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
32m ago
World of Warcraft as the Model for the Second American Civil War
On a play through of my childhood gaming favorite, I was thinking about the plot of World of Warcraft. I’ll note to start that I am commenting purely on World of Warcraft vanilla and The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, I never played anything after WotLK until TBC Classic the past two weeks or so.
The setting is post-apocalyptic, though it’s rarely presented as such, instead viewed as a standard fantasy setting. The original Warcraft set up an invasion of an otherwise organized fantasy Azeroth by demon fueled Orcs from another planet. Over succeeding games, the Orcs are defeated and enslaved by the humans, but then coming off that demonic alien invasion, they face a zombie plague which destroys the entire northern human kingdoms of both humans and elves, a slave revolt from the orcs, and a fresh demonic invasion leading to a tentative peace between the humans and orcs and a series of ententes signed between different races, the Horde and the Alliance.
Which brings us to World of Warcraft; The Burning Crusade, and its parallels to America. The Alliance is the red tribe coded grouping, the traditional fantasy heroes: religious normies (Humans), extractive industrialist miners and metalworkers (Dwarves), tech bro engineers (Gnomes), traditional ruralists (Night Elves), and a handful of weird fanatics from abroad (Dranei). The Horde is the blue tribe coded grouping, persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, the traditional fantasy villains reformed: liberated racialized slaves trying to regain some kind of culture after decades of subjugation (Orcs), Caribbean refugees (Trolls), the indigenous (Tauren), downtrodden burnout former criminals (the Forsaken), and metrosexual drug addicted faggy nu-males (Blood Elves). Notably, just like the Democratic Party, the Horde understands itself as symbolically lead by the liberated slaves, but its manpower largely comes from the faggy nu-males; while the Alliance understands itself as lead by the Humans, and the Humans make up the bulk of its manpower. An Orcish Ta Nehisi Coates or Ibram X Kendi would call the Horde the subaltern and the Alliance fascists and falangists; an Azerothian Dread Jim would call the Horde the bioleninist coalition.
((So narratively, we’re going to assume that “level” is largely if not entirely a gameplay concept divorced from storytelling. Else the entire narrative concept collapses: the first twenty levels of the human game are spent oriented around the Defias Brotherhood, their headquarters is the first big group dungeon of the game for Alliance players, by level 50 you could solo it in a few minutes, and it’s a two minute jog from the major human city of Stormwind, so why don’t they just deal with it once and for all in an afternoon and protect two major provinces along the way? It’s an inherent flaw in the RPG story telling method, which can’t be fixed easily or completely, but can safely be dismissed as “Willing Suspension of Disbelief” for our purposes, as otherwise there is no story to examine, and there very clearly is a story being told.))
From the moment the story starts, regardless of faction or race chosen, you begin in a world at war(craft). The safe zones you begin for the first five levels all feature some level of dangerous threat from demon worshippers, rebellious criminals, or monstrous chthonic races. After level 5, it only increases, by level 20 you’re in zones where the vast majority of the land in any area is not controlled by Horde or Alliance forces, instead by any of dozens of other groups. The war between the Horde and Alliance is in theory a bitter struggle for control of Azeroth, in game it is mostly a footnote, PVP is relatively unimportant to gameplay and more of a sideshow from a design perspective. But more than that, both the Horde and Alliance face bigger problems, even in their putative homelands they lack a legitimate monopoly on violence, and instead face rebellion and subversion and invasion across two continents. The Horde and the Alliance do not make up a majority of the forces in Azeroth, not combined and certainly neither individually.
Rather what distinguishes the Horde and Alliance from all the other factions is that they are trying to be a legitimate government of all of Azeroth. Most of the other factions are either regional criminal players or omnicidal maniacs, but both the Horde and the Alliance want to achieve something like normalcy. The conflict between the Horde and the Alliance mostly, after a while, just seems kind of stupid. Why are we even doing this when there are demon worshipping omnicidal religious cults around every corner? And there’s not really a good answer to that question that isn’t, well there’s a long history of racial hatred we’re dealing with here, somebody killed somebody’s grandfather, etc. Sins of the past, lack of forgiveness. Fighting a war that has long become irrelevant in a world we’ve lost control of.
The handful of NGO factions that are neutral, the Argent Dawn and the Cenarion Circle or the Capitalist Goblins, would clearly be able to lead a better world, but no one wants to put them in charge, least of all those factions themselves.
And I think that’s what a second American civil war will look like. Not true balkanization with Texas and New England and California and Appalachia as countries, there are too many blue tribers in red states and too many red tribers in blue states. Rather, a patchwork of war from coast to coast, with every state having bases of both sides and a million small regional violent interests to worry about on top of it all. A world of war.
