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
2hr ago
I just don't think you can make a map that really works. There's too many baptists in NYC, too many liberal arts colleges in Indiana. The cultural capital of the country is too mixed up. Texas is the only region that maybe has a strong enough identity to secede, but that would depend (oddly) on future Texan leaders moderating their red tribe culture warring significantly enough to get buy in from the 40% of the state the votes blue. The reverse in California or New England may also work, if they could moderate, but they are far behind Texas in regional identity.
I live in Pennsylvania. If I drive half an hour north or west I'm definitely in Appalachia, if I drive an hour south or two hours east I'm in the heart of the megalopolis. There's no clean line where people would feel happy drawing that line and letting "them" have the rest.
I guess what I'm getting around to is that I don't think there is a future where Red or Blue America can balkanize successfully, rather a future balkanized America would require stronger regional identities which moderate between Blue and Red. The populations are too mixed, and the ambitions that underly the culture war movement are too universal. Red Texas or Blue New England cannot secede, Purple Texas and Purple New England might be able to.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I can't recall a halftime show that impressed me more, particularly. He was definitely a lot better than Kendrick or Dre or Usher, because mercifully I didn't understand the words.
But I think most of the Discourse around this misses the point. The NFL as an organization wants to market more to hispanics at home and abroad, hispanics in America are less bought in to the NFL than whites or blacks, while Mexico and Latin America offer potential for growth. Move that godawful team in Jacksonville to Mexico City one day?
This was a calculated decision to punt on Anglo audiences that the NFL already owns to appeal to hispanics.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
There is no American Civil War that can result in balkanization. America has been too unified for too long.
If that is the inevitable result, it will be after decades, if not centuries, of civil wars, plural, which eventually massacre enough people to create clean stable lines.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Once one gets into nuances like that, it just becomes a question of creating virtuous men. How do we do it? One of the historical methods is by artificially creating hard times fo those experiencing good times in a society. The battle of Waterloo, after all, was won on the playing fields of Eton. We used to call such activities character building.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
America's Imperial wars of the past 100 years are best compared against various efforts to control uncontrollable hinterlands which were a constant feature of imperial history among the ancients. The Persians tried to subdue the Scythians, Varus tried to conquer the Germans, Pharaohs seemed to send an army to disappear into the south periodically, a powerful Chinese emperor would try to subdue the steppe. It's always part of the imperial rhythm to try to control economically marginal hinterlands, with mixed success.
I'm sure there's a term in military theory for what I'm talking about, but we're stuck in a thinking about wars that is primarily about peer wars, and we've lost concepts like the raid and the punitive expedition, which were much more common throughout most of history.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
When asked who I'm voting for, I tell the joke my father in law gave me from Iran:
I'm voting for Ali Baba, he only has forty thieves.
That often gets me out of the conversation smoothly enough.
If someone is earnestly trying to figure out my politics, I'm honest about them, perhaps choosing to target issue discussions that I think offer favorable ground for my arguments, on which I can sound more intellectually sophisticated or think I can find common ground with my interlocutor, compared to ground where my arguments are weaker or less sophisticated.
Hiding the ball ("Secret ballot innit?" "I never tell anyone who I vote for" "I just moved to town so I wasn't able to register in time..." "What's voting?") is probably the worst thing you can do if your goal is to be diplomatic and get a potentially prejudiced interlocutor to like you, because you're admitting guilt about it, confirming their suspicion that Republicans/Democrats know that their choices are evil and bad and nonetheless revel in mustache-stroking evil deeds. She's likely to think your politics are worse than they are if you aren't willing to even talk about them.
You're much better off being bold and saying what you believe, it's a more attractive quality than cowardice or guilt.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
There's a parallel theory that, for example, American soldiers in WWII were comfortable with mechanics because farms were more mechanized in America at the time. They were used to fiddling with engines on tractors and trucks, and were better at performing tasks like that during the war.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
I applaud your efforts at cohesive argument.
To have this debate honestly, we need to start by defining a pile of terms before we even start.
What constitutes Good Times? What constitutes Hard Times? What is the expected period over which the cycle should occur?
Then what are Strong Men? What are Weak Men? Hell, what do we mean by "men" exactly? Do we mean the whole testicled population of the state, do we mean "freeborn" or "citizen" men, or do we mean an elite subset of leadership? Because those three groups can all be at different layers of the cycle at the same time, the dynamic can occur internally as well as externally.
