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
Start doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It's got everything for the midlife crisis male:
-- You, too, can be 34 in a karate class. Takes you back to being a kid, with coaches to yell at you for doing things wrong, bullies who you resent for being dumber yet bigger and meaner than you, meaningless make work that you put yourself through because you are a teacher's pet, and the joy of actually getting good at something meaningful. You'll never want to tell anyone about it, for fear of seeming lame, so it's a fun personal secret.
-- Much like being a sports fan is gambling a bit of your happiness on the birds every weekend, BJJ is gambling a bit of your happiness on your own performance every week on the mat. Every round is a little stake of a little bit of my sense of self worth, and when it goes badly I'm down about it; but when it goes well I'm up like nothing else, the feeling of defeating a resisting man in the most clear way possible. The midlife crisis corporate job blues are, largely, about the lack of highs and lows, the feeling that one's life is flattening out. BJJ will, especially in the first year or so, deliver big wins and big losses. I can't tell anyone about the wins and losses, outside of my anonymous internet friends, because I'm 34 in a karate class and I'm just a new guy in some strip mall gym in small town PA, it would be uncouth to talk about. But man, the first time I tapped an opponent, it carried me through another month of training. Same when I started beating my best friend who started at the same time, the first time I tapped a blue belt, the first time I tapped my coach. I can remember distinctly things like hitting a shoulder crunch and the coach saying "wow that was a beautiful sweep," or just the first time I really nailed an arm drag; and embarrassing things like the first time I rolled with The Spider and he dominated me so badly I cardio tapped, or when the Gorilla mother's milked me and I wanted to ragequit on the day. BJJ provides you with something to make the days seem less same-y.
-- It gives you an aesthetic excuse for why you shave your head. Or, if your midlife crisis rolls in that direction, why you get tattoos.
-- It can be done with kids, as they grow up. My coach basically started the gym because his son came up in the hobby to the point where he was competing nationally constantly, and if it was already taking over their lives he might as well make a little money. It ages well, until your kid is full grown, you can play a tricky old-man-strength bottom half game against him even if he is better than you pound-for-pound.
-- It's relatively low cost, as good midlife crisis hobbies go. Classes where I am run $120/month for unlimited attendance, if I had the time and didn't injure myself I could go every day, even multiple times a day. The equipment is basically just the clothing, and even if you buy all specialized stuff you're only talking about maybe $300 to start and another $100 a year. You can, of course, spend a ton of money on ugly rashguards, competition entry fees, seminars, instructionals, private lessons. But the cost of the classes and equipment is the tires for a sports car or a good road bike or a set of golf clubs, so as midlife crises go you're getting off cheap.
-- Injuries. You'll come to a meeting with a black eye, or mysterious forearm bruises, or eight stitches on your lip which leave a permanent Mensur scar. Actually, some of that's just me, I have a very punchable face. But yesterday I got slammed at the end of a wrestling class and tweaked my neck badly, and for a day or two I'm going to feel like a complete idiot for getting involved in this, but Monday I'll probably feel good enough to go back to class and I'll want revenge, that fucking beardo wrestler is getting triangled and kimura'd all round. Another way to add drama to your life.
-- Community. I'm not going to sit here and write a bit about it, but you'll make friends instantly. And in all likelihood you'll get to be The Nerd again, not a nerd but The Nerd.
Other than that. Road bicycling is popular around me, my wife joked that last summer I just hit the middle-age curve and needed to ride my bike 100 miles, it combines a smaller part of the equipment consciousness of car racing with the cardio of jogging. Hunting is good down by you, right? Another primal feeling of killing and skinning your own, and you get the freezer full of venison out of it. Whitewater depends heavily on your access, but of all the XTREME sports it probably delivers the best thrills:training/fitness ratio. Powerlifting probably has the oldest guys setting PRs and world records, so for longevity it can't be beat.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
Scott used to write posts about how to positively manage the seething jealousy one feels while one's poly partner is out on a date. He's post-shame on personal topics.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
This is tremendously quality content.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Well, figure if you were top 5% in size/muscle when you were 15, then there were nineteen other fifteen year olds in Finland who looked at you and thought to themselves "Wow, that guy is bigger and stronger than me, I'm scrawny and weak!" It's an ordinal value, not an absolute one, so people are comparing themselves to others, and disproportionately everyone will compare themselves to the apex.
