February 13th, 2024.
Is it worse to die under the lashes of an abusive master or "in mutual combat" with another "free" black man?
The abusive master is far worse. Being enslaved sucks donkey balls. Fuck slavers; that dude in the ghetto is at least nominally free, he's not liable to get bought and sold like a fucking cow, and he has at least nominal rights. He may be killed by cops or something, but even if he gets murdered by really goddamn bad cops they have to at least half ass hiding the body. And this is being rather uncharitable about our hero's rights.
Counterargument: if every lonely individual chucked themselves in the Alaskan wilderness - leaving instructions to not look for the body or attempt rescue - there would be a lot more determined people in the world and a lot less lonely people. Yeah, it's nuts. Yes, it's dumb as hell; the risible idiocy fundamental to the Hock is, in my opinion, part of the whole fucking point of the Hock.
No. It is for us all to bind up the nation's wounds. It's like your great-great grandfather dumped a bunch of toxic waste in the town square or something. You didn't have shit to do with that asshole's deeds. Maybe you benefited from them, but it's far enough in the past that you're just some guy that lives in the town...and if we're going to clean it up, both of us ought to pay into the town tax fund or something to clean the mess up.
if they replaced Robert E Lee with John Brown that would generate so much public seethe you'd be able to say the change was a work of performance art!
Yeah, fair enough. Or maybe put up a statue of John Brown alongside Lee or something. A statue of John Brown represents this: the valorization of a man who attempted to overthrow an unjust system by force.
I think that it might be good to remove the statues to some kind of monument park or something like that: would we build statues of General Howe in our public squares? Of Nazi leaders? What about Soviet ones? These men committed high treason against the Union and in my view were handled very leniently; the traditional penalty for high treason is death. If they're still going to be sitting out there, I think they need some additional context...plaques or something...stating that these individuals were revered by the society that erected them but in the fullness of time, we have realized that these individuals were gentlemanly, polite slaveowning traitors.
I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.
The Nazis look like they were just saying "You need to conduct your mass murder in an organized way - none of this messy, disorganized, ad hoc murder. We Germans herd our victims into train cars and ultimately into death camps that churn dead bodies out like Volkswagens off the factory floor."
I would say Baron von Killinger was not horrified by the brutality - German concentration camps were just as bad - but by the disorganization and lack of efficiency that he may have seen. After all, the Romanians were using a lot of train fuel and freight car capacity to murder those five thousand people...
This seems like a debate between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil. Your "righteous" (and possibly genocidal) Orc who's running a tight ship and whose men are only eating one PoW in twenty alive is probably better at running his ship than the Orc on the next ship over who are eating every single PoW alive and leaving PoW bones laying around on the ship deck. That "righteous" orc is making a greater contribution to the army of Sauron.
Everybody wants to act like their enemies are the absolute worst, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth - and they are almost universally wrong, and simply have never seen real scum in their lives.
Yeah - police officers in really bad neighborhoods, ER doctors in the same areas, maybe people in psych units, people in maximum security prisons, and combat soldiers might see stuff like this. I'll grant that the Nazis were orderly in their mass murdering. I've heard it said essentially that outside of the huge piles of bodies coming out of the murder factories they built, the Nazis behaved more or less decently...although that is one hell of a qualifying statement. It's like saying "Sure. Hans is a decent guy if you're not looking at the 50 bodies he's got buried out back. Ivan, however...Ivan's a bit more disorganized with his shit. And let's not even talk about Akira, he's hopped up on meth and eating the bodies."
Yeah. Kind of facetiously: what if the gun had been used to kill a cardinal instead of the Pope?
It's the same reason why in some places road racing cyclists that ride like dangerous jackasses and do things that are dangerous but not illegal wind up having accidents and crashing their bikes.
Basically: the Hock is a homebrew form of psychological chemo in your view. Its aim is to kill the neurosis or other bullshit before it kills the host as well.
