FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
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
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8hr ago
My Father had a buddy who played with Joe Namath and he used to tell a story about going to a bar after practice and at the end of the night Broadway Joe was about to walk out with a really ugly girl. And he took Joe side and said hey come on man are you drunk she's not up to your usual standard. And Joe looked at him and said, it's midnight on a Tuesday, Miss America ain't walking through that door.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9hr ago
Either the Early Church or Pre-Socratic Greek Philosophy. We have so many thinkers that were very important, but who we only know through criticism and invective directed against them. To really find the full intellectual output of just a few of these lost writers would be a civilization changing event.
There exist "Baden-Powell Scouts" who are trying to do a kind of RadTrad fundamentalist boy scouts that hews closer to the original Scouting for Boys text. I'm all for competition.
I decry as woke the urge to sue the Boy Scouts for the (in)action of the unrelated third party Girl Scouts. That is wokeness personified: losing the battle and filing a lawsuit to make Mommy Government force you to play with me the way I want to play. Using the tools of wokeness to attempt to advocate for boys isn't anti-woke, it's reifying the woke framework that Mommy will force everyone to play by Mommy's rules of fairness.
And anyway, the reason that Scouting chose to allow (but not require) failing troops to choose a coed model has to do with the massive infrastructure that Scouts has as the incumbent. Scouting has huge land holdings, massive organizational advantages.
If Pete wants to start the Hegseth Youth, that would be great. And perhaps if you build it they will come. But there's a lot of building that needs to happen before it can seriously compete.
I was at my parents house reading the Sunday Times with them yesterday. The Ethicist column featured a man who wanted to contact the principal at his nine year old daughter's school because a group of boys playing soccer after school didn't let her join the game. It filled me with a deep sense of despair. I don't care which side of the gender divide uses the tool of forced interaction: it's wrong and bad and ruins our children's lives and futures.
The biggest problem with adding girls to Scouts is that it eliminates the scout-lead elements. These were already declining, but this puts the nail in the coffin. When I was 11 and joined the Boy Scouts, the 17 year old Senior Patrol Leader might be forced to be my tentmate, would hang out with me, would supervise me at camp. Is there anyone in the universe crazy enough to leave 15-17 year old boys alone overnight in a tent with 12-14 year old girls? So you substitute "put the boys out in the woods and more or less leave them alone" for "constant adult supervision to make sure Bad Thing doesn't happen."
That said, the whole thing has less to do with Gender Equality crusades than it does with "declining institution seeks to expand its market to support existing infrastructure." Scouting has or had something like 700 camps, and thousands of troops, across the country; five or so camps are closed every year due to declining enrollment. As enrollment declined for a variety of reasons, it's tough to support all that infrastructure. Coed expands the number of scouts that a scouting family can enroll, and makes life easier for parents: instead of dropping my son off at one meeting then my daughter across town at another Monday night, I drop them both off at the same church and go to the grocery store.
Faced with decline an organization can choose death, cut camp programs further, and then see enrollment decline further as they have less to offer to boys. Or they can choose diversity, and try to support all those great programs with a different program and population. Will I want my son to join coed boy scouts? Maybe not. But I also might not bother if the nearest troop is thirty minutes away and Philmont and Seabase have closed due to declining enrollment.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
10hr ago
Boxing was the big one I thought of, but I'm not versed enough in the lore of pugilism to say when we started seeing signs that we could universalize. Did we see older champions hanging on longer as the talent pool shrank? Did we see fewer young up-and-comers? Did we see a decline in skill and strategy over time?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
10hr ago
Not sure what it is about NFL WR but a lot seem to have poor impulse (control).