People tend to form durable internal identities during their youth, I would say 15 years old is pretty typical. Almost every male, whether you work out during that time or not, is smaller and scrawnier and weaker than he will be later, so at the time he is forming his internal sense of himself, he perceives the world that way. The typical fifteen year old boy compares himself to his father, he is smaller and weaker than his father. If he's not on a sports team, he is likely smaller and weaker than the kids who are on a sports team; if he is on a sports team, at 15 he is likely smaller and weaker than the older kids he plays with on the same team or at the same club. If a teenage boy has a job, he is likely working with adult men who are bigger and stronger than he is.
People don't tend to update those internal identities over time as quickly or as thoroughly as we ought to. For me, I went from rowing at 155# freshman year of college to getting into lifting and weighing around 195-205# every year since graduation, but my identity formed when I still thought of myself as smaller than that, and it takes conscious effort to think of myself as a heavyweight.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Why can Hispanics do it but whites can't? I'm trying to parse what this even means.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Without even going into the whole 'the parents were born into more typical households in a better socialized environment whilst the children got born into the internet era with permissive enlightened avant garde parents' aspect.
That's the core thing to go into though. My grandmother was left handed, until the nuns beat it out of her.
A weirdo kid who is taught to not-be-weird and raised in a culture where weirdness is punished might not turn out "normal" but will just be a little weird. A weirdo kid who is raised in a cultural setting that doesn't just allow him to be weird, but actively honors the weirdos around him as the highest examples of humanity, will cultivate his weirdness and become even weirder.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
When do you think we should start taking the news coming out of Iran seriously? What likely leading indicators will we see when things start getting serious for the regime?
I feel like we get the "Iranian protests threaten regime" news cycle periodically, but I have trouble trying to figure out what to trust. We'll of course get biased interpretations, but what concrete facts will tell us when to start thinking big?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Absolutely. It's the elephant and the stake in the ground. It's hard for people to understand that they've grown and changed since high school.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
My impression is that historical nobility had a lot of status anxiety too! Not just status, but plain finances to boot.
Our impression of historical stability for noble families is also heavily influenced by lying. Dishonesty and outright fraud have always been key elements of creating lineage stories. Cutting both ways!
The ancient frequency of Moses/Oedipus/Cyrus (Herodotus rather than Xenophon)/Arthur sword-in-the-stone myths likely reflects a way to incorporate peasant "risers" into existing lineages. The Hapsburgs were notorious for inventing spurious links to Caesar or Charlemagne. This occurred at lower, and less notable, levels of nobility all the time. A sufficiently rich peasant found a way to claim descent from so and so, and with the right palms greased the write documents were "verified" and no more peasant. I similarly roll my eyes at the western credulity given to claims by Oriental families to have lineages dating back before our earliest written documents, but without evidence to back it up. Accounts of nobility were always historically shaky in poorly documented societies with weak record keeping.
We now, of course, are so often treated to the opposite in America, false middle class consciousness. Republican family origin stories where dad was a "small business owner" (third generation multi-millionaire) and I worked my way through college (interned with a family friend's finance company); or the international student version where my parents were refugees (oligarchs who fled when their patron was ousted in a coup).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
You see the same dynamic in fitness hobbies. Genetic advantages are obvious to everyone, for the other guys who are bigger and stronger, but most guys will tell you that they themselves have mediocre genetics and that all their accomplishments are the result of hard work. Related, I suppose, to the Fundamental Attribution Error: actions by others reflect innate traits, actions we take reflect contingent situations and decisions. I'm in good shape because I put in so much work, fat people and weak people and slow people just need to put the work in.
In my BJJ gym, I've noticed it extends to the point that guys nearly all perceive themselves to be smaller than they really are. The big guys think they are closer to normal, the median guys think they are small, the little guys think they are tiny. When a bigger guy, often the same size, wins the smaller guy, often the same size, he writes it off as "He's bigger than me I never stood a chance" and doesn't think the bigger guy worked harder than him at training. When a bigger guy beats a smaller guy, he thinks of it as his hard work and skill that made him better.