But most importantly I think the missing assumption in all this is: how long should an empire last? What is the expected period that can be lengthened or shortened by cultural practices?
A lot of the arguments here hinge on defining terms differently. If we can communicate what we're saying, we can probably reach a consensus. Which ultimately comes more to something like Strong Cultural Practices Produce Strong People, Weak Cultural Practices Produce Weak People.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
So I don't think a talented wordcel could fake an Orthodox Jewish conversion with ordinary effort.
I mean, given that the supposed stakes are facing down genocide, I think "ordinary effort" in that case is actually pretty high, and could be executed if necessary. The major impediment to most of us being personal attractiveness as candidates, rather than ability to mouth the necessary platitudes and complete the necessary behavioral modifications. I don't know that I would be able to do it, primarily because I believe in Jesus and secondarily because of the circumcision, but for most that probably isn't an insurmountable set of barriers, and I could certainly imagine being forced to do so in a fantasy universe to go undercover or something. It's not rocket surgery.
Note that the Israeli authorities do not recognize Conservative and Reform conversions.
I'm not talmudic scholar enough to dig into what exactly that means but this article states that:
Israel’s “Law of Return” gives foreign-born Jews, or anyone with a Jewish parent, grandparent or spouse, the automatic right to claim Israeli citizenship. Those who convert to non-Orthodox Judaism in another country have been able to gain Israeli citizenship for decades.
But it does appear that Orthodox is a better bet to guarantee recognition.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
So do you think that all google searches, internet queries, LLM queries should be inadmissible in court? Or only those that can plausibly be called legal research?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I mean the correct answer, if you own a car and live 50 meters from a car wash, is that you neither walk nor drive to the car wash, you drive somewhere else and pull through the car wash on your way out or back when it happens to be empty.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
In this article, he mentioned a police chief that fought desegregation attempts in his town with clever tactics. As you might have guessed, the only difference in the outcome was that he's not vilified by history textbooks today, he still lost.
Isn't that kind of like condemning every Confederate or Wehrmacht general, or hell condemning Hannibal and Napoleon, in that they ultimately were on the losing side?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Yeah, I don't think I really see the Waitress Scale existing from what you've said, or I don't agree with you about where things fit on that scale.
When I hear "Billionaire marries waitress" I hear something very different from a schoolteacher.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Proper Orthodox conversion would work too, but a sham one probably won't - they are not born yesterday and all the tricks that can be tried had been already tried.
Maybe I'm overly confident, but I assume any Mottizen would have the verbal skill to appear sincere and comprehend the necessary information, if sufficiently determined. Leaving aside that a lot of us might be so wildly personally unpleasant that we would be rejected on other grounds.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
He was well known enough for his name and activities to be a punchline in 30 Rock and for his name and appearance and attitudes to be parodied in Entourage which I suppose were higher concept than like, NCIS or Friends but not exactly esoteric knowledge.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Harvey Weinstein was extremely well known before the accusations themselves.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
You're probably not going to find one without tracing ancestral roots and learning the relevant language. You're not really looking for someone that wants you, nobody does assuming you aren't working and have no assets. You're looking for someone who can't turn you away.
If you have any Jewish ancestors, you might be able to gin up Aliyah to Israel. In some cases I've heard stories of people pulling it off despite not being halachically Jewish, just having a Jewish grandfather or something like that. I'm not sure you have enough runway to convert convincingly in that time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Before engaging in this, can we get a clear definition for what you consider "waitress" jobs versus what you consider "girlboss" jobs? Or what attributes we are putting in each category? What are we actually talking about here? I just feel like everyone is going in circles about what "waitress" and "girlboss" and "prefer" even means.
I think the original tweet makes some sense without reference to marriage, if an elite man might choose to fuck a waitress without marrying her, she is still competing for his attention. She's like a spoiler in a playoff race: she's not gonna win the championship, but she might keep you from winning it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Why wouldn't it be? Notes to oneself aren't privileged. If I keep a notebook it isn't privileged. If I ask you a question it isn't privileged. My lawyer, my priest, and my wife are privileged; we do so to protect those certain relationships. Why do we want to extend this to LLMs?
What you're looking for, I guess, is something like why would it be probative to talk about someone's LLM history? Would it be more prejudicial than probative to admit them as evidence? But that's very different from privilege.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I'm starting The Stand next (I watched the old miniseries in pieces a dozen times on SciFi cable growing up), and my exposure to King's writing is limited to IT, Salem's Lot, The Shining, and some short stories. So I might change my mind on that front, and I'm open to being convinced otherwise on any count.
