x does. I'm kind of assuming you did tell her about the brakes, but didn't drill using them enough that she remembered how to use the brakes quickly under pressure.
But regardless, what policy could prevent such a bike accident? Kids can't ride bikes! Parents can't teach their kids to ride bikes, they have to be enrolled in a Licensed Bicycle School! Kids can only ride bikes with complex and expensive Automatic Emergency Braking systems! The latter two are of course equivalent to "poor/disinterested kids can't ride bikes."
So sure, hug your kid. But keep your priorities straight.
The punch line to all this? The author, Farha Khalidi, is an Onlyfans star!
I feel like Aella unleashed a sort of Rule 34 for gimmicks: there is no niche so stupid that some e-thot won't try to exploit it.
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for?
She's advocating for money, from men, who will be charmed by her pretensions of intellectualism and pay to see her tits.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
I would bet on that being true, but not a complete explanation. I'd add:
A) Crime statistics don't capture all crime. A lot of stuff is never reported. Property crimes so minor that they don't merit the time because you know the cops won't do anything about it, like stuff stolen off your front porch or out of the back of a pickup truck. Scuffles that don't result in major injury. Things that happen to shitbirds while they are engaged in shitbird activities and would prefer not to involve the law. Sexual harassment or assault under gray circumstances. People observe or hear about those even if they aren't reported to police and it figures into their perceptions.
A1) Attempted crimes that don't rise to the level of being worth reporting or prosecuting. I see a guy hanging around my truck in the parking lot and yell hey can I help you and he runs off. The guy that follows my wife for a block or two so she goes into a store and he disappears. Those don't show up in statistics. This largely overlaps with what you are saying.
B) A lot of people are wildly paranoid, and will over-react to news reports of crimes. People will tell me that in a local small city "Two or three people get killed there every weekend;" if I look at the statistics 13 people were killed there in 2021, 9 in 2022, 17 in 2023, 4 in 2024. But that's enough that they can remember a story about a person getting shot, and it makes them start to worry about going downtown.
C) People who are victims of crime talk about it a lot, and typically write over anything they did to "deserve" it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23d ago
Something I think hasn't been addressed thus far: the degradation of international law over the GWOT period, leading to the current Iran-Israel conflict. War used to be declared publicly, fought to a conclusion, ended with finality. Now there isn't really a declaration of war, states of conflict exist in nebulous ways between strong-state, non-state, and weak-state actors. Obviously this goes back a long way, but the US pioneered this process during the GWOT, asserting its right to bomb within certain countries at any time, with no declaration of war, and no peace made afterward. The USA was never at war with Pakistan, and Pakistan never formally publicly approved the use of force by the USA within Pakistan's borders in either a narrow operation or broader war. Yet the USA continuously bombed targets in Pakistan, and even launched a commando raid within Pakistan's borders killing residents of Pakistan with no formal notice to or approval by Pakistani authorities. The USA continuously asserted its right to bomb targets in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, without a formal declaration of hostilities commencing or ceasing.
What was initially the prerogative of the hegemon leaked. Israel and Iran started to assert their right to do the same after terrorist attacks, first within weak states and targeting non-state actors. Israel periodically bombs targets in Lebanon, Syria. Iran responded to attacks by bombing non-state targets in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan. Now they're trying to assert that right to bomb each other. Now we're in a situation where the belligerents escalated from proxies, to hurling drones and missiles at each other, with no particular realistic end point in sight.
What we're seeing is a kind of low-grade warfare, that will drag on, because it forms political positive feedback loops. The leaders who send the bombs are strengthened by the bombs that come in reply. Peace is an unclear process from here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
On the morning of November 11, 1918, World War I was effectively over. The armistice had been signed hours earlier, and at exactly 11:00 a.m., the guns were set to fall silent. The battlefield was already filled with soldiers – on both sides – who were simply waiting out the last few moments of a war that had consumed the world.
And yet, just one minute before peace, a single shot rang out. Henry Gunther, an American soldier, was dead. He became the last official casualty of the war, but his death wasn’t an act of heroism – it was something much more tragic.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race
Why?