I'm vulnerable to this error myself, I think of myself as an average size guy, then I'm reading boxing history and most of the Heavyweight Champions before the 60s were my size or smaller, hell even Tyson in his prime was just a few pounds heavier and an inch shorter. At my whiniest, I've been known to complain that weight classes are stupid and it should be height classes, weight is a decision only height is innate. Why should the purple belt benefit from years of experience and that's ok, but years of hard work in the weight room are an unfair advantage?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
My mother and I recently visited a memorial to WWII submariners, and my mother looked at the list of lost ships and their crew numbers and said wow how on earth did you convince anyone to get on a submarine? And I pointed out that submarine service isn't SO bad, because for the most part you either sink or you don't.
You're much less likely to get grievously wounded, disfigured, crippled than you would be in the infantry. You aren't crouching in a trench in perpetual terror for months. Your moments of danger are intense but they last mere hours, and then generally you're dead or you aren't. Not a bad deal as war goes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
The clothing and manners debate is orthogonal to the core question of sorting. I don't particularly care if our elites wear suits or hoodies, as long as we're selecting them for the right reasons. My objection to aristocratic sorting isn't the aesthetics, it's the inefficiency. If your system selects for people who know which fork to use, and knowing which fork to use happens to correlate 0.7 with having rich parents but only 0.2 with job performance, you've built an inherited oligarchy with extra steps.
As a very wise friend of mine recently said:
This is the big one. We live in intense cognitive bubbles.
The problem is when we generalize from this filtered view. We start believing that because IQ doesn't predict success within our bubble, it must not predict success period. We see a colleague who's a bit slower but works incredibly hard and does fine, and we extrapolate that to everyone. We forget that the slow colleague is still in the 85th percentile of the general population, and that the person in the 30th percentile who works just as hard isn't a doctor at all, they're doing something else, probably something that pays worse and doesn't sound as impressive on a Hinge profile (see proxies re-emerging?).
Dressing neatly in a clean and appropriate suit and tie doesn't strike you as a cognitively demanding task, or even really in this day and age an indication of wealth outside of branding, just as a chore to learn and a cultural heritage to pass down. But it does serve as a filter for baseline intelligence and conscientiousness when widely understood as something we can screen for. There are people that are too stupid to dress themselves properly, or insufficiently conscientious to do so neatly.
By building a culture where this is a well known expectation, we create a culture where we can look at someone and (as @pbmonster said in the SSS thread) have their IQ tattooed on their forehead. There's obvious spirals of fashion and veblen goods and in-group signaling that are bad, but culturally expected dress codes don't need to be focused on that. The broad concept of "appropriate" dress. does not need to veer into wasteful or extravagant dress.
Basically, yes, you shouldn't judge a book entirely by it's cover; but damn wouldn't the book store be more convenient if book covers told me more about the content in the book? And this seems entirely within the control of the publishing industry.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
In what alternate reality besides truly tiny niche examples?
You're right, I was probably being insufficiently precise.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Depends on the family. Does his wife's father have any AAQCs? What about his paternal cousins?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I'm not sure it really fit, but I couldn't resist the joke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Leave the backseat moderation to heritage mottizens.
This favors the people living and breathing inside the dominant culture. It favors the legacy admission who knows how to dress and speak. It subtly closes out the dissenting voice from the outsider who might have raw supercomputer-level processing power but speaks with a regional accent, wears ill-fitting clothes, and hasn't learned the subtle dance of feigning humility while signaling status.
Some professions, like programming, are comparatively more sane/honest. You can have a perfectly decent career in FAANG if you don't shower regularly and speak with a lisp, assuming you are actually good at your job. Hell, like the dude with the MLP (pony, not perceptron) resume, you can counter-signal by being incredibly eccentric. If you're still drawing a seven figure salary, then you're worth it.
Just picking out this particular area of your comment, it amazes me when intelligent people (like you) actually repeat this odd myth in the year of our lord 2025. What you're talking about as "sane" in the programming profession is exactly what you're decrying elsewhere as opaque vibes based sorting. Programmers acting like slobs might have been rebellion against corporate life, or reflected a genuine lack of interest for social norms, twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. Today, it reflects precisely the opposite, tech-bros compete over who can performatively display their slobbery and betrayal of social norms as evidence of their talent. When professors and executives wore suits, choosing to wear a t shirt meant something. Today, it is just another form of cultural signaling.
