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
3d ago
Did you wait a week or a few days from your last "emission" so that it would be a larger quantity?
They recommend three days, that's apparently optimal. I got that the first time (15mm) we tried it, but the second time (29mm) they scheduled it last minute so I only got one day of abstinence, so I don't think it makes too much difference. I edged extensively both times to increase the quantity of the sample, though I haven't tested it not doing that so idk.
I will say: the day before the second sample I had an absolutely killer run at BJJ, so maybe there's something to the idea that winning dominance/athletic competitions increases testosterone production.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
My wife is really hoping for twins for the economies of scale. Quadruplets would be a bit much though, I don't think I can come up with 4 precisely equal names.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
That jeopardy clue is going to hit so hard one day.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
As I suspect that none of us has done a formal survey, we're probably literally talking about one or two local fast food franchises, which might be a case of a particular owner with a preference for hiring hispanics (easier to schedule full time, not as flighty so I'm not retraining all the time, less likely to slack off) vs one with a preference for hiring white teenagers (easier to keep them on short hours making your labor pool more flexible, better customer experience, don't seek advancement).
I know in my hometown, the Taco Bell is all local teenagers, the Burger King is the most busted methhead trailer trash you've ever seen, and what's left of the Wendys is all black women from the local city, must be on a bus route.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I Read It So You Don’t Have To
Jake Tapper’s Historic Misnomer in Original Sin
How do you come clean without coming clean? How do you take your team out of a tremendous, historic, catastrophic failure and yet manage to convince everyone involved to change absolutely nothing? How do you protect the power and position of yourself and your personal friends, while letting everyone know that you’re Taking Responsibility? How do you present yourself to society and strongly say Mea Maxima Culpa while avoiding any consequences?
Well, Jake Tapper has gone back to an old standby in Original Sin: you find a goat, you put all the sins of the community on the goat, and then you drive the goat out of town never to be seen again. For Tapper and the Democratic Party, they want to put all the sins of the 2024 election loss on Joe Biden and his immediate subordinates, get rid of Joe, and ride off free of guilt or blame. Unfortunately, for all the promise of the title, Tapper fails to grapple at all with the earlier sins of the Democratic Party which lead them to the Biden presidency. It’s a fakakta head fake, a cheap attempt at a false accountability that leaves Tapper and the rest of the Democratic Party machinery safe to keep doing the same things they were doing before.
Personal opinion: This book was horrendous. I knew it would be bad going in, but my wife wanted to read it so I downloaded it off libgen and loaded it on our shared Kindle account, and we decided to read it together and discuss it. That part was fun. The book itself just made me mad.
What Tapper offers is a mostly-disconnected and somewhat confusing series of anecdotes that add up to what a lot of people around here were absolutely on top of years before Tapper: Biden was cooked. However cooked you think Biden was, you’ll see evidence that it was worse than you thought it was. I won’t bother going point by point, we’ve tortured every incident to death already. Tapper tries to throw Biden a bone here and there, but for the most part he adequately massacres his goat. In the process a few close Biden advisers come in for a bit of trouble. Tapper labeled them the Politburo, and they are the villain of the piece, lurking, a sinister and undefined presence. Everything is ultimately laid at the door of some decision maker in Politburo or with the last name Biden. Joe, Jill, Hunter, and a few close personal aides are responsible for the entire coverup: denying the obvious, blaming the lighting or a cold or a long night, pressuring underlings into silence, making never-specified decisions in the name of the president without his knowledge, and generally operating the entire process of Weekend at Bernies-ing the President of the United States.
What Tapper doesn’t offer is any in depth analysis of actual policy decisions or tactical choices in government. This book is pure politics. He doesn’t at any point question who was where and when during crises in the Ukraine or Palestine. He doesn’t look outside the standard West Wing cast of characters in the political circle of the President, what was going on in the State Department or the DoD, what did the kids get up to when it became clear that daddy wasn’t home? How was it that the SecDef was out of commission for weeks without the White House even knowing about it? Did people start metering what they told the President’s office? Did they feel more comfortable defying the President’s wishes? Well, you won’t find out about it here, instead you’ll get seventeen people telling you separately about how they couldn’t believe how OLD Biden looked when they met him…Except that time after time we get people telling us not that he looked old, but that he looked older. Meaning, it wasn’t a mistake to vote for Biden in 2020, when everyone with a calendar could tell you how old he would be in 2024; it just happened out of nowhere, and there’s no way you can blame the Democratic Party for it.
My disappointment stems from the title: Tapper promises to trace to the root cause of the problem. Everything was paradise until this, then after this everything went wrong. But ultimately, he seems to be aiming to skate by what, to me, seem the obvious candidates for Democrats Original Sin:
-- The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
-- Obsession with Identity Politics: Biden, of course, didn’t actually lose the 2024 race, that honor was passed to Kamala Harris. Why was she there? Because she was (marginally) black and a woman. Tapper is pretty clear on this one, and states it directly, but never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak. It’s the lack of a talented VP who could be president, or at least win an election, forced everyone to Ride with Biden until it became obvious that he couldn’t win. And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent, leaving you in a position where you couldn’t be seen to skip over a Black Woman, but because she had to be a Black Woman she had no chance in the election.