You know, I'm doing the most "real" gaming I've done in years, I downloaded World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, 20 years after playing the original. And mostly I'm loving it and realizing that it's just the game for me. But Blizzard has made tons of little QoL changes, little things to make the game smoother and easier, and it's not that they ruin things, it's the way that the original was so intricately designed that even small changes throw things off.
Leveling is I think someone said around 30% easier in classic than it was in the original. Which itself is good, and for what it's worth I'm not sure that I'd play as much if I were grinding out one level at a time rather than blazing through, I'm not a bored bone idle teenager with no friends anymore I'm a busy adult who wants to relax for an hour or so. I'm not trying to prove anything or be better than anyone, so there's no reason for me to care. Except, and especially if you park your toon in an inn when you log out and get the 2x rested xp bonus, leveling faster makes questlines and areas all wrong. Especially if, like me, you love doing a PUG 5 man dungeon as basically the highest expression of WoW as a game; with rested XP you can basically gain a level running an instance, plus sometimes ending up on the wrong side of the world, and as a result you level right past the questing area you were in the middle of, and what was a pretty good storyline is ruined or cut short, because by the time I get to the final bit I'm 2-3 levels too high and not getting XP for it.
Another example: you get your mount much earlier. Which is good, nobody likes toddling along slowly to get to the summons in the southern barrens when your nearest fight point is ashenvale, but it also throws off the rhythm because at that level you have less time to save the gold up, especially with faster leveling, and I had to go back and power level herbalism to catch it up to my current zones and raise auction house cash, because otherwise I'd find myself unable to earn the gold necessary. Which, I could just not get the mount until the traditional level 40 (iirc) but what's the fun of playing poverty spec?
And that's the rub, strictly speaking I could choose to play differently but I won't. Rather than making sure to park in an inn or city for the rested XP bonus, I could make sure to leave my character outside to prevent it. I could do the quests anyway even though they deliver zero or minimal XP, to finish the story. Etc. But I'm not going to do those things, I want to play the game according to the incentives. Which means at least a little intuitive min-maxing.
I do think a big part of it is the shift in the audience. TBC Classic is being played by 34 year old me, I have a hundred other things to do, I want a mild distraction not a new avocation. Which I think is a growing market over time in gaming, I would guess that every year after 1998 the total market share of video games occupied by 13-25 year old boys, the core hardcore gamer constituency, has gotten smaller. The market for video games has gotten older, more feminine, and consequently less competitive, less dedicated to the craft, more casual, every single year. Eventually Video Games as a category have become something that middle aged moms engage in just as often as 16 year olds fueled by Mountain Dew and thwarted hormones.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It's possible that some information, real or dis, has been accessed by Iranian linked or sympathetic hackers and will be released soon.
But more likely this is just a confusing and weird thing by a confusing and weird woman who is vastly out of her depth in a confusing and weird administration.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Don't forget promoting them to run the organization you just made up today.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
First the war is to distract from Epstein, then Epstein is to distract from the war. We've come full circle.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Don't forget "resigned" as an extra step at the beginning!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I see a lot of people in the conservative press attacking Pope Leo and Archbishop Coakley for their statements against the Iran war, but I've seen very few examine the elements of Just War teachings within Catholic doctrine, because the Iran War will be found wanting if you examine them in terms of what has been publicly expressed.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
The problem is that you have to leave a space where you can stay in charge without getting knocked off by the nationalist religious psychopaths on your own side, or getting bombed by Israel. I don't think that space exists, or if it does exist Israel and the USA have done a bad job communicating it to potential leaders. A good Quisling can't be an obvious Quisling. You have to be able to maintain legitimacy among your own people.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
You said
But that's a lot of "if this then that" to get that stream of cashflows into Iran.
But your list of "a lot of ifs" seems mostly like dividing the single statement "if they toll the strait" into an infinite number of steps
If there are actual tolls imposed on and paid by ships, and a material amount of that money actually ends up in accounts the Iranians can control as they see fit...
You could add an arbitrary number of similar "if" statements into any payment of money for services. "If the money is paid in legal tender," "if traffic doesn't decrease significantly," "if the world remains dependent on fossil fuel exports from the gulf" etc
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I've never watched any of the MCU, so I'm a little out of my depth.
I'm really surprised a powerlifting girl couldn't translate the strength to the mat, huh. What do you think if she was also a purple belt?
I'll let you know in four years! I suspect at that level of experience she would probably move from "can't-beat-me" to "can-beat-me" but I doubt she'd make it to "should-beat-me" or "will-beat-me-every-time." Which are the basic categories of people at the gym in my taxonomy.