The primary reason Zohran won in the primary is Andrew Cuomo, the secondary reason that he won in the primary is anti-Zionism and the anti-idpol populist backlash that comes when outside forces try to tell local people who to vote for.
Andrew Cuomo was the candidate the establishment and the financial industry rallied behind in the primary, despite the fact he hasn't lived in the city in years, was covered in scandal on his way to resigning from the governor's mansion, and really didn't have a great record as governor to run on to begin with. There was no good reason for Andrew Cuomo to run for mayor of NYC.
Then the campaign begins and they go after Zohran for his supposed anti-Semitism. Twitter was filled with jokes about Israelis speaking out on the NYC mayoral race from their bunkers in Tel Aviv, and Andrew Cuomo swears allegiance to Israel. Zohran's enemies successfully made the most interesting and present aspect of the race the question of supporting or opposing Israel.
What this tells us is that accusations of racism on IdPol lines are not going to be enough, going forward, to decide elections. The antisemitism stick has been wielded so carelessly, that even cowardly urban Democrats are no longer cringing under the whip.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I generally try to avoid both porn stars and the anti-porn crowd online, because I always have the feeling that a lot of the more aggressive and verbose anti-porn people haven't earned the right to be so angry and so cruel. Which I think is what you're picking up on. Your modal anti-porn crusader on twitter or rat-adjacent spaces doesn't feel, to me, like someone who has lived a traditional morality. They feel like gooners, porn addicts, who out of some sense of sadism or some inferiority complex related to their own inability to stop themselves from masturbating.
If my Great Uncle Charlie wanted to criticize Aella, he would have every right to, but, well, he wouldn't because he would never have any idea who she was. He lived a pious life, and that included managing his media consumption to include only appropriate material. If he had come into contact with Aella, he would have recognized who she was and withdrawn immediately.
The people who bring up Aella constantly in order to abuse her, along with various other e-thots and porn stars, are not withdrawing. They aren't avoiding worldliness. They are the consooooomers of the content produced by e-thots, while also desiring that the e-thots be unhappy.
This is an experience I seem to run into all the time on the internet, the guy who messages me about some porn star who is hosting an enormous gangbang or made a million dollar severing her hymen on live or something, with a long screed about how degenerate this is. And my reaction is always kinda, hey dude I wouldn't even know about it if you hadn't messaged me, why do you even know who she is?
The best thing to do if you don't like Aella's values and think she should have less influence, is to ignore her.
Alas, I've fallen into the trap here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
Specific random things, because most things are going to be covered by smarter guys than me:
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Plan one entrance to the house with no steps. Almost nobody does it, because it's difficult to handle the architecture/landscaping to make a ramp look good, but you totally can if you plan it from the start. Elderly people fall on steps all the time, and often hurt themselves. Also convenient for heavy stuff in general. If you plan for it now, you'll have it forever; if you have to rerig it later it will look bad, especially if it's at a time when you yourself are older/less capable.
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Anywhere water comes into your house will eventually leak. Plan for that now.
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That's a big house, think about how you're going to use the rooms. A lot of people end up with a big house with four rooms that are all variations on "couch and we watch TV in here;" or they all started as bedrooms and got adapted.
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Think of the repair guy. Don't put anything in a place where it will be difficult to extract when (not if, when) it needs to be serviced or replaced. Make it easy to reach the air handler, the water heater, the septic system, etc.
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Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements. Store them in multiple places, hard copies, in the home, for the future.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14d ago
The Bell Curve Meme strikes again, cinema history edition!
I had long known of the Reddit midwit, clickbait anti-American, hipster propaganda factoid that Sergio Leone's seminal A Fistful of Dollars, the film which made Clint Eastwood a star, was nothing but an unlicensed ripoff of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. headlines tell us that Leone "ripped off" Kurosawa, or "Plagiarized" his movie. Notably, Kurosawa would get a 15% stake in Dollars after a lawsuit, and made more money off that 15% than he had off of Yojimbo. I'd long accepted this as a fact: the superior Japanese Samurai film was ripped off by the inferior Western cowboy movie!
