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
6hr ago
Given that you had a month to read it, I'm amazed that you didn't address most of the things I said in that post.
The obvious case here is A Few Good Men[...]
This case is clearly distinguishable from A Few Good Men in that the real incident was public record and would have been well known to many people, part of any background check that the Marines went through later in life, and ultimately "googleable" though this wasn't a relevant concept at the time Sorkin was writing. The Cat Person connection was too obscure to be identifiable to more than a handful of people, up until Nowicki chose to put it all out there for attention. There was no way to google some combination of "30 something guy some time in the late oughts or early teens who dated a college freshman in Ann Arbor and worked at a movie theater and was super lame" that would deliver that guy's name. To repeat myself:
There are 34,000 undergrads at UMich Ann Arbor at any given time, you're telling me she's the only freshman to ever fuck a 30-something? The precise details may have been bang on, sure, [and] call me antisocial but there are like five people I would recognize at the level of detail we're talking about here. Her best friend may have recognized her, maybe a dozen close friends, but not everyone in Ann Arbor or something like that. There just wasn't sufficient detail to connect the fictional story to a real person based on past events!
The general rule of thumb is that a reasonable reader would recognize the plaintiff, not just a small handful of people who can recognize him from obscure knowledge but an identifiable community of people. This identification clearly fails on those grounds: only a small handful of people could possibly recognize these characters.
All the examples you give except the novel are not in this limbo; truthful memoirs/bitching/tweetstorms are #1 and are definitely fine, while false ones (because they're outright lies, having been stated to be real) are #3 and are very much not fine.
It's adorable that you assume that Kulak and Scott Aaronson are telling the truth when they rant about the awful Normies they have to interact with; let alone telling the truth as the Normies would recollect it. We'd have a real Rashomon on our hands if we ever got a hold of the people who have to interact with Scott Aaronson and they gave their side of the story as to what they think really happened there. The idea that there is an objective "truth" to get at whether someone is bad in bed or said a bad word once or was rude or didn't care that Scott Aaronson was lost is as good as a heckler's veto on fiction.
In research for another recent thread, I discovered that the writer of Sandlot was sued by Squints because he had made him look like kind of a dork at twelve years old; this despite Squints marrying the school hottie and having nine kids at the end of the film! He gave Squints the opposite of the Small Penis Rule treatment, and Squints still fucking sued!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
Catholicism is probably a bad example to debate, in that the Catholic view of this is that if Alice, Bob, Carol, and David were all Confirmed Catholics at some point in their lives, then they are all Catholics. One can lapse, or be in a state of apostasy or heresy or excommunication, but one cannot cease to be Catholic once one has become one, Catholic identity is an indelible mark even should one wish to shed it. Essentially the view is, in your terms, that if one does a sufficient quantum of activity+belief at any point in one's life (typically but not necessarily while young) then one has become Catholic and remains Catholic forever. One can be more pious than another, or in Communion with Rome as opposed to lapsed, etc. But one is always Catholic.
That all being said, within any belief system I think there are multiple types and layers we have to distinguish, some of which Catholicism has traditionally taken note of.
One should distinguish between sins, where one fails to meet the standard that one believes in as we are all weak and fallen, and dissenting beliefs. Somebody who slips up on occasion and does something against the teachings of the faith while still believing in the teachings of the faith, is different from someone who believes the teachings of the faith are wrong. Then there's the difference between dissent, believing the church is wrong, and error in ignorance where an individual is either insufficiently Cathechized or just too dumb to understand the finer points of doctrine. Obscure theological points, or third order logical conclusions, just won't be properly comprehended by a lot of people, and a skilled sophist could lead them through clever phrasing to deny them. And there's a difference again between His Holiness' Loyal Opposition, a reformer who dissents from church policy and wants to change it, and someone who hates the church whole cloth.
At any rate, we should recenter the question. I don't really care what you call yourself, I care about how seriously I have to take it. A constant problem within the legal cases surrounding Freedom of Religion in the United States is how do we know who is a believer? I want to see a broadened freedom of religion, but I also want to see enhanced tests of belief to access those protections. Similarly socially and ethically. It's fine for anyone to call themselves a Christian or a Jew or a Pastafarian, it's not fine for that to impose requirements on me to take their beliefs seriously.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
c) If you're going to bomb the Capitol as part of an attempt to overthrow the government, the least you expect afterward is the boogaloo, the most you expect is that your people get into power. You don't plan to evade the FBI because after the bombing the FBI either won't exist or won't have power over you.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
To be honest, it was a separate train of thought that was combined in my head incorrectly. Both are manifestations of doctor shopping based grubbing in law school, but you're right, the valence is precisely opposite.