I was thinking about Killian Jornet's account of his upbringing, but with social grace instead of mountaineering: raised by an alpine guide father and climber mother, he started going on family ski trips, cross country skiing up mountains and going downhill on alpine skis. By five, he was going up 10,000-foot mountains and traveling on glaciers with ropes, crampons, and ice axes. By the time he was ten, he'd backpacked across the Pyrenees with his family - a journey that took them over a month and which their family repeated yearly. By 13, his mother took him on longer trips on the mountain, where he would sometimes fail to bring enough to eat or drink. So he licked water off rocks for as long as sixteen hours.
Imagine a family like this...but a networking or political family. I'm reasonably sure that families and maybe smallish communities like this exist...there's probably like a small pack of climbers in Colorado or something raising their kids a lot like the Jornet family did. I've never seen or heard of this though. Yeah, it could be bullshit, but if even a quarter of it is true...
Anyone got an over/under on my odds of surviving this shit?
Interesting - would have thought it was political families to be honest. I know there are families of engineers, military families... probably bush league politics and networking families too.
What do people there think about my plan to attempt this Hock?
Hell, even if you don't have a bike you ride outdoors, this seems like a better deal...just a beater to stick on the trainer is a few hundred bucks and something nice is a grand used.
Question: for the price of a Peloton, why not just grab a pretty solid used road bike for $700-$1k and a smart trainer to put it on? This way, you have a stationary bike AND a road bike...
Y'all sound like a bunch of hyperlexic autists...
Knights, in ages past, trained incessantly at knightly shit from childhood. Are there groups of people or cultures that train this intensely at networking...the kind of people where, if charisma and political competence was martial skill, they'd be very similar to Japanese samurai or European knights or other martial aristocrats? Or: since the average person has the same kind of material comfort and wealth as the aristocrats in ages past, are they just determined as all hell and making like ducks, seeming to not try very hard while actually putting in extremely demanding performances, like JFK and his career as a soldier and politician while suffering from severe chronic pain and never letting on, except to his closest friends, how much he was suffering? FDR the polio sufferer seems to have been cut of the same cloth. More mundanely, I've seen a few people who have chronic pain and don't really look like they're suffering. Maybe Joe Average is secretly determined as all hell and doesn't cop to it...
hockey has long had a culture of policing things that aren't quite illegal, but considered excessive via player-based enforcement in fights.
Cycling too, in some places - there are a lot of legal ways to be an asshole, even a dangerous asshole, in a bike race. Riders can also swerve and take each other out. So there's basically a gentlemen's agreement going in cycling.
Surviving the Hock will mean that I am no longer both disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship.
Don't worry, I'm not descending into utter nihilism or insanity like our buddy Skook
I guess I've been summoned: would you say that I am insane, or just nihilistic as all hell? Like, the basic premise of the Hock cashes out to "if you're an unattractive person/dude, whether it's because fugly or autistic or physically disabled or whatever, your partners are probably gonna find you disgusting. So you're asking for an awful lot there from your partner, arguably for no good goddamn reason. You kind of suck and are hypocritical if you're not down to freely choose to suffer like a motherfucker for no good reason - you're asking the same of your partner."
Maybe the Hock doesn't make you some kind of Chad, but surviving it sure as hell freezes some of certain kinds of hypocrisy off of you, as well as being a test of physical and mental fortitude. The Hock, like shit like climbing Everest or Navy SEAL Hell Week, seems to be most heavily loaded for high conscientiousness and low neuroticism.
I guess you might come to believe that you have something that approaches a moral duty to not offend people or to not do so inadvertently, and to be graceful and socially skilled. How you'd get there, IDK.
If he cooked up anything that was hock like, he would definitely not have the same type of narcissistic entitlement. Supreme Gentlemen are already Supreme and so don't need to fucking Hockmaxx.

I suppose it's a LARP until and unless skis touch snow north of the Arctic Circle?
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