But, then I started an audiobook of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 noir Red Harvest, one of his Continental Op books. And what is Red Harvest about? A Mercenary protagonist, middle aged and experienced, nameless, hired or co-opted by crooked criminal warlords in an oppressed town, who plays them off against each other to clean up Personville (Poisonville). It's Yojimbo! Kurosawa acknowledged the influence of another Hammett novel/film adaptation, The Glass Key, in his creation of Yojimbo, but when you read Red Harvest it's obvious that the plot is the same. Dollars might be Yojimbo in the Southwest, but Yojimbo in turn took Red Harvest out of the 1920s Southwest and moved it back in time and across the Pacific.
And it's interesting to me for a few reasons.
The universality of Western culture and globalization of culture earlier and earlier. I've said before that Don Quixote is the proper recipient of the title First Novel, in that it is the first book with a novelistic structure that everything afterward was influenced by, there is no author anywhere after 1945 writing novels who hadn't either read Cervantes or was influenced by people who had; where something like The Tale of Genji can't make a similar claim (though arguably one could make that claim about Genji for authors born after 1985 or so). Kurosawa is iconically Japanese, and iconically among westerners a sort of saint of foreign art film vs Hollywood schlock; but his ideas were often influenced by Western originators. Everything is much more intertwined than people would have you believe.
The way this claim has been used as a bludgeon by a certain kind of cinema hipster, to point to the originality and superiority of Kurosawa over the cowboy movies made in the West. How is that claim impacted by Kurosawa in turn taking Hammett's Noir and turning it into Samurai fare? Hammett in turn was original, in that he drew directly from his work with the Pinkerton's and his involvement in leftist politics for his inspirations. But is anyone really original? Dostoyevsky said that there were only two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. So at some level nothing is ever going to be original-original, that's not the nature of human culture. Not that I question the Kurosawa-Leone monetary settlement, hey he deserved it for the shot-for-shot remake, that was worth some money. But the cultural credit he receives, and the subsequent scorn heaped on the Westerns, seems excessive.
Just one of those clever factoids that's missing the "fact."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Two Notes on Women in BJJ
I went up to New England to visit my in laws over the weekend. While there I visited a local BJJ gym three times. It was great to get a new flow, some new partners, some different tricks thrown at me and some more success with stuff I normally can't hit. But two funny things happened:
Sunday night, after too many cocktails, we were sitting around with some of her older family members and we were chatting about the new gym I had found up there. And I was trying to explain the sport, and naturally this turned into "Show us something on Mrs. Fivehour!" So I have her get on top of me on the ground, and slap me like she's throwing punches. Then, gently and smoothly, just to demonstrate not with any force or intent to harm, I swung her into closed guard, tied up her hands, and then went for the triangle choke. I never even fully locked the triangle, I was just bringing it around to lock it in casually when she tapped as hard as she could and let out a yelp. I untangled myself and she was flabbergasted "Holy shit I couldn't breathe, oh my God, wow, that was terrifying! How did you do that? You can just do that?" I'm not particularly good, and I certainly wasn't abusing my strength, I was just playing around; but I have pretty thick hamstrings and I often catch training partners earlier in a triangle before it is "technically" closed. Everyone laughed, we talked more about it, totally normal.
That night, we go to bed, to set the scene when we're in New England at her parent's house we sleep in Lucy and Ricky style single beds next to each other. She comes over to my bed and says, hey, FiveHour, can we snuggle? I was really freaked out when you choked me earlier. She said she's looking at me differently because she suddenly realized how easily I could kill her, that just for a second the air had been completely cut off and she was terrified. She said it was like when she saw our dog murder a rabbit, and she suddenly realized the dog was capable of that, that she'd never realized I could do that to her.
Now, Mrs. FiveHour is a very strong athletic woman. I shit you not, I have seen men on the motte or similar internet forums talk about their lifts when they're doing Starting Strength who were months in and still squatting less than her. And we lift together so she knows I can knock out deadlifts that are better than twice hers. But still, she wasn't ready for just how easy it was for me.
Point for those who claim that the male-female gender gap isn't sufficiently understood by most people.
On the other hand, Monday morning I went to the gym, and I rolled with everyone at the new gym, and I tried not to be overly aggressive because I was new. And at any gym, I basically never turn down a roll unless I'm injured. I do typically avoid the girls at my home gym, but mostly just by positioning myself away from them when everyone is pairing up, if they ask me to drill or roll I will. More of a Pence Rule thing than anything.