Sam Bankman-Fried is our prime example, but there are millions more. SBF's appearance and behavior wasn't based in a natural untutored naiveté, it was a carefully cultivated performance for investors who superstitiously believed that this was what a genius startup founder was supposed to look like. He didn't play League of Legends during investor calls because his professor parents never taught him basic manners, he did it because he wanted to demonstrate to the crowd just how "above it all" he was. And venture capitalists ate it up, believing that the performance of Aspie disdain for social norms could substitute for actual genius. Sequoia Capital put it on their website! as an example of how cool SBF and FTX were, and how Sequoia was the hip company that could understand these kinds of geniuses, who could understand their vibes.
We've seen this for centuries in the arts, where the antisocial behavior of brilliant artists becomes a touchstone for young poseurs and strivers. The artsy kids I grew up with imitated the gay drug addicts in Rent and strived to die of heroin overdoses in New York City, who were written in specific imitation in both art and life of the alcoholic painters of La Boheme and strived towards dying of consumption in Paris gutters, who themselves were based on a novel whose real life examples probably imitated Rabelais or something. A real artist is depressed and deep, so the artsy teen wears black all the time and feigns misery and misanthropy. So many great artists are alcoholics, so young artists drink themselves into a stupor. Great artists abuse their sexual partners so must I!
Legible aristocratic or middle class standards of appearance and action, actually looking good in nice clothing and speaking properly, is much easier to learn and imitate, and a much better test of intelligence and conscientiousness, than is performatively spurning those standards. What suit to wear, and which type shoes to match with which belt, and what color tie, is all learnable and teachable. And learning all that, applying resources to acquire the knowledge, and exercising those skills, are all examples of that skill of "holding one million variables in your head and making decisions." Knowing when to wear tweed and which fork to use and which glass to pour which wine into may be frivolous and wasteful effort, but at least it is legible and trainable, and shows some degree of intelligence and training at a glance.
Excellent comment overall, and I may reply further on other aspects, but this in particular stood out to me, as an example of how Vibes Based sorting is so insidious and difficult to rid the brain of. Humans are very good at striving to imitate the appearance of doing something, even when they aren't.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
sometimes even paying for OnlyFans despite knowing that this was terrible for me and that I was probably talking with a bot.
I'm asking in a spirit of curiosity and not of attack: how does one come to participate in this practice? What made you do it for the first time? Did you regret it at the time? Leaving aside moral disgust, do you feel like you get your money's worth?
I've never in my life paid for internet pornography (I have purchased the odd vintage magazine, and Mrs. FiveHour has a fondness for vintage Playboy calendars and puzzles as home decor, so strictly speaking I have paid for nude images of women). It always feels like a sharp line for me, where doing so would cause me to cross into some new kind of behavior and I recoil from it. In the same way that I can imagine eating or drinking a drug, I eat or drink other drugs and something stronger is a soft line, but I don't know how one comes to inject drugs.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I'm getting too cynical, it just doesn't feel real to me, but it's going to be years before we can parse it. It's an odd strategic move, akin to terrorism on its face, to kidnap a head of state as a naked threat to hang over his successor. So I have to imagine that there was some under the radar deal with the venezuelan deep state to accept this turn of events in exchange for letting them stay in power.
Of course, deals with the USA aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way.
Ah, there's the problem, I am cool with that idea.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I have been surprised by the longevity of this incident in the news cycle. I mostly consider it a boring incident.
I think you're underestimating the impact of racism, sexism, tribalism, and profiling in the perception of this incident as compared to others.
Renee Good was a 37 year old white mother of three. I haven't looked into her background, but just judging from the car not being a complete heap I don't think she was impoverished, we can probably label her middle class. There's virtually no chance, with just that data, that she was out there engaged in a suicide terrorist mission. She might literally have to be the first middle aged white woman in all of American history to do something like that. I asked both ChatGPT and Grok, neither could bring me a single documented case of a white woman between the ages of 30-50 killing an on-duty police officer in the history of the United States. If we included "middle class," "mother of three," and "not visibly disordered" it would cut those odds even more. When I asked for 30-50 year old white female terrorists period (not just anti-cop), the closest I got was Shawna Forde who murdered two illegal immigrants as part of some cockamamie border militia thing, and maybe some left wing bank robbers from the 70s but those were getaway drivers. If anyone else can find me examples of 30-50 year old white women killing on-duty cops, let me know!
Liberals might decry racial profiling, but they believe in it, because it is obviously true. A male suspect is vastly more likely to be dangerous than a female, an old suspect less dangerous than a young one, a black suspect more dangerous than a white one. A middle aged white woman is just vastly unlikely to be a domestic terrorist engaged in an anti-cop suicide mission.