I still hope to get the chance to roll with a female black belt or an equivalent female competitor, I still want to meet a girl in the "will-beat-me-every-time" category, to see what that feels like. But in general I can say that a purple belt gets you to "can-beat-me," so more strength might get her to a push where we roll even.
Important to keep in mind: this is me, I'm a decent comp for a mook in a movie, I'm fairly big and muscular and I've trained BJJ pretty hard for a year. I'm not an average American man. So when I say I roll even with her, that means she'd smoke the average American man, who doesn't really work out and has no experience with BJJ.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I'm not knowledgeable enough to claim a useful opinion on either keeping it or tearing it up, but at some point that discussion has to become moot because either way it wouldn't have applied anymore.
Not really. A world with/out the JCPOA is different at sunset than the reverse. Iran is starting from somewhere.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Only the minds behind NEOM could possibly imagine an armored pipeline, so it's likely we'll see it.
This might be even dumber than my predicted ending to the war, where the US takes Kharg and charges Iran a royalty on all oil exported, while Iran maintains control of the strait and charges a toll on all oil coming out of the gulf.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
The structure is pretty confusing.
I mostly wanted to get in the correction immediately before someone saw it and got unfriendly about your whole point over it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Chief of Staff not commander in chief, which is the president. Chief of Staff is a mostly admin role as opposed to a direct commander.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Ok now build air defense for every inch of your pipeline. Pipelines are extraordinarily vulnerable to attack by Iran in case of another conflict. They won't really work as Iran war insurance.
I think a lot of people hear the headline number of $2mm a tanker and think that's high. That's only about 1% of cargo value.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
So we're in agreement that there's age related cognitive decline, but you're correcting my use of the technical medical term in a casual way?
And to be clear, how do we judge a President's mental abilities if not by their fruits?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
This might be the first time I've seen someone actually engage in Zeno's paradox as an argument.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
But it's clearly in their interest since Iran is a long-term threat to them.
I find it interesting the way that Americans (and those LARPing as us on the internet) can recognize that Trump/Biden/Obama doesn't necessarily act in the national interest in the United States, either through wickedness or through stupidity; while we assume that the governments of Iran and Israel are identical with the national interest of those places.
It certainly seems that never-ending war is very much in Netanyahu's personal interest, in that it keeps him out of court for as long as it lasts. I'm less sure that it is in the interest of Israel or the Jewish people that we're hearing things like this thrown around. Yair Lapid on Twitter:
There has never been such a political disaster in all of our history. Israel wasn't even at the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security. The military carried out everything that was asked of it, the public demonstrated amazing resilience, but Netanyahu failed politically, failed strategically, and didn't meet a single one of the goals that he himself set. It will take us years to repair the political and strategic damage that Netanyahu wrought due to arrogance, negligence, and a lack of strategic planning.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
a) Weight classes in competition are fake weights. A guy who cuts to compete at 130 probably walks around much heavier between comps. So he's still a small guy, but much less small than you think he is.
b) Availability is the most important ability for any athlete. When you push yourself in the weightroom, you risk injury, so serious athletes tend to go easy in the weightroom, or do partial RoM or odd lifts that target specific movement patterns while reducing odds of injury.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Important to note how victory has a thousand parents, defeat is an orphan.
One of the sudden stomach cramp moments of realizing how bad things were was when Trump said it was Pete Hegseth's idea, that Pete spoke up first. That is atypical of Trumpian dialectics.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Relevant recent experiences:
Over Easter I was up at my in-laws, which means I got to visit my other BJJ gym a few times. While there I got the chance to do something I've wanted to do for a while: I rolled with a female purple belt.
For context, I'm a white belt at BJJ, I've been going for about a year and a half, and I suck. I am not a graceful person. To start I was reasonably strong and in above average cardio condition; but I'm nothing to write home about as a natural athlete, across all sports for thirty years I've capped out at the level right below the level where it would be interesting to be that good. I'm 6', 195lbs, probably between 15-20% bodyfat. A reasonably approximation for a clumsy goon in a superhero movie.
Up to this point, while I've occasionally rolled with girls, I try to avoid it because it's just too embarrassing. The whole time I'm typically in my head trying to avoid going too hard and being a jerk because I'm beating up on the girl, or going too soft and being a jerk because I'm not offering her a decent roll. And God forbid one of them asks me to drill with her, which happens every few weeks, and coach picks a move involving a "chest post;" after a few times of THAT, I carefully position myself far away from any females before we pick partners to drill with.