I had a roommate in law school with a prescription for addies, and he started dating a friend of mine 1L year, and right before finals I caught her walk of shaming out of there when I was making Turkish coffee. I of course offered her coffee, she scurried out. My roommate proceeded to tell me that she had asked him if she could buy some adderall off him, and he had said "Oh, you'll find a way to earn it..." and I started laughing and said "Jeez, if y'all were black and lived in Baltimore they'd call this prostitution for amphetamines."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I don't see Ukraine or Gaza playing much of a role in the election. These aren't wars with direct US involvement, and there are intra-party differences of opinion. For Trump to move the needle on Ukraine he would have to negotiate a deal that was extremely favorable to the Ukrainians, and I doubt that will be forthcoming. Ukraine isn't winning the war, though they may be able to hold out for quite a while. The most likely outcome, aside from a continued stalemate, is some kind of Russian victory, and that doesn't really help anyone. Gaza is technically a settled issue at this point even if the war is realistically continuing, and I don't see it being an issue next year absent major new developments.
I think an underestimated political aspect of the Ukraine war is that if Ukraine wins, there's going to be a lot of carnage when they get ahold of collaborators, which is realistically the entire population of the LPR and DPR at this point. Which makes allowing Ukraine to win politically inadvisable for any POTUS. Even as allowing Ukraine to lose may be equally inadvisable.
That's what it should mean, in reality when I hear people use street smart day-to-day, it's offered as a contrast and salve to a lack of "book smarts." The lack of books smarts is obvious in a lack of education, a low wage job, or simply in speaking to him; the claim of street smarts is treated as unverifiable, there's no standardized testing for speaking to strangers or dodging a con man.
I'm contending that if one doesn't see evidence of competence in how they handle themselves, one should treat claims of street smarts as unverifiable and subject to being rejected without evidence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Which is more important to identity, ideological orthodoxy or activity? I would say having one or the other allows one a claim to identify as X, while having neither prevents it, and having both makes it impossible to avoid the identification.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they? We can’t have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there. -- Senator Roman L. Hruska (who, unsurprisingly, did not persuade his colleagues on this nomination)
I disagree. I think smarter people do a better job for everyone. I think it is incumbent upon all entrusted with Other People's Money to spend it well, and that means getting as much work for as little as you can pay. Anyway the subset of laws related to disability is small, hearing the voices of the disabled can be achieved through things like Amicus briefs in the few decisive cases. But at any rate, we should probably cut off this thread of argument because I don't want to do that annoying thing where I provide additional details from my real world example that I didn't provide initially in order to refute your points which you made in good faith based on your limited knowledge of the situation, and I feel like that's going to become inevitable fast.
A little learning is a dangerous thing ; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring : There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Interesting, I never thought about it like that, but you're probably right!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It's not that I disdain the concept of common sense or street smarts, or that I don't believe in the book smart genius who is a babe in the woods in life.
It's that I find that stating out loud, constantly, boasting, identifying that one is "street smart" instead of "book smart" is poorly correlated or even anti-correlated with actual street smarts. The people I know who brag about their street smarts are often just as if not more likely to fall constantly for scams, cons, flimflams etc. The perpetual victims in my life, the ones who are always buying the wrong car or dating the wrong woman or telling me about some magic product they bought from a weird website the lowers their electricity bill using technology developed by Nikola Tesla, they are exactly the people telling me they aren't book-smart but they have common sense.
So assess people based on the visible evidence that results from their intelligence, not based on their claims. For common sense, that looks like somebody who runs their life well. Someone who doesn't fall for scams, who always knows the score, who always gets a deal, who has a guy for that, a contact over there, a trick for getting things done. That guy has street smarts. The guy who claims he has street smarts, he is most typically falling back on the way of identifying himself that people won't call him out on the way they would book smarts. Always check for receipts.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I think these are the same thing but looser, they appear to have discontinued the one I have.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Probably, but not as a lawyer. And once you are so far down that path, you've taken on a lot of financial-temporal-moral debt that creates path dependance.
If he had the ability to finish law school at all, he has the ability to do some job in the economy. But rather than looking for a profession that he could perform well in, he was allowed to drift into a profession despite failing (under even circumstances) every test designed to filter for the talent required to perform well. Now he's likely in significant debt, he's three years older, and if he tries to do anything else it's understood that he failed as a lawyer.
Someone who can't function within time limits is never going to do well in a business built on billable hours. A lower pressure role, or one where having one great idea every week is better than doing 50 hours of competent drudge work might be fine.