Well we were doing positional 2 minute rounds starting with one partner in front headlock position, and a nice young woman about eight inches shorter and eighty pounds lighter than me asked me to roll with her. I let her get the front headlock, and I probably let her get it in a little deeper before we started than I would have let a man. And I tried to avoid using any muscle or weight, just flowing through the moves and trying to use good technique, letting her work. And the little bitch managed to tap me out. I gave her too much slack and she hanged me with it. It's the first time I've been tapped by a woman, and for several seconds I couldn't believe it. She got me in a perfect front headlock strangle, and there was no way I was getting out of it without trying something desperate and more likely to injure someone than escape smoothly. And anyway, she had earned it, she had the strangle on tight, and I tapped. She was the only one to tap me that practice.
So on the other hand, that was humbling, a point for women in the battle of the sexes: there is a point at which a woman can submit me, if I'm not at least a little careful.
I've actually started, when rolling with partners who are much smaller/weaker/estrogenic, listening to one of the coaches and once we are in contact on the ground in guard, I'll close my eyes and try to flow roll without looking, trying to feel their bodyweight shifting and reacting to mine. I'm not sure if it has "helped," but it is a really neat experience.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14d ago
Maybe Eric could scratch out a future riding on daddy's coattails like a populist version of Jeb Bush, but people like JD Vance and even still Ron Desantis are more well positioned to lead that movement.
The more interesting question to me is: would Eric or Don Jr. draw enough attention to fatally weaken another MAGA candidate and throw the race into confusion? Trumpism has always had multiple facets: some people like him because he's a fighter who wins for traditional conservative causes like reducing the size of government or abortion issues, others like him as an explicit repudiation of the prior GOP consensus on issues like foreign intervention and tariffs, still others just like Trump personally as a celebrity showman.
A TrumpSon run would almost certainly capture significant quantities of credibility on the third leg, and probably carry more credibility on the particular mix of traditional Republican policies and MAGA policies than most older line GOP candidates like Rubio or Desantis. A Trumpson run would also be ruinous to Vance, as it would rob Vance of the title of Heir.
Even if neither Eric nor Don Jr. can win, and I don't particularly think they can as they haven't thus far shown the kind of talent that would get them over the finish line, their run could still be important. Which is why they're NEVER going to say they aren't running: the threat of entering the race, even if only for a quixotic Connor Roy spoiler run, is leverage. And the Trump's are old-school moguls, they never let go of leverage*. So whether they actually plan to run or not, they'll hang the threat of a run over Vance and Desantis, and demand loyalty and service in exchange.
*I personally remain convinced that Trump's entire 2020 election theft bit was a clash of worldviews. In real estate, when you have a claim, even a weak claim, it represents leverage, and you can get your counterparty to negotiate and give you something for it. You never let it lapse for nothing. Trump thought he could cash out the vague election theft allegations for something from Biden's handlers; Biden's handlers don't think that way and wanted Trump gone so they weren't in the mood to play. In his efforts to hang onto the bit, Trump lost control of it, and wound up with a lot of things happening that did not benefit him at all.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Even the most politically loaded prewar narrative, Frederick Douglass, reveals the same pattern. One of my favorite anecdotes is when he bribes young white street urchins in Baltimore to teach him to read by giving them bread, which he has free access to an effectively unlimited amount of in the kitchen. Or his lament for how the institution of getting drunk on new years causes plantation slaves to waste money that they could be saving to try to buy their freedom. Slave experiences varied wildly and were not unform suffering and lack of agency.
Still, it must be noted that ancient Greek slavery was just a different institution. Most slaves were not slaves for many generations, slavery was not racialized as radically, freedmen did not worry (any more than anyone else) about being re-enslaved.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29d ago
Cuban missile crisis. The USA essentially has it as a rule that no other western hemisphere country will have the bomb. We just don't notice it because it's so thoroughly accepted as obviously true.
"We need scammers to get vigorous economic development" is such a weirdly cargo cult reading of that story.
