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FiveHourMarathon

You can get anything here except red ink

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joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

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

You can get anything here except red ink

13 followers   follows 6 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

					

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

Minnesota won, so it doesn't matter. If they lost, it would be a big deal, but they won, so it's ok.

I've told my wife that I have no real desire to be in the room during the birth. It feels like the ultimate nightmare version of standing around awkwardly around pretending I'm helping the plumber.

I have no idea how you'd go about testing any of this.

You'd have to create an artificial metric for the importance of a news item, then measure for how many weeks it was front page news in a basket of prominent newspapers, then how long it was a prominent feature item, and how long until it disappeared entirely. How long did the Ukraine war stay on the front page every day in the WSJ and NYT and LA Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, vs how long did the Yugoslav wars stay on the front page. Various Israeli-Palestinian crises probably provide a relatively 1:1 comparison, as would mass shootings, or sex scandals.

But I suspect you wouldn't see stories stick around all that much longer. Rather, I think this perception might be the result of the multiplicity of content outlets that can be labeled "news" today. There's a long tail of websites putting out content every day, posting something, trying to get views. As a result there are always going to be dead-enders pursuing stories that have long dropped out of the mainstream news outlets.

There's also fewer actual reporters, fewer gumshoes knocking on doors and calling people on the phone and going to public meetings and digging into old files chasing actual stories. From the Times on down but especially below, newsrooms have died. Reporting new stories requires actual reporting, commenting on and remixing and reiterating old stories doesn't.

So you have content clickbait farms like Slate and Jezebel and TheAmericanConservative and a hundred websites that are even lower tier. And they've all got a dozen or more writers, and one of them might just have a hobby horse that he keeps putting out a shitty little article about every week or so, and that's a constant drumbeat of stuff about something everyone else has given up on.

So take a current Current Thing. The Kendrick Lamar vs Drake Rap Beef, and the associated accusations that Drake is a creep/pedo. Right now it's popular and fun, everyone is talking about it, the Dodgers are playing Not Like Us during batting practice, somebody shot at Drake's house, but two weeks from now it'll probably be out of the news. But you might have one writer who stays on the Drake is a Freaky Ass Nigga' beat, and just from sheer multiplicity of writers you can keep posting the same story over and over again, and it might feel like it stays "in the news" longer.

I broke 1000 pages on War and Peace. I'm going to dump my thoughts about Tolstoy afterward, the way he plays with the question of what is real and what is fake, the concept of society and the layers of power and importance, are fascinating.

My tablet book for boring public meetings is Stranger in a Strange Land. I commented a couple months ago about how after reading Dune I suddenly realized half of A Song of Ice and Fire was ripped off from Dune. Now I'm reading Stranger in a Strange Land and realizing that half of Dune is a straight rip from Heinlein. A specially trained Psychic young man who founds a religion, along with his loyal Water-Brothers, to overthrow a corrupt and sclerotic government. For the most part though, the book is rendered a historical artifact by how it was written. It's set in the near future, and we've reached Mars, but is filled with Mad Men era businessmen and Chandler-esque gumshoe reporters calling secretaries 'Toots.'

Fascinating factoid from the introduction by Heinlein's wife: the germ of the story came from a SciFi magazine Time Travel gag issue, a fan wrote a letter to the editor where he said he had traveled through time and seen next year's issue and here were the Authors and the Titles of their pieces. So the magazine contacted the authors and asked them to write a short piece with that title. Heinlein and his wife dreamed up the outline of Stranger and it expanded until it morphed into a novel, he wrote something else for the magazine.

I also have my old copy of Shogun sitting on my nightstand, between the series and a friend reading it I'm looking up and referencing passages constantly.

On audiobook, I'm listening to Numero Zero by Umberto Eco. It feels at halfway mostly a shorter version of Foucault's Pendulum, with the same theme of the fake accidentally becoming real, so if you like Eco but want something short and punchy it's great. I adore Eco, so even a knockoff is worth it. Sort of like Hemingway with The Old Man and the Sea vs The Undefeated. It's got everything I love about Eco: it's fun and light, easy to enjoy, while also having a ton of depth and intelligence to it. I'd highly recommend it.