I think we're talking past each other on the definition of friend, my friend. You seem to be using it to mean a true mutual understanding between two people, while I'm using it to mean more along the lines of "people who like you."
The con artist may have no real friends, in the sense that he doesn't actually like or value these people around him. But many people are under the impression that they are friends with him, that's how he conned them. Bernie Madoff conned his friends, so you may say he wasn't friends with them, but they trusted him and allowed themselves to be conned because they thought of him as a friend. The cad may not love his conquests, but they are all under the impression that he does. Politicians function by getting people to believe they care, even when they don't, and getting people to throw themselves under every passing bus requires that those people like you.
Someone with charisma may be a sociopath (though I hate that tired and fake archetype) who approaches every interaction as one of exploitation, but that's only his interior life, from the outside you won't know that really. From the outside, in terms of visible or measurable outcomes, you'll see someone with a lot of friends and admirers, tons of people willing to do him favors. While you might be able to construct a hypothetical toy example where it behooves the charming sociopath to have no friends, I don't really think it's a common case, in nearly every situation it is better to have people like you than to have people dislike you. Life is nearly always easier when people like you, and your brilliant sociopath is basically never going to calculate otherwise.
So when someone has genuine charisma, from the outside you're going to see someone with a lot of friends. Even if on the inside he disdains them, from the outside that's what you'll see, and if you don't see it no charisma exists.
The opposite case is rare enough that it strikes me as another cope, in which people who lack charisma pretend that they have stealth-charisma, and despite the fact that everyone hates them it is all really a clever manipulation game they are playing.
I'm curious to probe why we have all chosen to use primarily left-coded examples, when the same examples on the right abound. The identitarian rot runs so deep in our culture that everything is infected.
Only half of self identified evangelicals attend church weekly. Two thirds of evangelicals have premarital sex. There's no expectation that one's activities must justify one's self-identification.
The universe of Tradwife and conservative girl influencers and followers seems to consist of women who claim tradition as an identity, while rarely being willing to commit to actual values when it requires sacrifice.
Country music has been infected by poseurs, self identified "country boys" who grew up nowhere near a farm. Men who make up their lack of masculinity with a leather clad pickup truck. People who buy hunting themed stuff, but never hunt. There's no expectation that one must do something to earn credibility.
And most confusing to me, men who talk about supporting the troops and honoring the troops and loving the troops, and never tried to serve.
We have financial analysts who self-identify as blue collar, and day laborers who self identify as entrepreneurs. The poison is so deep in the American system, that I don't know how we get it out anymore.
It's easy to see the flaws in one's opponents, it's hard to see them in one's allies, it's near to impossible to self examine.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment.
More than that, most thieves can make a moral analysis of why what they did was acceptable, perhaps even righteous. It will be skewed, absurd, even ridiculous, but they can do it. When they say I didn't do nuthin, the [wrong] is implied.
I stole from the store, but insurance will cover it. Or it's a big corporation so it doesn't count, they'll never know the difference. I stole from my employer, but he underpays me so I deserved it. Sure, I robbed that woman in the street, but she has more than me and I gotta eat.
The thief understands cause and effect and morality, they simply find a warped enough reasoning to justify their actions.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
"Multiple intelligences" strikes me as something of a motte-and-bailey argument. No one disputes that some people are bad at maths and good at music, or shape-rotators but not wordcels.
My attitude towards claims of different forms of intelligence is that it is obviously true on its face, but that one can safely assume that when one is talking to someone claiming that they have a "different" form of intelligence than the ones that can be measured they probably don't rate highly in any form of intelligence.
Other forms of intelligence have their observable markers. The person with great emotional intelligence has a ton of friends, is a great salesman, can start a conversation with anyone off the street. The person with great spiritual intelligence is one who is always moral, a holy man who always does the right thing and knows the right thing to do, a saint. Someone with artistic talent produces art. I've known men who could barely read, but possessed some kind of innate mechanical ability to fix anything. People who truly possess these talents are quick to acknowledge that they are dumb, their talents and the rewards thereof provide the recompense for their stupidity.
By contrast, you have the person who loudly proclaims their emotional intelligence, such a person almost certainly lacks emotional intelligence as that is not a very emotionally intelligent thing to say to people. The person who talks about their intense charisma but has no friends, or the person who speaks of their spirituality but is a bad person. Or the worst of the worst: street smarts, common sense. The number of abject failures who crow about their common sense is a clear indictment of the concept, if it exists it clearly has limited value! And as a country bumpkin, I was eternally treated in my younger years to college friends telling me I lacked "street smarts," which always amounted to some kind of useless local knowledge at best, and just urban myths at worst.