I frequently stop at a local convenience store, and buy an Arizona diet iced green tea, which costs $1. The store is tiny, normally there is only the owner or his wife present, and when I walk in they're frequently making a sandwich at the counter, stocking something, etc. When they're somewhere else I wave the tea at them and the dollar bill, tell them I'll leave it by the register, and leave.
Now I could definitely steal the tea once, maybe twice. I could probably steal a candy bar or something a few times.
But I would definitely go there less if buying the tea took me three minutes longer.
Which would probably also reduce my purchase of higher profit items like Zyns and hoagies and ice cream at the store.
The way you get a high trust society is because when people trust each other, there's so little friction in economic transactions that you become so rich that the odd scam can be ignored, societally, without serious consequences.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Perceived crime rates change much faster than actual crime rates.
Can anyone explain America's love affair with the pickup truck?
I'm reminded of the odd demographics/tribal affiliations of this forum reading the replies you got. The luxury 4wd pickup truck is the greatest motor vehicle ever constructed for your average American suburban/rural man, it's available at a reasonable price from numerous manufacturers, and the drawbacks mostly don't matter to the people who buy them. If you compare them to other choices along the metrics that matter to the people that buy them, the big dumb pickup truck, much maligned, wins frequently.
The modern American pickup truck is as comfortable as any luxury car, with enormous storage capacity, complete capability across any situation, power and style. But most importantly: people buy them because they like them:
So what do people actually like about trucks? According to Edwards, the answer is counterintuitive. Truck drivers use their trucks very much like other car owners: for commuting to and from work, presumably alone. The thing that most distinguishes truck owners from those of other vehicles is their sheer love of driving. “The highest indexed use among truck owners is pleasure driving,” says Edwards. Truck drivers use their vehicles this way fully twice as often as the industry average. “This is the freedom that trucks offer,” says Edwards.
People like big V8 engines. Not even necessarily for speed reasons, but they like the way they feel, the sound, the rumble, the sense of owning and using a powerful well engineered machine. A family friend of mine recently signed to buy a Z06 Corvette, which gets to 60 in under 3 seconds, but told me he never intends to drive it fast at all, he simple enjoys the sound and rumble of the bigger engine. Of course, modern pickups are about as fast as sporty cars of the past: a V8 F150 in 2025 gets to 60 in about the same amount of time as a V8 Mustang from 1995. They're not exactly slow, they cruise at highway speeds and pull out no problem.
People like big comfortable cars. They like having space to stretch out. They like having an excess of space for stuff, so they don't have to worry about how much they are carrying, or carefully clean and sort things each day.
People like having an excess of capability. Being able to haul things at any time, even if you don't need to often, is nice. Being able to haul way more than you need, is nice.
The reasons not to get one: it's difficult to park, it's bad on gas, stylistic reasons. Most suburbanites and rural dwellers never parallel park, and live in areas with abundant parking, so it doesn't matter to them. The increased gas cost of a pickup vs an SUV or full size van is pretty negligible. Gas might be annoyingly pricey, but it is factually cheap: the price difference between a 20mpg vehicle and a 30mpg vehicle is $600/10,000 miles, or about $6k over 100k miles, assuming an average of $3.50/gal. $6k is a pretty unimportant difference over the life of a car between one you like and one you don't, probably shouldn't make your decision for you. Stylistically, some people don't like them, some people do. The people who do, buy them.
Vehicle purchases are, at heart, irrational. Trucks are tough and fun and capable, and people dig being associated with that, in the same way that they seem to enjoy dressing up like their favorite sports stars and watching games, or putting on cowboy clothes on Halloween. I like to say that All Cars Are Drag, costumes that we put on and take off. And nowhere is this more relevant than with the Butch Drag offered by pickups. “When asked for attributes that are important to them,” Edwards says, “truck owners oversample in ones like: the ability to outperform others, to look good while driving, to present a tough image, to have their car act as extension of their personality, and to stand out in a crowd.” Trucks deliver on all of that. At a price.
I do think part of this discourse is poisoned by a weird belief in the anti-pickup truck crowd that if they see a truck without anything in the bed once or twice, it must never have anything in the bed. So I'd ask the crowd: how many times a year do you need to use your truck for truck things before you are "allowed" to own a truck?