Request: a while back someone on here was reading a long book and posting a series about it on Irish history around the IRA and the Easter Rising, what was the book? I can't remember.

Ok that sounds amazing. I need to find this book.

Stupid thing I did this week: injured my lower back after following a driving range session with a kettlebell workout. I'm ashamed both of the fact that activity level was enough to cause an injury, and that I was stupid enough not to realize that level of activity would cause an injury. It is improving over a few days, no big deal, and I'm hopeful it's nothing, but I need to reassess my plans for the rest of the summer and that pisses me off.

In my own ethical view, it depends on the store.

I don't generally view our obligations to corporations to be the same as our obligations to individuals. A small business I would not cheat. A corporation has already stated that it will act to maximize profit, screwing me in the process if necessary or just beneficial.

I might overcorrect towards giving people some grace on these things, because I can't imagine ever talking to my wife like that, it's so far outside of my experience that I don't want to assume I know what people are thinking. I know many people have more contentious relationships than I do.

So the argument is, if not for religion my life would be even worse?

there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis.

I found the perfect metaphor for this scenario after yesterday: the Falcons drafting Michael Penix Jr. 8th overall, after signing Kirk Cousins for huge money in the offseason. All the possible outcomes are bad scenarios for the Falcons. If Cousins is good, Penix never plays, and they wasted the 8th pick, with which there is no question they could have drafted someone at 8 who could help Cousins win. If Cousins isn't good, and Penix actually plays, then they've wasted $45mm/yr for the years they should be benefitting from the cheap Rookie QB contract, undermining the team they could build around Penix if he's good enough to get picked 8 overall.

It's possible that this all plays out fine, and the Falcons are good despite it. Like the Niners and Trey Lance. But they're betting against themselves somewhere. They're either spending $45mm/yr because they're worried they might whiff on the 8th overall pick. Or they spent the 8th overall pick because they were worried they have whiffed on the massive free agent QB contract. The scenarios where things actually work are worse than they would be otherwise.

I think any persuasive case would have to include some sort of theory for why instigating a divorce would be in any way beneficial to the conspirators. Is it known that non-divorced right-wing comedians are less desired by social media outlets?

It's pretty obvious to me that influencers pushing Right Wing trad values should have happy marriages, and if they don't it's a significant blow against their credibility. This is just personal, I hold the old fashioned view that if a person can't practice what they preach it throws significant doubt on their system.

...So "they" made him take the Benzos?

Do we have any information about the divorce? Anything that would indicate that this makes sense? I'll cop that I have no idea who this is, so maybe it's obvious.

I googled briefly and all that came up was a bunch of hit-piece articles and reddit discussions of them, which all aired grievances that ranged from the cringe-inducing (he didn't show up to the birth of his kids) to the maybe-horrible-but-probably-just-a-bad-day (ring video of him berating his pregnant wife for taking the car when he needed it or something) to the milquetoast and probably exaggerated (workplace gossip that he was sending around pictures of his penis to other male staff).

The divorce appears to have been filed immediately after the birth of their twins.

I find it far more likely that YouTube personalities typically are already, and nearly always become, obnoxious people to be around. Jordan Peterson is sort of the Platonic Ideal of watching the degradation of a human being exposed to too much culture warring in real time. From this to this in just a few short years.

Of course many founding fathers believed that slavery was wrong but that there was still a clear intellectual hierarchy of races... many abolitionists did believe in the 1820s and 1830s that black and white were equally capable,

These aren't necessarily contradictions in terms. There was widespread belief in a much more nuanced and fine-grained set of racial distinctions, the idea of a "white" race as opposed to a German/English/French race, or a white race as opposed to a "race of labourers" and a race of aristocrats, is developing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Many at different times have said that the black and white races contain, in due proportion, the capable and the incapable. Or one could believe that blacks are dumber than the English and less organized than the Germans, but smarter than the Irish and more moral than the Jews.