You know, I was having this debate in discord while raiding BT in World of Warcraft the other day. Does playing a class draw in people with a certain personality, or does playing the class impact your personality? When you play mage, the game teaches you that you can do anything with the right combination of spells, somewhere in your spellbook is the answer. When you play rogue, the game teaches you to sneak around, find ways to achieve by stealth what you can't by brute force, do as little as possible and leave. When you play warrior, the game teaches you to win by brute force. When you play hunter, the game teaches you that you don't really need other people, you can do it all yourself. When you play priest, the game teaches you to sacrifice your own fun for the team. Over the hundreds of hours people log leveling up, then even more in endgame, that kind of repetitive pattern matching has to impact how you act in game. Do the classes attract people who like to behave that way (you can't spend 100 hours on the Paladin daddy/martyr routine if you aren't already like that) or does playing like that impact how you play the game (spending 100 hours on the Paladin daddy/martyr routine makes you worry about other players more than yourself)?
A WR, not just in the NFL but in their entire formative years leading up to it in high school and college, has to have irrational confidence or he can't play. An average NFL game features about 70 snaps of offense, a top tier clear #1 option might get 10-12 targets out of those plays, while a second or third banana will only get 3-5, and a lot of players run a ton cardio routes and get 0-2 a game. To make it as a WR, a guy has to be willing to run those routes and have confidence he can make it happen, even when for long periods he never gets targeted and nothing he does matters. A wide receiver has to stay motivated to keep running his routes perfectly with high effort, even though he'll only get targeted on a handful of them, and he'll only convert about 60% of those targets into catches. The WR who lacks that kind of irrational confidence will fail, in the NFL if not earlier, because he won't be able to commit to running those routes expecting to make a big play. It both attracts players with poor impulse control and irrational confidence, and teaches them poor impulse control and irrational confidence.
Compare the Center. My third grade teacher had this Ogden Nash poem on the wall and I memorized it sitting in class:
You'll note the life of Dick Szymanski
Is not all roses and romanski.
He centers the ball, he hears a roar-
Is it a fumble or a score?
He performs amazing feats.
And what gets photographed? His cleats.
A center is trained to never be the center of attention. Even the best center in the game, his name is most commonly called out in the commentary when he screws up a snap or a block and the QB gets hit. He builds his life around teamwork with the rest of the line, doing his job, and team success rather than personal recognition. This attitude, along with the caucasity of O-linemen relative to skill players, is why the stereotypical Delco dad wears a Kelce or a Jon Runyan jersey to the Linc, not a QB or a WR. Now is it that the Center has been trained over a decade of football to behave that way, or is it his natural tendency which leads him to become a center?
But anyway...
Of course it’s a monkey paw situation because if I didn’t create a tension then there wouldn’t be something to debate. I 100% the average NFL player is average to above average intelligence. Judging by responses it seems like people really don’t like the idea of giving up intelligence.
The original question was
So my question is would you trade your intelligence for getting to have that athletic ability. Basically you can do anything you want on a football field but the entire world outside the football field is complete confusion to you.
Presumably in this hypothetical you're starting at like 14 years old at the latest, early enough to take full advantage of the athletic ability throughout a career. At 35, the trade off is clear: even if I were an NFL quality athlete I'd be eyeing retirement at my age. And my point is that athletic ability is strictly inferior to intellectual ability for that reason. Sports fans who have followed up and comers, an MLB team's farm system or a national soccer team in particular, have experienced seeing massively talented youngsters come into the game only to suffer injuries, some of them from pure bad luck, and wash out of the game. An NFL player might have all the talent in the world and take a bad hit or fall wrong and never be the same. That is unlikely to happen to my IQ, while I could imagine a bad-luck scenario where my degrees or licenses or jobs could be lost to me, I could start all over with my IQ in another field altogether. While speed is one snapped ACL from being lost to me forever.
Like, yeah it would be cool as hell to be Tom Brady. But Carson Wentz was, circa 2017, every bit as athletically talented as Tom Brady or anyone you want to throw out there, but injuries (some from pure bad luck rather than anything you can attribute to personal traits) derailed his career and now he's a career backup. Jalen Hurts has played six years in the NFL, and made the Super Bowl in two of them, he got cleated three weeks ago and formed a blood clot in his leg that might derail his whole career. The incidents that could cause a drop off like that are pretty rare for promising young physicists or doctors, and the ones I can think of are equally a risk for NFL players. All it takes is one hit to change your life in the NFL. That doesn't really happen to IQ.
