FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
20hr ago
Count me outside of that circle. I never really understood any of the things Hilario was accused of, I do think the Trump prosecutions have been hilariously overdrawn.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
21hr ago
I would say I lose the bet if Trump is significantly inconvenienced in campaigning in any way. I think he'll miss a few days for court appearances etc; I don't think he'll be jailed, placed under house arrest, removed from the planned debates, prevented from campaigning or holding events in any state on the grounds of his felony conviction, removed from the ballot in any state. Prior to the election. After the election is anyone's guess.
Why that happens procedurally is irrelevant to my belief, I just think the Dems are too ayam to pull the trigger when the chips are down. So in my mind sentencing doesn't happen prior to the election, or he's sentenced to prison with a report date after the election, is a win for team cowardice.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
23hr ago
Saved. You can force me to steelman anything on here if he goes into custody.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
23hr ago
Yup. A retarded guy in a Q themed Hawaiian shirt is gonna kill a cop and we're gonna hear about it all fall.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
Interestingly, I have Biden winning with the same set of priors, except that I find right wing violence highly likely between now and November.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
I'll register that I expect the sentence to amount to nothing until the election is past. By whatever method, Trump will be free to move about as usual until December.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
Terminology aside: Wouldn't your argument imply that they will once again be too cowardly to harshly punish Trump on trumped up charges once we get to sentencing?
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
The woman talks about the absurdity of
modernpolitics - people pretend to care about something because they like the attention or because they want to 'virtue signal', not because they actually care about the thing. She gives many, many examples.
Fixed that For Her. This is about as modern as agriculture. Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky were constantly involved in internecine conflicts over which branch of the revolutionaries were correct and which weren't, which were poseurs, which were just in it for the street cred or to impress chicks or because they liked robbing banks for their own reasons. So were Robespierre and Murat, so were John and Sam Adams; so were Clodius and Julius Caesar. The presence of unserious people doesn't represent a serious criticism of a political movement.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
Why he was held in contempt is irrelevant to the point that he was held in contempt, and the penalties assessed for contempt of court were minuscule, to Trump. No effort was made to assess a penalty that would actually harm Trump, like multi-million dollar fines or imprisonment. That is kid gloves.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
My car looks good (to me) with some nicks and scratches from difficult mountain roads, but I hate the key mark on the side from some asshole in the alley where I park.
At some level though, those things are the same, in that over time the odds add up that some asshole keys your car, or backs into you in a parking lot, or loses his loaded shopping cart at Home Depot and crashes it into your car, or you get caught in a sudden hailstorm, or any number of other mishaps, over time those odds approach 1. The only way to fully prevent those things is to never leave the garage for too long.
Now, given, I park at the back of the parking lot every time, both to reduce the odds of mishaps and out of a sense that I have fewer problems and inconveniences compared to most people so I'd rather walk further.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
But oh man, I bemoan the devolution of my volk (I'm using the provocative word on purpose because contemporaries, countrymen, etc would only call it to mind) into childless Naz Reid tattoo'd up redditors with a joint.
Question: Do you think people with tattoos on average have more, or fewer, children than people without them? The majority of the drop in birthrates is attributable to the drop in teen birth rates, and increasingly women are delaying their fertility until their 30s, when it might become problematic to get pregnant. What we're seeing with fertility, in short, is a problem of people delaying gratification, thinking too hard about if this is the right time or the right occasion to have a child, rather than people just having a child impulsively, which is associated with higher fertility rates. I certainly know many people with a bevy of tattoos for a bevy of kids, it's one of the classic "lame" normie tattoos I see around these days.
The exact mindset of "Sure, do it, but only if it's meaningful/correct/the perfect combination of thing and time/absolutely certain not to go wrong" that people are talking about with tattoos in this thread when opposing tattoos, those are exactly the attitudes that suppress fertility on a societal level.
I'm re-reading War and Peace, and one of the things that strike me about the characters is how impulsive they are. Natasha wants to run away with Anatole, throw up her entire life for him, in a way that just blows my mind. But Tolstoy wrote her as a normal young Russian noblewoman, not as a particularly impulsive or flighty character.
Secondarily, on your broader point, if people don't care for their nice things, they won't be nice anymore. I have to clean the pool and add the right chemicals at the right time or it'll start growing moss. Saying "fuck it, we'll do it live" is not the cure to keeping the china unused unto death, there is a via media where stuff is meant to be used, but treated with respect.
I agree, I think there is a distinction to be made here between maintenance and preservation, or between appropriate use and inappropriate use. A good pair of leather boots should be regularly cleaned, waterproofed, polished, oiled, resoled, etc. But when you're wearing a pair of leather boots, you should be willing to get in the mud. To do otherwise is, as our holy father says, a bit frociaggine for my taste. This is true for all the boots I own, even the 'dressier' pair of Allen Edmonds boots I wear when my job is more clipboard class but I still want to appear formal. I would never want to own a pair of boots that were so nice, so expensive, so fine, that I would wince walking through the mud. I want to wear my boots through the mud, as they should be used, then cleaned and polished to preserve them.