Gross white racial superiority is largely a modern innovation.

The Democrats are fumbling the ball, but Republicans still need to recover it, and as of yet they show few signs of being willing or able to do so. Jews moving away from the Democrats need to go somewhere. And the GOP is not offering a welcoming environment at this time. Some Jews who come to the conclusion that Right Wing Antisemites are merely harmless morons while Left Wing Antisemites are powerful and dangerous will make the switch, but I doubt it will be a mass exodus.

It's absolutely brilliant. One of the most uncomfortable reads I've ever had. Resonates so completely through the ages.

He was absolutely correct and the hip bookstore employee who recommended it to my wife should get the other half of her hair shaved off in public for this.

The whole book just felt like a thesis length version of "But I have already drawn you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad..."

I'm still working my way through War and Peace, notating it as I go. It's such a tremendous work.

In between I listened to some graphic novel recommendations and read From Hell on my tablet. Really fun work, and fascinating that it is based on a pseudo-legitimate Ripper conspiracy.

I took a beach trip and grabbed a book my wife had bought and had been well reviewed, R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. The best thing I can say about it is that it was shorter than I thought it was going to be, it was a 200 page book with extra large margins and line spacing to make it 300 pages, so that it seems like a real book but is really an overgrown novella. Even in 200 pages, it runs out of ideas midway through. A blank space and a power fantasy where I was told a literary work would be.

Kavanaugh: I hate that he has literally never had a job. In his bio he has no job he's ever had that wasn't either judicial or political. He's never argued a case in court or had a client. Judicial jobs, even as clerks, are rarefied air: everyone treats you with deference. He worked briefly in an "of counsel" position at a law firm, and it's not clear he ever did anything there, literally he couldn't give a good answer when asked. I also find him to be a bit of a government stooge, in regret over his role with Starr he finds the President to be immune from just about everything.

KBJ: I don't like how she was nominated, and haven't seen anything to change my mind as of yet.

Kennedy: Absolute nightmare of a Justice. Obergefell will go down with Dred Scott on the list of universally reviled precedents, if the current structure of the Court even survives the results of Obergefell. The number of ways the fake-test he created in Obergefell can and will be twisted by future Justices has the potential to undermine the constitution completely. The only positive way I can skew his opinion is that he wanted so badly to protect Gay Rights that he ensconced them into a framework that will allow a conservative court to protect other rights that they care about more than they care about gay marriage.

What do you mean by this?

Trump had the courage to engage and lead on the issues. Discourse on free trade agreements has changed completely from 2015 to today. Discourse on Russia and the support for Forever Wars has all but flipped partisan valence. Polling of the public, and the positions publicly espoused by Republican political candidates, have changed as a result of Trump's leadership on the issues.

Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump...

I think it is incumbent to pretend to be a true believer in public. Trump's supporters believe that he is a believer, that is enough. If a leader is perceived as cynical, think Mitch McConnell, it is difficult to push public opinion.

We can debate what kind of costly signals are sufficient to reach a point where True Believer vs Extra Savvy Counterfeit become indistinguishable. When the young aristocracy physically fight and die in Flanders, it sort of doesn't matter if they're doing it "cynically" for credibility or honestly for patriotism. There's a broad perception among Trump's supporters that he has suffered for his beliefs, that he could have had an easier time of it personally if he had changed his view, and I do think that is important in terms of his ability to move public opinion.

Huh?

I guess running shoes are the edge-case that is most relevant here. But a treadmill, or a rowing machine, or a kettlebell seem pretty clear cases. Bikes I guess can go either way, but I also don't have a problem encouraging bicycle usage.

The core emotion is inward, it’s self hatred not because they never did, but because they never could have. If they went back to being 16 now with their current personality, they’d end in the same place in the social stack. “I regret not partying in high school” should actually be “I regret not being the kind of person who would have partied in high school”.

Absolutely. Only boring people are bored. Endorse all of what you said.