Personally: I have a distaste for anyone who doesn't use the things they own. I have an American aristocratic horror of things that are "kept nice."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is),
I pretty much reject the idea of Holocaust Denial without Antisemitism, because a faked Holocaust is pretty much a concrete open-and-shut case for a world Jewish conspiracy. It requires not only that Jews have had the power to force the story on everyone, to force schools in the United States to make me read five novels about the holocaust in the course of my public education and force half of Europe to throw you in jail if you don't believe in the holocaust; but also that every individual Jew who attests that they lost a family member is a liar. It pretty much positions Jews as a uniquely powerful and evil group. If you don't hate the Jews after confirming that they faked the Holocaust hard enough to sell 30 million copies of Anne Frank's diary, then you're a little looney tunes yourself.
That said, having personal experience as the center of Holocaust proof is rapidly running out of runway:
I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.
In 2000, there were close to 6,000,000 WWII veterans alive in the United States; in 2024 there were around 66,000. And worse, in 2000 when I was a kid there were still WWII veterans who were active scoutmasters or deacons or worked actively, I interacted with them as vigorous active guys; in 2024 they are mostly just pushed around senior living centers in wheelchairs. The family stories I pass down to my kids about WWII will be no more meaningful or inherently accurate to them than stories about the Civil War were to me.
Given these facts, it seems unwise to hinge an entire societal worldview on the Holocaust's exact details, or occurrence at all.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14d ago
I do find it interesting that Trump, for all of his self-vanity, does seem to genuinely care about leaving a legacy behind him and grooming successors.
Huh? I'm totally lost: one of Trump's defining political characteristics over his decade in politics is his lack of successors. That's why Butler, PA was so crazy: everyone knew that if Trump died the policy direction of the United States would change. And it would have! The entire world economy would be in a different place today if Trump hadn't turned left at the last second.
Where Biden died on the job, and no one even noticed, and on the ballot he was replaced by Harris with no real change in policy plans, and if Harris hadn't taken the nomination we have a list of generic "qualified" Democrats pages long who would all implement more or less the same policies. Romney, McCain, Dubya, Dole all had pretty similar policy platforms, as did many of their primary competitors. Trump? No one has his policy platform, except inasmuch as they copy it from him.
In a decade in office, Trump has done nothing to groom a successor publicly as the "next one up."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
I think Trump is getting dog-walked by Netanyahu, reacting to events and trying to seem in control, while actually being in a reactive mode and failing to achieve any kind of leadership over his putative allies or the people he has a "great" relationship with.
Whether Trump knew about it in advance or not, I don't think he wanted Israel to do this.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28d ago
Rome collapsed as landowners farmed their estates with slave labor, and foreign mercenaries were hired for defense. Meanwhile Roman citizens were given bread and circuses.
Three events that took place separately over about four centuries.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
You can absolutely enter into agreements that restrict the 1st amendment right to free speech, NDAs, trade secrets, non disparagement clauses, even just normal character clauses in a contract restrict your right to free speech.
The first amendment protects from the government, it does not protect from private contract law.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
When Aristotle talks about "natural slaves" he's not really talking about some American nightmare-vision of an antebellum plantation*. The ancient Greek system of slavery he was familiar with was closer to "employee who can't quit" than it was to "living under absolute constant terror." In some sense "slave" is a mistranslation, because the context is so different.
If you say "should it be legal to enslave people" everyone says no; but if you asked the same people "Should it be legal for certain people to be employed in jobs they can't quit" many would say yes.
There's no question that a great number of people need a structured job created for them, where they are directed. Traditionally, bosses took a large hand in the personal lives of their workers; today that is frowned upon.
*It should be noted that actual plantation life wasn't like that either. There were black slaves better off than some poor white people.
I have so many layers of problems with this logic. Even starting by accepting that "the bible tells me so" is a good way to set up foreign policy, let's take a second and think through a few implications:
a) What kind of arrogant or ignorant person thinks that the verse can be interpreted simply and literally?