To make it a good trade we'd have to specify that my NFL star level talent won't end with me hauled off the field on a cart in a meaningless conference game in college followed by decades spent talking about my high school career at the Enterprise rental counter. THAT is a clearly inferior outcome, which mere athletic ability doesn't protect against.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
11hr ago
Don’t get me wrong; I see evidence of cowboys fandom everywhere I go, as a generic corporate thing. But more ‘fandom’ tends to be for college sports.
Regionally, I think this can vary with the team's loveability/success. The Eagles are way more culturally important now than they were when I was a kid. If I wear a jersey, or even a hat, to the grocery store I will have at least one complete stranger greet me with a "Go Birds." I don't recall ever hearing the phrase "Go Birds" as a child outside of maybe in the Vet itself.
((Eagles fans are also basking in Schadenfreude as the last resort of failure just at the moment, that the Eagles are having an awful season because their three best players on offense are injured, possibly dying, and retired; while the Cowboys are having the same awful season for no apparent reason))
College football, I was never a fan because I found it so confusing before the playoff system, so this is an outsider view: I don't get what people are fans of anymore in CFB. The transfers are so constant that the game is more mercenary than the worst free-agent stereotypes of American pro sports, probably even worse than Euro football at this point. How do you maintain fandom of a team when the players shuffle constantly, and even coaches ditch playoff teams for new opportunities? I don't think we've ever had an NFL head coach, or MLB head coach, ditch a semifinals team for a rival mid-season.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
14hr ago
There's a theory bouncing around the internet that the NFL is entering a quiet crisis of talent. That youth talent pipelines are in decline for a variety of reasons, including CTE fears and a general emasculation of American youth along with pay-to-play camps and lower level coaches variously accused of being too obsessed with winning at all costs and ignoring player development, or alternatively too obsessed with player the "right" way and failing to teach proper winning football.
Evidence offered is the decline of great QB play in the modern NFL. You have ancient QBs, some of them mediocre to begin with, being called in and showing a certain intelligence and ability to run an offense that modern quarterbacks lack. Phil Rivers came off the couch and started games, Case Keenum was able to just shred my Philadelphia Eagles. The ability to process and run an offense seems like a lost art.
People argue that the youth participation rate is drying up, that the most talented athletes no longer go into football in the same way they used to, that college players are choosing to stay in college for Van Wilder years and then retire with their money rather than enter the NFL, and that as a result professional football will inevitably decline.
I don't actually know enough about football to make a judgement about the evidence offered, my question is about prior historical examples.
What other sports have followed a similar pattern in this or other countries: popular sport, declines in talent as a result of youth participation drying up with the quality of players and play declining to the point where the old are simply better than the young for too long, and an ultimate slide towards irrelevance? I can imagine examples, but none I know enough about to be sure.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
15hr ago
This feels like such a clear monkey's paw situation.
You said trade for athletic ability, but then you get injured. Or you get drafted by the Jets.
And in a fair trade, my intelligence (top 1%, but by no means historic) wouldn't get me NFL starter money, maybe on a practice squad.
I also think that we probably underestimate how smart your average NFL athlete is, the theory that NFL athletes are idiots is mostly copium created by the mediocre. They seem stupid talking about the world outside football, but then some of the smartest men I know seem like complete morons the moment the topic of feeeeeeeemales comes up. I don't believe in types of intelligence, but I do believe in fields of intelligence and fields of interest.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
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No one has ever really shown that statistically fraternities have any higher incidence of rape than anywhere else. Much like another much maligned organization of my brothers, the Catholic Church, they are unfairly maligned because they are more organized than their equally rapey but less hierarchical competitors. Do girls occasionally get raped at frat parties? Yes. But college girls are less likely to be victims of sexual assault than similarly aged girls who aren't in college, and I'm not sure that girls attending frat parties have ever been shown to to be victimized at higher rates than other women on campus.