In terms of my own body, the big area of decision making is working out, rather than tattoos.
"If you find the notion of falling off the rings and breaking your neck so foreign to you, then we don't want you in our ranks,"-- Greg Glassman
Mark Rippetoe likes to say, "Accumulating injuries are the price we pay for the thrill of not having sat around on our asses.”
No individual workout I do is particularly likely to result in injury, but every workout has some possibility of injury, which could be reduced by doing less. I accept the accumulating risk of degrading my body over time. If one doesn't accept that risk, one can't really do anything worthwhile. To assert ownership of my body, I have to accept the risk of destroying my body. Otherwise all I can do is live in fear of injury.
Now there's some risk of injury I'm not going to take. There's a risk/reward. My workouts are structured around that acceptable risk of injury, for me personally. I barely ever straight-bar deadlift anymore, because dollar-to-donuts within a deadlift training block I will hurt my back. Every time. So I write off that lift, in favor of hex bar deadlift or heavy swings or power cleans. That's an unacceptable risk. I only do some exercises in the morning, and only do others in the evening, because of injury risks. I don't climb in areas that are heavy on pockets.
But eventually, periodically, it's going to catch up with me. That's inevitable. But I have to accept that to live my life.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
This is a good bit of who/whom.
It is. Republican Politicians want one rule of law for the poor, and another for the powerful. I have trouble feeling sympathy for them when they were mistaken about being the powerful.
I remain hopeful, but not optimistic, that Trump's Trials and Tribulations will lead to a future where some portion of the American people coming to a consensus that centering all power in the Imperial Presidency was a Bad Call, that enabling prosecutors to jail any American was a Bad Call, that enabling the National Security state to spy on everyone all the time was a Bad Call. So far, it seems that both Republicans and Democrats have taken the lesson that it means that we need Our Guy in charge. C'est la vie.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
I doubt it. They've treated him with kid gloves in the contempt of court procedures so far, fining him what were objectively pissant amounts for attacking the judge's family. He could easily be in jail already for contempt, and he's not, so I think they will be much too cowardly to jail him immediately. He's highly likely to remain free, even absent any appeals, until November.
FiveHourMarathon
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1d ago
Nowhere did I address Trump voters, I specifically called out Republican Politicians.
FiveHourMarathon
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1d ago
Probably. But before the election there will be months of Trump walking around doing normal Trump things. And lots of people are under the impression that you get convicted and immediately dragged to prison. They'll equate him being out and about with the conviction having been overturned or no big deal or something.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
My only real take on this is that I wish Republican politicians talking about Trump's civil liberties had the same energy for the rest of us.
"He was convicted on the testimony of a felon! Who only turned on him for a plea deal!" Cry me a river dickhead. This is a routine dance across the country in courtrooms from coast to coast. When a normal citizen's defense attorney tries that, the prosecutor gets up and gives the same line about "I wish I had nicer witnesses, but the defendant hangs out with felons, so felons are the people who know what happened." Every damn day. Trump has a very limited ability to gain credibility by accusing his lawyer he chose of being a slimeball.
Prosecutorial overreach has impacted thousands of Americans, where's this energy for them? Where was Mike Johnson when Aaron Swartz was hounded to death? When Assange was pinned on bullshit charges? When our prisons were filling up with people who plead down to felonies when cops lied about having witnesses, and prosecutors told them to take this deal or risk dying in prison?
Don't take your political movement that's spent decades building a state with the power to imprison citizens on a whim, and get all shocked Pikachu when one of your oxes gets gored.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
No, at 9pm ideally I've gotten into bed to read a book or news magazine. Occasionally radio broadcast of a baseball game or similar.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
Which part do you disagree with? In what way?
I'm not sure I agree with all of it, I have no tattoos. Though I can't stand the idea of owning sneakers that can't get dirty.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
1d ago
It's even more obvious if you move a step down from housing to land-ownership. Who owns the land has been a political question since Ur and Leviticus.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
2d ago
I'm an extreme morning person. I'm up between 430 and 5 most days, and work out by 7. I'm most productive in difficult work before 2pm. Between 2-6pm I'm working, but mostly I try to be editing or doing rote work. After 6pm I don't really get much done unless I'm drinking a bonus espresso or using other stimulants because it really needs to be done. In bed by 9pm to 930pm, asleep by 10-11pm.
I'd say I'm good for 6-7 hours of hard alert work a day, 10-14 hours of work total, before I'm tired.