But IT is probably his most iconic work, which is most emblematic of his overall output, and his contribution to culture more broadly. Pennywise was well known to me even before reading the book or seeing the films, where I don't feel like I could reference Trashcan Man or Randall Flagg or Mother Abigail in a conversation. I could definitely expect everyone to get a joke about the sewer clown, even if they haven't actually consumed IT. If you ask a room full of people about IT they'll tell you it's that clown in the sewers that eats children, if you ask about The Stand you'll get less.
Stephen King is mostly famous as a horror writer, though he pumps out a lot of other material as well, and IT is a monster book. Where The Stand might not even be top-5 in apocalypse books off the top of my head, IT is near the top of monster books and influenced every monster that came after. IT is closer thematically to Carrie and The Shining than The Stand is, in my mind.
Also I just looked it up, just by book sales, IT is King's best selling novel, with twice as many copies as The Stand. I've seen copies of IT being read by people in real life, but never copies of The Stand.
So yeah, the clown stands alone, IT is it, the magnum opus.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
You WILL be blinded by the glare of my 10mm gold Cuban chain
I love the term because whenever I see one, I just picture it on an old Miami Cuban dude in a straw fedora and a linen shirt.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Why do we want to extend privilege, which is a situation where we all pretend that what we know ain't so, to LLM queries?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I just read IT on my tour of King’s great works. Spoilers below, kinda, but more just don’t bother reading it if you aren’t familiar with the book.
-- Add IT to the list of "Great Boomer literature that's ultimately about relitigating the 60s. Technically the 60s happen mostly off camera in the book, but the cultural conflicts of the period form the moral core of the book and the Boomer protagonists catharsis over their childhood demons. The villains poisoned by Pennywise are vile racists who spout nigger at any passing black, they are homophobes who bash queers just for existing, they are child abusers and bullies and bigots. The Losers' Club protagonists rebel against the eternal forces of evil, overcome it as children, then return and kill the ancient symbolic manifestation of all racism and bigotry and evil. The symbols of Reagan-Era greed and excess, the shopping malls and greedy developers, sink into the pit created when IT is killed. It's a fundamentally optimistic view of history that is very of its era. ((Contrast: on my King tour I just got to Salem's Lot, a decade earlier, post-Watergate era, same "horror author goes back to his long abandoned Maine home town which is being stalked by a demon representing socio-economic and cultural decline" plot, and the ending is much more ambiguous with the protagonist killing the big bad, but his life is ruined in the process, everyone else in town dies including most of the Scooby gang, it's not even clear that they will ultimately clear the town of all the vampires))
You can actually look at the historical cycle, the famed “every twenty-seven years,” and it lines up perfectly to make each occurrence in the work (1985, 1958, 1930, 1903) line up with a Republican president, so maybe IT is just Republicans in the White House according to King. King talked about IT in terms of Reagan’s nostalgia for the 50s, with the story meant to be illustrative of the ways that Americans in the 80s had repressed the sins of 1958. King misses
-- IT is ultimately a book about Noticing. Ben says about the bullying the kids face from other children:
“This alarmed Ben more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sight-line. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like “Why don’t you quit that?” and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner . . . and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.”
Which is a metaphor for the entire 27-year child murder monster cycle thing. Mike explains earlier in reference to the murder cycle:
“If I were an insurance man instead of a librarian, I’d draw you a graph, maybe. It would show an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault...Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years—although the cycle has never been perfectly exact—that violence has escalated to a furious peak . . . and it has never been national news.”
"How many?" Bill repeated. “Nine. So far.” “It can’t be!” Beverly cried. “I would have read about it in the paper . . . seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine . . . and those children that were murdered in Atlanta . . .” “Yes, that,” Mike said. “I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s really the closest correlative to what’s going on here, and Bev’s right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children . . . But we all know that doesn’t really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn’t. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn’t want it to.”
The information about the murders is available, each murder and disappearance is reported in local news, and if anyone from outside asked about the murders people would tell them. There's some indication that IT has the ability to prevent people from noticing, or to convince people to turn away, and that might be true in certain cases in the book. But at a larger, town-wide level over decades, the story is one of selection. There's no force field that prevents people from leaving Derry, and some people do. It's noted that during the summer of murder in 1958, a lot of families send their kids off to summer camps. The people who live in Derry and choose to remain are simply those who do not Notice, who are not concerned about it. They don't recognize the pattern, or trust their unease, they just get through it and keep living their lives and accept that certain things happen.