In rolling against a fellow female white belt or blue belt, my experience is that I'm basically in control the whole time. I can "let her work" as much as she wants, when it comes down to it I can escape or muscle out. Out of ~100 rounds, I've tapped to a girl once, and that was in the particular scenario of drills starting from front headlock, and I think I let her start way too close to finishing the submission, and I'm not sure I couldn't have burst out of it if I were to muscle out as hard as I could but I wasn't about to do that during drilling. Generally when I roll with girls, I try to use as little strength as possible and only take moves that are perfectly technically executed on my part. Where against one of the men in the "equals" category I'm willing to just muscle him into a Kimura, against the girls I'm trying more wacky technical stuff.
One of our white belts is a female competitive powerlifter. Honestly, bros, on the platform some days she might hit bigger numbers on the barbell than I do, and I know for a fact she squats and deads much more than some of the other guys at the gym. She's probably around 180 and her deadlift is extremely impressive! But her functional strength on the mats is little better than the pretty 125lb girls. This is true of a lot of competitive powerlifters male or female: they're hyper optimized for particular movement patterns, and comparatively a 1rm squat test isn't telling you as much about them compared to an untrained woman. She can, and has, helped me move a couch, she's not a weak person in a day to day sense, but she's not much of a threat on the mat to a similarly skilled male. I roll regularly with guys that she outlifts in powerlifting, and I'm clearly stronger than they are, but not to the scale I am stronger than her on the mat.
All of which brings me to Good Friday, when I finally got the opportunity to test myself against a female purple belt. I've wanted to for a long time, for science. Purple is the first belt where I'd say it consistently means something, whites come in all shapes and sizes, and blues can sometimes sneak in or get a pity promotion, but I've seen few purple belts who didn't at least mostly know what they were doing. Typically, a purple belt means four years of training at least three times a week, studying and thinking about the sport regularly, and probably competing at least occasionally, so by any reasonable standard an expert. For scale, I've rolled hundreds of times with male purple belts. Typically against a male purple belt, I will lose 95% of rounds, even if they don't sub me there's no need to keep score it's just obvious who was dominating the round. This holds even against a purple belt 40lbs lighter than me. Every now and then I get lucky and catch a straight ankle or a kimura, but never anything like a head and arm choke or a triangle that requires set-up. Against a female purple belt, rolling casually in a morning class so probably more like 75% than trying to kill each other, without using a ton of strength or leaning on size I was rolling about even. She was clearly technically better than me, and presented problems I had to put effort into solving. It wasn't the case that I could just pass her guard at will, or leave anything open and she couldn't take it. I had to play tight, methodically break dilemmas, and build towards wins. Ultimately the rounds would have scored at worst 50/50, I tapped her a few times and she didn't tap me but I didn't positionally dominate the rounds as much as the submissions would indicate, partly because if she started to get close to submitting me I was more willing to use strength to escape. In enough rolls, I would guess she'd win at least 1/5 if we both brought our A-Game. And she would probably be able to tap out a totally untrained male, she would have dominated me eighteen months ago.
So FiveHourMarathon's n=1 trials indicate: being a competitive powerlifter will not make a female defeat a male who is equal as a lifter, being a trained expert female will not allow her to defeat a novice male in reasonable shape.
That all being said, I don't really find female superheroes any stupider or more Suspension-of-Disbelief-breaking than male superheroes. When you consider how absurdly unrealistically fit and capable Batman has to be to beat up fifty goons or whatever, adding an extra factor of 2x in there because Batman should be twice as strong as Batgirl doesn't really change the math for me. If Batman is 50x a male black belt, it doesn't really make a difference to me to have Batgirl be 100x a female black belt. In my recent WoW run, I'm playing a female Night Elf hunter, both for lorefag reasons (Night Elf females were Sentinel warrior/rangers, while Night Elf males were druid-hippies) and because I think the slim female build in WoW looks better for an archer than the muscular male build, which in my opinion only really works aesthetically for a warrior. Given that a casual questing hour involves killing fifty orcs, thirty men, ten ogres, and a three headed dragon...I don't think I'm really worried about the chromosomes in terms of realism. The far more realism breaking thing for me in WoW is Gnome warriors, but I get why it's set up that way.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I have strong doubts that Trump is going to turn on Israel because of Israel killing another IRGC commander or Ayatollah in another surprise attack. This entire adventure is built on the predicate concept that if you get the opportunity, one should spurn negotiations in favor of killing Iranian leadership in surprise attacks, and that if Israel is going to do it then America is per se involved in it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
And if Israel bombs Iran, what happens?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
The entirety of Western administrative government is based around the idea that "managing" "safe" "orderly" use of [x] empowers the government to keep certain people from using [x].
Why does it matter who you strike first? Timeline doesn't seem like strong evidence of guilt or righteousness; the most guilty Nazis or Confederates weren't killed first.
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