I think to really parse your statement we need to define "exhausted." I'm properly exhausted like can't keep my head up after 18-20 hours, but I'm noticeably less productive after significantly less.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
2d ago
Naz Reid, Romance, and Regret
Naz Reid is a bench player for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. He averaged 13 points a game last year, in a breakout campaign (for him) that saw him win Sixth Man of the Year, the league award for the best player who did not start. He’s a cog on the Timberwolves, not a star, and such players often become celebrated among the most dedicated fans. I can remember Yankees fans endlessly reposting the infamous “Log Cabin Copypasta” about Luke Voit, or cops from The Wire wanting to have sex with the Baltimore Orioles backup catcher. The backup, the role player, never has the expectations attached to the star free agent signing or the first round pick you build around, the guys you need to produce to justify the value invested. An Undrafted Free Agent like Naz Reid is a free bonus in terms of roster construction for the Timberwolves, and fans can appreciate him in an uncomplicated way without risk of disappointment, where KAT will never quite live up to expectations even when he’s a star. Naz Reid has become a mascot for fans of the Timberwolves, with fans online and in person greeting each other and commenting on events by simply nodding and saying “Naz Reid."
Two weeks ago, the WSJ recorded the height of Naz Reid hysteria reporting on a tattoo studio that offered to tattoo Naz Reid on any takers for $20. As of press time, 156 Minnesotans had taken him up on the offer. That was before a huge 7 game series win over reigning champions Denver and their MVP winning center. I’d imagine there have been many more, but I can’t find a count anywhere.
In light of this post from last Sunday and these excellent replies, I thought more about Naz Reid and the idea of tattoos, and life and love and the friends we make along the way.
Let’s make our learned friend Harold’s argument a little more concrete: Will the hundreds of Minnesota Timberwolves fans who get this tattoo regret it?
“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
The Naz Reid story on the Timberwolves is likely to end in disappointment. The Wolves are down 3-1, having barely avoided a sweep on Tuesday, but I’d still put odds on the series ending in a Gentleman’s Sweep with the Mavericks coming into Game 5 as heavy favorites. Wolves fans are probably going to be commemorating a season that ends with a memorable failure to finish. Regardless of the outcome of this season, much more likely than not, Naz Reid will not lift a trophy to end the season. He’s also unlikely to be a contributor on the Timberwolves in a few years, in today’s whirligig world of NBA roster construction. If he’s good enough to start, he’s likely to get traded in deference to KAT and Goebert. If he’s not good enough to start, he might not be in the NBA at all not long from now. Die hard Minnesota fans might find themselves with a tattoo naming a player on the Bucks or the Sixers.
This is all so obvious, why have hundreds of midwesterners decided to drop $20 for a permanent memorial to a moment so fleeting?
My first boxing coach was a former tattoo artist. He never managed to convince me to get one as a teenager, his own art was mostly pretty terrible to be honest, but he told stories about it while we jumped rope. He was a big fan of skipping rope. One of the things he told me was that when people came in to get a tattoo for their boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/fuckbuddy/lover, he would try to make sure they wouldn’t regret it, because no tattoo artist wants his victim to hate that tattoo, and they prefer to get repeat business. Coach would sit the guy down and say “Will you be happy with this tattoo if she dumps you? If you won’t be happy with it if she dumps you, you shouldn’t get the tattoo.” “But why would I ever be happy with the tattoo if she dumped me?” “I have tattoos I got with old girlfriends, and I love the designs, and they remind me of that time in my life, even if I don’t talk to her anymore I remember as she was then, and how she changed me. That remains a part of my life and the tattoo honors that.”* ((Avoiding tattoo regret about any particular tattoo is probably easier when you have truly terrible tattoos, like a purple cat in a bowler hat smoking a cigar, all over your body, as Coach did))
This is why you get a Naz Reid tattoo, or any tattoo, and why you don’t. The glass is already broken. The Wolves already lost, in heartbreaking fashion. Naz Reid has already torn his ACL and washed out of the league, or been traded to a rival team. The girl has already dumped you and moved on to someone else, or she’s stayed with you and you’ve both changed and she’s not the same girl anymore. You are already old and saggy. The trend is already out of fashion and lame and decades out of date. You enjoy it because of the moment it represents, not because what it represents is eternal and unchanging. Tattoos at their best aren’t permanent commitments, commitments that we must as flawed humans fail and break, they are permanent reminders of who you were, of the time in your life when you got it.