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On the other hand, I think the age of the fraternity system has passed. When I read what people want to do to fraternities after the latest controversy, I always wonder why these people didn't go to Liberty or Messiah. They could have had the kind of college experience they wanted there. Having fraternities as semi-autonomous wings of the university itself cannot function. It's time for a divorce: the university should not sanction or sponsor or bless the fraternity, but neither should they regulate how their students live or act in their free time off campus. If a group of men want to live together, want to adopt a common logo and name, want to invite other students over, that is none of the university's business. Unless, again, they want to adopt a student code of conduct along the lines of Liberty or Messiah. Universities need to let students organize on their own, without Official Organizations looking over their shoulders at every turn.
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If Fraternities are behaving poorly towards women on campus, then the proper target for feminist lobbying is other women on campus. Convince hot young freshman girls not to go to parties at the fraternities. This would change the behaviors of those frats instantly and completely. That the Campus Feminist Collectives can't or won't do this indicates either that they're lying, that they don't represent all women on campus, or that they're stupid. It's probably all three.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
If you hate arch support, like I do, you'll love these.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
3d ago
I think Europe's only Achilles' heel is if the campaign turns into another Scramble for Africa and the various powers begin to compete amongst themselves. Even if the rules forbid explicit internecine conflict (as otherwise I think the invasion of Poland and France are simply delayed and we return to approximately the original timeline) unless they also compel absolute cooperation, Europe's greatest enemy will -- as usual -- be other Europeans.
That's the unstated assumption that makes this such a good scissor statement.
Europe's disunity at the time was such that within five years of 1939 they would be collectively incapable of wiping their own asses without American support.
Africa's disunity now makes the idea of a cross-continental campaign rather unrealistic.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
3d ago
Congrats! Our kids will go to different schools together.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
3d ago
I agree with this take, I think federal executions should be halftime at Redskins-Cowboys every year. But, the guy in the wheelchair seeking to make a martyr of himself in an incident most people vaguely remember if at all, probably not the place to start.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
3d ago
Newt Gingrich, who has written several books about Trump now, concluded in an interview that Trump is aware that he’s playing a character, and that the character is Donald Trump. Newt said something like, Trump knows that he has to wake up every day and act like Donald Trump, or he doesn’t get to be Donald Trump. The image is the substance.
At this point, the book is older than me, to some extent didn't the interpretation of Trump through the book create or reify the Trumpian character. Trump may not have been the Trump of the book in the same way when the book was written, but he is now, in part because of the book.
Character is a very funny causal loop.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
I think my revolver has jammed more times than my semi-autos at this point
How?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
I like the form factor, and I like the simplicity and reliability. I know that if I maintain my semiauto properly there's no reason it won't work when called on, but I like that the revolver more or less can't jam under pressure, even if it hasn't been used in a while. And while I have no fear of using a semi-auto, I like that the revolver has extremely visually clear loaded/unloaded states. Basically everyone I know who ever had an accidental shooting, the gun was "unloaded" at the time.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
Which naturally leads to gun manufacturers focusing on the small range of models that actually wear out, rather than on the larger market. There's probably just no mass market for revolvers these days, sad to say as I'm one of the few holdouts who love them.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
The problem is that, while like any man I admire beautiful engineering and want something way better than what I actually need, guns long ago passed the point where the gun is holding back the accuracy. Get me the finest $10,000 firearm it's not going to improve my groupings all that much over the cheapie.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
Yeah I buy a car or a drill because my last one died. I buy pens or chapstick because I lost the last one. When my grandmother died, all her blankets and sheets were either thrown out or used for moving blankets, because I don't think of that as something I'm going to inherit.
None of those apply to guns. It wouldn't surprise me if the median gun purchased in the past ten years is still around when guns are banned.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
What's the attrition rate over time for consumer firearms? I would think it's pretty low on average. Leaving aside boating accidents, which don't take them out of circulation anyway. You're not going to see a lot of guns legitimately lost, like permanently lost such that the owner needs to buy a replacement. Some small fraction are stolen, but even those remain in circulation satisfying some kind of consumer demand. Are any significant portion of firearms damaged beyond repair each year? How many rounds do you have to put through a modern firearm before it wears out?