I can say that different forms of intelligence exist from personal experience, in that I consistently rate much higher on any classic test that measures intelligence than I function in day to day life, I overperform on tests. I'm a mediocre mechanic, even though I would trounce anyone at the dealership in an LSAT; and I could never cut hair even if my IQ qualifies me for the job. But when one claims all the forms of intelligence that can't be measured, and has no evidence to back it up, it's easy to dismiss them as a liar.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
At one of our local courthouses a kid fresh out of law school applied to be a judicial clerk. For those of you unfamiliar, a judicial clerk is a mix of an assistant to the judge, and doing the judge's actual job for him, with the percentages varying with the judge and the clerk. Most of the judicial opinions that form the law of the land are written primarily not by judges in black robes but by anonymous clerks whose names are nowhere in the text.
This guy claimed all kinds of mental disabilities along those lines (ADHD and the gang), and before he even started the job, during the application process he was pointing to various accommodations he would need to function within the role of judicial clerk. He would need extra time on assignments, he claimed to be incapable of following speech and taking notes without a laptop or of engaging in live debate because he couldn't process speech fast enough or something.
To even ask for these things reflects an entire misunderstanding of how work works, of the whole idea of a professional. You don't get extra time on assignments, the assignments exist and you get them done. If you don't complete the work necessary in your allotted hours, you have to finish it outside of your allotted hours. If your allotted hours produce less work than the average worker, you are less valuable than the average worker. At no point in the application process did this young man seem to think of the problem as "I'm going to need to work more hours" but always in terms of "You're going to have to go easy on me." I know it's the government, but still, there's not even the illusion of caring about productivity or value for a dollar.
And what offends me most is to lead with it proudly! As @FtttG says below, Hyprocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. One ought to at least have the decency to be ashamed of being a slow worker, or disabled, and hide it until after one is hired in a cushy government sinecure from which one cannot practically speaking be fired.
I used to struggle with this in law school, the idea of extra time or drugs to help someone focus on legal work strikes me as absurd in a professional school that is explicitly preparing the majority of its students to function through billable hours. It seemed obvious to me that it was good to provide help to kids who needed it in elementary school, but that it should stop by professional school. I didn't recognize how slippery the slope was. Standards must be standardized, or they are useless. People we pretended were good at one level always trickle down to the next level and demand we pretend they are good at that too.
This young man is now shipwrecked, with a professional degree and probably a great deal of debt, and no real way to make money at it except by conning others into "accommodating" him. Left to his own devices, as the mythical solo practitioner with a shingle out, he will need to work absurd hours to achieve a livable income. Working for others, he will be fired repeatedly, or barely tolerated for fear of a lawsuit. That's no kind of life. And I don't know how you pull someone out of it.
We're well past the point of "a bunch of kids in colleges," this is now at the point of taking over the workplace.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Mandatory public education seems like a big Chesterton's Fence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I think I asked this question here a couple of years ago
I think I answered this question before. Both of these are good quality, made in USA, I've owned the products for a while with no issues.
Los Angeles Apparel makes a lot of good stuff. These are my preferred casual pants. They get stretch from the weave rather than from spandex. They also make good thick sweatpants, if anything they are too thick to be comfortable in some cases.
Alternatively, American Giant makes superlatively good, if comparatively overpriced sweatpants.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
There's rumors that Maduro is negotiating an exit plan with immunity for family and elections to follow. If Trump takes it, he's a genius compared to who we've had lately.
But if he's really smart, he'll keep Maduro on hand. Just in case.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I don't care if it's done ironically, I find it unpleasant to look at. It's ugly to me. Simple as.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I might still do it once or twice, but compared to a reasonable open mat where in two hours I can spend an hour rolling?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Anyone who sticks to requiring some strict set of criteria from a partner wants to die alone. Trying to debate him without addressing his real motivations and goals is a waste of time. Arguing with him about the odds is telling him: your method is going to be very effective at achieving your goals.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I know many people who would disagree.
I don't think that you can produce any data showing an over 50% suicide rate for those situations without engaging in a tautological definition of the situations at hand, where you assume if they didn't commit suicide than it wasn't that bad and exclude it from the dataset.
And at any rate, "hopelessly doomed to starvation" and "kill yourself honorably or we'll kill you and probably your family dishonorably" are so far afield from "LMAO this short story author said you can't get it up" that we're talking about entirely different things.
More options
Context Copy link