If you can’t stand the idea that a tattoo might one day seem out of date, that your body will be different and ruin the lines of the tattoo, that you aren’t so in love with the reason you got it, you shouldn’t get it. If you can’t destroy it, or stand to see it destroyed, you don’t own it, it owns you. I’ve tried to make this a motto of my life when it comes to material possessions. My father has a hobby of estate auctions, and I’ve been going to them to pick up his finds since I was a teenager. The amount of times I’ve seen fine china sets, service for 12, come up for auction never used. No utensil marks on them, none. Many of them were Wedding gifts, the couple’s “China Pattern,” purchased for them by wedding guests at exorbitant prices, but never eaten from. The happy couple received thousands of dollars in china, but it was never the right occasion to use it, never the moment when they were willing to risk marring their perfection, never the guests who would take care of it, the kids were too young and might break it, or the wife is too old to bother hand-washing all those place settings, and then they divorce or downsize or die, and they or their children sell it off for 2-10% of the original cost. They’d have been better off using it every day, throwing it in the dishwasher even if it wasn’t “dishwasher safe” and it ruined the gilding, breaking the crystal glasses at raucous parties late in the night. The dishes are already broken, if you save them you just guarantee they won’t be broken by you. You, or corporations selling you something might lie to yourself and say you’re maintaining it for your kids, but in reality they’ll probably auction all your crap off if its worth the effort and throw it away if it isn’t.
“A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care and then forgotten all about them.” — Hardy Amies
I’ve tried to make this part of my life. If I can’t destroy it I don’t own it. If I don’t own it, I don’t want to pretend I do. I don’t own shoes or clothing that I feel the need to baby. Not that I’ll wear my best gray suit and suede loafers to work in the garden, but I avoid wearing clothing that I’ll be precious with, that I’ll turn down any activity while wearing. If someone wants to throw a frisbee around, I might take off my jacket and tuck my tie into the buttons of my shirt, but I can do it. I’ve eliminated leather soles in favor of thin rubber soles, they may be less perfectly formal but I prefer to wear them in wet weather or on dirt without thinking too much. I don’t buy anything so expensive that I can’t stand the idea of wearing it out, that the idea of it being stained or torn upsets me. I buy almost exclusively second hand furniture. Protecting your furniture is inherently lame. I want my furniture to already have enough nicks and scratches that the ones I add are no big deal. Within reason, I never want to tell people to be careful with my things. I listened to the guy from ICON Motors on Rogan years back, and one anecdote he told about a friend stuck with me: he would customize a perfect classic muscle car, and just when he was finished he would find a spot on the back and key it. There, now it’s not perfect, I can drive it. Pick ye rosebuds while ye may, enjoy life, don’t save it for the next guy, go to God with nothing and say “I used everything you gave me.”
I’ve had many girls** tell me they think tattoos were hot on guys ((they didn’t manage to convince me to get one either)). Even taking the point that it will look stupid when I’m old, it would have made sense to get a tattoo at 19 if a significant portion of girls agree with that. Let’s posit, as utilitarians, fake numbers: if a tattoo adds 2 points on the 1-10 scale at 19, but takes away 3 points later when you’re 45, you’re probably better off having gotten them, even if at 45 you regret them. Time weighted, the 2 points when you’re 19 are worth more than the 3 points at 45, if things go well you shouldn’t be dating at 45 at all anyway. At 45 you should be married, and look at the tattoos you got at 19 to impress girls, and think of the girls you knew and the friends you had back then, and smile at the memory. If that idea is foreign to you, you shouldn’t get the tattoo.
To bring this back around, Naz Reid. If a Timberwolves fan got a Naz Reid tattoo thinking they were gonna win the championship, and that Naz Reid is going to play in Minnesota for years to come, he is going to regret that tattoo. But a wiser Timberwolves fan, one who gets the tattoo not to commemorate the championship they probably won’t win or the career that Naz Reid probably won’t have, but to remember that one shining spring and how excited he and his friends were getting drunk at the game, he will not regret it.
That’s how you justify getting a tattoo. You own your body, if you can’t destroy it, you don’t own it. So do it, if you can justify it in the end.
*Yes, I’m making his words significantly clearer and less profane. I only really remember the gist of the story anyway.
**While I expect many to dismiss this point, I’m going to state baldly that at least some of these were High Quality Girls with Ivy League degrees and good character, who have gone on to have good careers and/or make fine wives, though I expect some will No True Scotsman that assertion.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
3d ago
Question:
Did Protestants and Catholics have irreconcilable differences in Europe?
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
4d ago
There's no such category of thing as "opening a business." That description contains stuff that runs the gamet from Buying A Job like opening a real estate agency or a plumbing company, to startup entrepreneurship like trying to start a company around a new innovation, to entering a competitive field like opening a restaurant. Those are all going to have different expectations and definitions for success and failure.
I think a smart person can be fairly certain of success running a low end business if they can acquire the capital on terms that aren't crippling. But even an extremely intelligent person isn't going to be guaranteed to set the world on fire running a hedge fund or opening a nightclub in NYC.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
4d ago
Whether the initial comment is warranted or not, this kind of petty call out shit flinging never is.
Isn't Trump's higher likelihood of targeting more than compensated for by his vastly larger resources to defend himself?
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