So if guns exist at some point to fulfill all existing demand, and they don't pass out of circulation, you're only selling guns if you're creating new gun owners or new demand. Tech advancements account for some new sales, but what new tech is going to come out of the industry at this point? When does that max itself out? Doesn't really matter if the owner dies, they are pretty much always inherited, or at least sold off.
The only thing producing fresh demand that I can think of are gun buybacks and murderers tossing a handgun into the Hudson. Unless some exogenous force is producing new gun buyers.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
7d ago
Good Deals:
Whitin shoes. They're plain enough that I wear them with everything, my sneakerhead puerto rican tenant thought they looked good enough that he asked if they were Yeezys. While I bought several pairs when I realized they happen to perfectly fit my foot, figuring that they'd wear down quick, and they hold up well enough to regular use lifting/walking/running/golfing/biking that I haven't actually had to retire a pair yet. And they're cheap. So much cheaper than anything else I've found out there.
Bad deals:
Everything to do with babies purchased new. 90+% of our baby stuff is second hand, and we have yet to have a single problem with quality. There's a sea of infinite baby stuff available on FB marketplace/poshmark, and tons of friends essentially just say please take this stuff we want to feel good giving it to you instead of feeling bad selling it on FB for no money.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
7d ago
Consider that Iranian have an institutional memory of using American elections to their advantage.
Back in the early days of the Islamic Revolution, when the Mullahs had just thrown off the yoke of the Shah only to face invasion by Saddam, Jimmy Carter put an arms embargo on Iran, seeing the Islamic Revolution as a dangerous pathogen to be stopped. The Iran Hostage Crisis weakened the public's perception of Carter as president significantly during the last years of his presidency. Carter would successfully negotiate a deal for the release of the hostages during his presidency, but they would not actually be released until Reagan was inaugurated some months later. Reagan would, of course, then sell arms to Iran illegally during the Iran-Contra affair. Many have made the argument or presented some evidence that this was the result of back-channel negotiations between Reagan's foreign policy team and Iran: help us win the election by refusing to release the hostages while Carter is in office, and we'll deal kindly with you after we're in power.
Now the important thing is not whether we think that the Iranian's actions during the election were the proximate cause of Carter's electoral loss, or even whether Reagan sold arms to Iran because of some backroom deal. What matters is whether the Iranians themselves believe this version of events.
And it's not so crazy as a theory of foreign policy. Consider the famous 2012 open-mic incident in which Obama told Medvedev that he would have more flexibility to deal with some issues after the election.
As he was leaning toward Medvedev in Seoul, Obama was overheard asking for time - "particularly with missile defense" - until he is in a better position politically to resolve such issues. "I understand your message about space," replied Medvedev, who will hand over the presidency to Putin in May. "This is my last election ... After my election I have more flexibility," Obama said, expressing confidence that he would win a second term. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir," said Medvedev, Putin's protégé and long considered number two in Moscow's power structure.
It's probably fairly routine for American administrations to, sub rosa, tell international partners not to screw things up too badly before an election, after which they can take a freer hand.
I actually suspect that some of Trump's public signaling around the midterms, particularly his statements that "we're going to end the war after the midterms," reflected not a plan to escalate, but a plan to de-escalate and sign a deal, with the midterms acting as a signal to Iran: hey you just need to make it to November without rocking the boat and then we'll give you what you want, but we can't sign that deal now because it will cost us the election. Not that anything the Trump admin says to anyone, let alone to Iran, is reliable evidence of their intent to follow through, but it seemed to me that was the signal they were trying to send.
Anyway all of this is to say that the Iranians might believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can use the elections as leverage to negotiate with America on the war. They may be incorrect, but that doesn't mean they don't think it. If politiical actors were always right and never made incorrect strategic guesses, we wouldn't be in this war to begin with.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
So to summarize, it looks like the war is expanding, Iran's proxies continue to be able to strike US allies, and Iran's proxies are escalating the conflict instead of backing down.
Expanding a war is a pretty common tactic when slowly losing, historically speaking.
While the strikes between Saudi and Houthi territory are fairly well reported, what are the actual facts on the ground as far as dispossessing the Houthis of the territory gained a couple weeks back?
Oh, carry on. I see the misunderstanding now.
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