I'd add that I don't regret in any way leading a dull and chaste high school life, in that I am happy where I am. Amor Fati. It's fun, occasionally, to daydream of how I could have acted with more agency at the time, but if I had the power to change anything I'm not sure I would. I might have ended up married to someone else, which I wouldn't trade for anything.

Funnily enough, inasmuch as my preference is originalism, I'd expect the Dems to fumble this one and end up with a mediocre judge on the court at best. But looking at that pseudo-majority they're running out there, if I were a Dem I'd be certain that we'd end up handing Trump another pick.

I think this analysis has a fatal flaw in it. Sotomayor is an affirmative action appointment

@ThenElection

This is why I brought up the example of Clarence Thomas, the single most obvious Affirmative Action appointment in the history of the Court, who has developed significantly over the course of his career. Conservatives are much more likely to cite Thomas' concurrences today than they were in 2002, when even Originalists joked that he was Scalia's sidekick.

I spent most of law school hearing obnoxious liberals (mostly white) talking about how dumb Thomas was; the fact is that he is probably smarter than most. Even the AA SCOTUS appointments are really smart people! ((One of the things that's so offensive about open AA is that it undermines the credentials of what are, factually, very accomplished people)) Maybe they're top 1% lawyers rather than top 50 lawyers, but they're smarter than the vast majority of the people criticizing them for being dumb. She might not be putting out top tier stuff at any given time, but she could grow into the role, like Thomas did.

I'm reminded of the Twitter discourse after the Oakland v Kentucky game this March, when a million people made jokes about Jack Gohlke being white and a future car salesman. And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.

I happen to like Sotomayor on a personal basis, in that I think it's hilarious that she'll go to Yankees games and sit in the Judge's Chambers. She's far from my least favorite justice, coming in above Kavanaugh, KBJ, and I still hate Kennedy enough to make up for the fact that he isn't actually on the court anymore.

Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.

The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.

Incel, properly understood, is more like "unemployed" than it is like "disabled" or "nerd." Most men are involuntarily celibate (they would like to have sex but can't find a partner) for periods of their life. I've expanded the metaphor elsewhere:

We could distinguish [] between the "unemployed" incel and the "disabled" incel. Almost every man goes through periods when he is looking for sex and can't get it, very few young men are permanently physically incapable of getting laid. We could further distinguish among the unemployed incels the three general types of unemployment in Econ 101: Frictional, Cyclical, Structural. Virtually every man has periods of Frictional celibacy, between girlfriends or hook ups or busy at work or on a long term sojourn somewhere not amenable to casual sex. Obviously there's not a "business cycle" to sex, but we could substitute that for the lifecycle of the man himself, almost all men are ready and willing to have sex long before they are able to obtain it, and most are willing to have sex long after they are too old to interest most women. Those two categories are unimportant to us, they may participate in incel discourse for a time but ultimately they'll get their "fair share" of sex over a lifetime. It's the third group, Structural Incels, we should worry about. The Structurally Unemployed are those whose skills have been made redundant by industrial changes and reorganizations. Your coal miners or carriage makers. People who will never get laid with the skills they have. The solution to that is always training and help changing careers. Some people don't want to train and they don't want to change careers, well tough luck then. Sitting around whining you should have a bigger paycheck because you are the best carriage maker in ten counties, and failing to acknowledge that no one buys carriages!, is a bridge to nowhere.

What we see is a lot of guys retain the incel talking points and resentments, that they formed when they couldn't get laid, even after they are getting laid. A lot of guys continue to hate women for withholding pussy even after some women stop withholding it! A lot of guys who came into themselves are still mad about rejections in high school. Which I understand, there was a period between 16-18 when it seemed like I had somehow already missed the boat: every girl I hit on who didn't reject me immediately eventually told me she had lost her virginity some time ago to her [asshole] ex bf, and that now she wasn't really interested in that kind of thing anymore. And it's easy for those kinds of rejections to fester, even after one goes to college and none of it matters anymore. Or, a lot of guys who came into their own after college, once they got a good job, feel like they missed the boat in that ok fine I can date women now, but half of them got fat after college, and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then.

That's the dynamic I think you're seeing!