The white middle class might dislike what ICE is doing or we might not particularly care, but we pretty much assume that whatever happens it won't touch us. This is one of us getting shot. Not some immigrant getting sent to a foreign torture prison in Cuba or El Salvador, not some black kid in baggie pants getting killed, this is a middle aged woman who looks like my sister, my coworkers, my grad school classmates. I might roll my eyes when they lib out, that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with a world where they might get shot. A middle class liberal might decry his privilege, but he still believed in it, that as a middle class white person he was protected, that bad things wouldn't happen to him. This pierced that privilege. And that's hard to deal with.
The reason this is hanging around is because Renee Good doesn't fit the profile of the kind of person who gets killed by the cops. Turbolibs love to quote Wilholt's law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." And they believed that, they believed they were in the group that the law protected but did not bind. Every accusation is an admission. White liberals believed that their privilege would protect them. It turns out it will not.
And that means you have to make a decision. Because when the gun turns against your tribe, the nature of war is that you don't get a choice of which tribe you are part of. If we decide that killing middle aged women for being turbolibs is ok, I can't decide that I'm not part of the tribe, my family and my friends decide that for me. I can only decide whether I'm ok with their deaths or not.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
It's very clear that the British viewed the Afrikaaners as colonial ethnics in the same way they viewed the Zulu, maybe a step above the blacks but fundamentally a primitive group to be managed through conflict with other such groups.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Picture this. It's 2011, you're nineteen or twenty. Your fraternity has booked a party bus to take everybody to formal. Everybody is pregamed, dancing in the aisle of the bus. You grab the overhead handrail, and realize you can do a pull up on it, then realize you can flip over and loop your legs over the rail and hang upside down. So of course you grab your girlfriend and you kiss her upside down and your fraternity brothers and their dates yell WHOOOOOO SPIDERMAN
So anytime you're drunk with your friends and you see a handrail or a pull up bar or an appropriately sized tree branch you can swing your legs over, you do the same thing. And everyone saw that movie ten years ago and cheers. It's the college equivalent of the middle school practice of jumping to touch the top of doorways.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
-- Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there. The pioneer tames the wilderness and makes it safe for civilization, only to find that civilization has no place for the pioneer, and that he can never step in the same wild river twice, that he isn't the same man and it isn't the same river.
-- On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene. I was at the library book sale over the summer, and among the old ladies and college students there was two or three immigrant women with little barcode scanners attached to their phones. And methodically, mechanically, they would scan each and every bar code on each and every book, one at a time, not even glancing at the cover or the title, and picking up one book out of every fifty or so which the phone told them was valuable enough to resell. That's what modern reselling looks like: poor immigrants sucking every cent of value out of stuff they don't even care about. I'm generally averse to critiquing the poor for trying to keep body and soul together, but their presence eliminates the opportunity for a down-on-their-luck hobbyist to hustle a bit of money on the side using their knowledge and skill. This is one less way that an ordinary person can make a little money without debasing themselves. And there's a certain romance to a young middle class woman leveraging her knowledge and enthusiasm to arbitrage, that just isn't there for a drone who doesn't care about the stuff involved, that I think makes the former acceptable in a way the latter is not.
-- As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40. It used to be I'd spend all day hunting for vintage Scottish cashmere, and get it for $8, but on the way I'd see a thousand Banana Republic sweaters and any day I wanted I could go over and buy a cheap sweater. Now the juice isn't worth the squeeze for the cheap stuff, I think you're better off waiting for a sale on it new at that price point. Nobody needs cheap Gucci, but it used to be nice being able to get functional nice looking stuff for cheap.
This Christmas marked a sad milestone in AI for me: I heard a Frank Sinatra song on youtube (I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan ) and I'd never heard it before and got suspicious that it was some kind of AI fake in the style of Sinatra. The lyrics to the song are just odd enough that I thought it must be an LLM attempt to combine concepts from the American Songbook genre to produce something that sounded like it if you didn't look hard enough. "I've lost the only girl that I've found" is sort of odd, and what's with the blue pajamas?
But no, it's a totally legit songbook work from an Adirondacks campfire song to a broadway show in 1927 to a Fred Astaire film. But the joy of discovering that was ruined, because I was too busy worrying if I was a dope falling for AI slop.
More options
Context Copy link