Derry is noted as thriving despite the murders, and leaving aside the blessing of the eldritch blood god living in the sewers, it seems that the blood letting makes the city healthier rather than weaker? The population selected for acceptance of child death is a fully functional city. Maybe the people who are just willing to accept the risk of gruesome death is actually better at living in the modern world than the rest of us, and the cowards who flee from it are the idiots?
-- I'd heard tell of the child-orgy-gangbang thing, and honestly I think people who get politically correct about it are cowards. It's weird to draw a line between what's ok to portray in a horror book and what's not, and put child mutilation murder on one side of the line and sex on the other. It’s a horrifying scene, and that’s the point it’s a horror book. A lot of woke reviews of the book complain about using terms like Rape too much in the novel, because it’s “traumatizing,” and it’s just so weird to me because traumatizing you is kind of the point of the book.
The novel is famously massive, early reviews note its 4lb weight, but weird thing is that when a book is that long is that it nearly always was supposed to be longer. IT was just about at the physical limits of bookbinding. Any longer and it becomes a series, and turning a single story into a series changes the rhythm. It reduces the number of readers who will actually consume the whole story, and how they consume it. Reading one long book is different from reading three shorter books. King clearly wanted to tell this story in one novel, and you can see the remnants of other plot directions that King considered and possibly started but then abandoned or edited out to make the story fit into a single book. Which leads me to my fan theory about the Child Orgy: there was meant to be a second orgy.
The Child Orgy is a symbolic passage into adulthood. Grady Hendrix writing about revisiting IT after thirty years says:
It draws a hard border between childhood and adulthood and the people on either side of that fence may as well be two separate species. The passage of that border is usually sex, and losing your virginity is the stamp in your passport that lets you know that you are no longer a child (sexual maturity, in most cultures, occurs around 12 or 13 years old). Beverly is the one in the book who helps her friends go from being magical, simple children to complicated, real adults. If there’s any doubt that this is the heart of the book then check out the title. After all “It” is what we call sex before we have it. “Did you do it? Did he want to do it? Are they doing it?”
But this isn’t, really, a one way passage. Sinatra sings: “You make me feel so young, you make me feel so spring has sprung.” When adults fall in love, we say we feel like a little kid again. When a grown woman has a crush we say she is “giggling like a schoolgirl.” The climax of IT is built around the adults, on return to Derry, having to regain their childhood memories and beliefs, regain the feelings and gestalt of youth. I think King originally intended the group to have another Orgy, which would bring them back together, reunify them, and take them back to youth. This ties into the other theory I have about abandoned pathways in the novel: there was supposed to be a new seventh loser.
Throughout the 1985 portions of the book, we’re reminded over and over again that with Stan’s death they are one short. Six, can we do it without seven? Seven was powerful, six isn’t enough. Then they lose Mike too and have to do it with five. At the same time, the three non-Loser’s Club characters Originally, I think, Bill’s wife Audra is meant to link up with the Losers’ Club and become the seventh loser, and then participate in a Losers’ Club orgy with the other six to “get back” to childhood belief in things like open relationships.
-- Structurally, IT is more of a fantasy-heroic book than a horror book. Thematically and vibes, it's horror. But really you have the Fellowship form, you have the quest, you have the hero stepping up, you have Gandalf/Mike lost before the final confrontation forcing Aragorn/Bill to step up and lead. King was a big Tolkien fan, and I wonder to what extent he consciously wrote his magnum opus in imitation of LOTR.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I don't have much to say on the shady dealings between Epstein and Wexner, could it plausibly theoretically be the case that a creepy pervy bigshot was trafficking underage girls to another creepy pervy bigshot?
It's not really credible, as Coffee nodded to, that Les Wexner owner of Abercrombie and Fitch at the peak of its nudie magazine catalog and bags needed Jeff Epstein to get teenagers to sleep with him.
Nor is it all that credible that Les just handed Epstein a billion dollars for no real reason.
Sure, but what I see out there is the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe getting performatively mad at each other, with the Red Tribe acting as though the halftime show was coordinated by some perfidious cabal of Oberlin professors and the Blue Tribe declaring that they are the normal ones. When the reality is that this was coordinated by such evil libtards as Robert Kraft and the Walton family, and that is the agenda that needs to be questioned.
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