Ted Cruz says that in Genesis (well, he didn't know that, but that's where it is) God commands us to bless and aid Israel. But much of the Old Testament consists of God punishing Israel, often with foreign invasion and raiding. God is constantly using foreigners as a tool to punish Israel, especially when Israel is lead by a corrupt, selfish, venal, dishonest, cruel man who refuses to give up power at the appointed time. God seems to cause Israel to lose as often he causes them to win, to be honest as a genre-savvy gentile if I were living in Old-Testament-Superstition-Land, I'd probably stay out of it. God, to my knowledge, never punished anyone for ignoring Israel. God's blessing to Israel is as often the blessing of discipline as it is the blessing of good things, and I sure wouldn't want to get between the Father and the child he intends on spanking. Getting involved with how exactly God is seeking to bless Israel seems like a real Oracle of Delphi situation!
In fact, the one clear example where God blesses an outside nation for its aid of Israel would be...Cyrus the Great of Persia. So perhaps we can intuit that the Persians are a nation specially chosen of God to chastise and discipline Israel? It seems odd that Ted Cruz is so certain he knows God's will. But let's accept for the moment that we are obligated to help Israel:
b) Which Israel?
Is Israel its government? Is Israel the global diaspora of Jews? Is Israel the population within the borders of Israel, regardless of religion, provided they descend from Abraham? This might seem like trivia, but I'm pretty sure the verse that Ted Cruz is citing is Genesis 12:3 which reads in the ESV:
Which of course brings up the question: Who the fuck is you? Frequently this is interpreted, and put up on billboards by Israel lobbyists, as "blessing Israel." (Where's your Sola Scriptura, Ted?) But God makes no mention of a state or government. The more natural interpretation of the phrase (leaving aside the new covenant that "you" is the Church, which is pretty obviously correct and righteous to me) would be all the descendants of Abraham are to be blessed. I would certainly offer no privilege to Abraham's descendants who have persisted in one type of religious error over another.
But let's accept that the state of Israel, as represented by its government, is what is to be blessed, let's consider:
c) Is it blessing someone to help them commit a sin?
Some years ago I was the best man in a very relgious Evangelical wedding. Before the ceremony, the pastor gathered up all the groomsmen, and we prayed and we put our hands on the groom, and the pastor told us that our obligation was not finished when he said I Do or when the tables were cleared up, that we had taken on an ongoing sacred obligation, to bless our friend, to bless his union, to come to his aid to keep his marriage together and to keep him on the straight and narrow. I said Amen.
Today, he called me, and told me that his wife is cheating on him, that he knows where she is the guy she is there with, that he's coming to my house because he needs a gun today so he can go kill them both.
Does my sacred vow to help him and bless him obligate me to give him the gun? Am I violating my oath if I ask him any questions other than "what caliber?" Ted Cruz would seem to say yes, you are obligated to bless him and that means helping him do whatever it is he wants to do. Ted would probably say "Do you need a ride?"
I would say that's an insane interpretation or friendship, and an even more insane interpretation of blessing. I would say that my obligation in this scenario is to restrain my friend, by physical force if necessary, to prevent him from committing a horrible life-ruining and soul-damning sin. I would say that my obligation extends so far as to warn his wife, to call our mutual friends and his pastor to help me talk him down, or even if no other means were available to call the police, to prevent him from committing murder. Friendship means protecting your friends, and that includes protecting them from committing mortal sins.
In my life, when I've had a friend who was in a really bad place, I've gone to his house with a bunch of friends and told him hey let me take your guns to store them for a few months, to keep you from doing anything you might not live to regret. That is what I think friendship is.
But ok, let's say I do give him the gun, that still doesn't answer...
d) Is it blessing someone to help them make a mistake?
Let's alter the hypothetical above: accepting ad arguendo that I am obligated to give my friend a gun to kill the man that cuckolded him and his cheating wife, what if my friend's wife cheated on him with JD Vance, and my friend has no realistic chance of taking my 1911 and getting past the Secret Service (ok that may be easier than previously thought...) and killing Vance. Am I still obligated to give him the gun?
This is where knowing the population of Iran is a useful piece of information. At least within an order of magnitude! It allows you to faithfully discharge your obligation to Bless Israel with, for example, wise counsel! If what Israel needs is advice, it doesn't help them to give them weapons to help them get themselves into trouble.
I just don't see how evangelical politicians can act like the bible command leads directly and easily to using bunker busters on Iran.
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