-- Trump Derangement Syndrome: The refrain from Biden and his handlers throughout the process was monotonous. We need to beat Donald Trump, Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever). Democrats convinced themselves that Trump was so uniquely evil that they had to throw out all sense of decency to beat him; this kept them from beating him. Democrats convinced themselves that voters would reject Trump so thoroughly that it didn’t matter they were running an empty shell of what was left of Joe Biden; this destroyed voter trust in the Dems as a whole and cost them the election across the country. The Dems lost the plot completely due to TDS, and started to think they could or should do things they never would have thought of otherwise.
But Tapper doesn’t address any of these actual deep sins of the Democratic worldview, because that would require actual change by the Democratic Party, and change might lead to Tapper and his friends being disempowered. Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Instead he just blames it all on ol’ Scranton Joe, who will shuffle off to the great used Corvette dealership in the sky and leave the Dems to keep right on sinning just as they always have.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
This week you're all getting a break from all the uninteresting things I'm doing with kettlebells or jiu jitsu to talk about fertility treatments.
I know I'm not supposed to worry about it at all, that anything can happen at this stage, but I have to tell someone and I'll tell y'all because you I can't tell anyone who matters in my real life: after a little over a year of trying, my wife got a positive pregnancy test.
We'll have to confirm it, and hopefully it all works out, but I'm very excited.
We had what our doctor called "unexplained" fertility issues. Which is to say we were making love often enough, and individually our tests were coming back good, but no baby resulted. I guess its good the tests came back clean, but it was a little disappointing, in that when you go in for tests you hope for the doc to say something like "Oh, you actually have a very obvious, simple, and treatable common problem. You aren't doing anything wrong, you just need to do X and then it'll all work out." Sperm testing stressed me out, in that I feel like all versions of that are equivalent to "You're not really much of a man." Where female infertility, while surely bad, is so multifarious and complex, that it seems a little less bad. Like, where male infertility is "your engine doesn't have enough horsepower to move the car;" female infertility is "the wire harness came loose and the starboard vacuum sensor borked itself." Given, I'm sure Mrs. FiveHour felt the opposite way, that have slow sperm is better than being a woman who can't have a baby. At any rate, neither occurred, we were just stuck there with no baby for no particular reason. And hitting the age where while we could probably have a decent chance of getting it done, we might be under pressure pretty quickly.
Our insurance covered IUI, which is basically just optimizing the fertilization process. Mrs. FiveHour took some drugs to precisely trigger and optimize her cycle, then I was to jerk off into a cup, the facility would "clean" the sperm to optimize the sample, and then the nurses insert it directly into her uterus. We elected to give it a try.
This required me, of course, to jerk off into the cup, then immediately drive it across town to meet a very precise appointment time. I have never had a more stressful masturbation in my life. So much pressure! I really put a lot of effort into optimizing the production. I needed a good sample, I needed it to all go into the cup. And it's so weird carrying around a cup of my own splooge. I felt like such a bizarre pervert, in the car, then sitting in the waiting room. Not that I had much odds of getting into such a situation, but I would sooner be searched by a cop and have him find a gun or a half ounce of weed than I would have him find a cup of my own sperm. And the whole time I'm looking at the brown paper bag thinking, well that didn't seem like very much, I bet this was a miss.
I will note that according to my wife, as a personal achievement, that the doctor commented to a visiting med student who joined her for the procedure that the sample was "ridiculous" and that this was "definitely going to work;" they look for 5mm and I managed to hit 29mm. God I hope we don't have to do this again, because I'll have to try to top that. The natural male high-scoring instinct applies to everything with a metric.
I don't know if this will happen or not. We might not get a confirmed positive, it might not make it to term, or who knows.
But I'm praying this is our child. If for no other reason than I don't know how much more I can optimize my jerking off.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
That's not my primary aim, though it may be a secondary benefit. I think the major benefit of working a job is developing independence early on in teenagers. They get money of their own, they have obligations outside the home, they have the necessity (and therefore the right) to travel outside the home.
Below, and always, we are talking about the problems of young people dating. Summer jobs are the number one solution! Give them money, get them out of the house, encourage them to have independence from their parents outside of structured and scheduled "day cares." Give them the means and the reason to get a cheap used car. Give them the ability to take someone on a date without asking mom for the money.
That said:
Musicians can actually, you know, improve past what they’ve learned by age 12. That’s when serious musicians start grinding, learning new techniques, expanding their knowledge of theory, etc. My high school’s band program (of which I was a part) was small and pathetic compared to wealthier schools in our district, but a number of the musician kids I knew even then were spending a lot of time practicing to get good enough to potentially pursue it further into college and beyond. A disproportionate number of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, were Asian. Far from the Tiger Mom caricature — toiling away miserably at an instrument they hate in order to farm Extracurricular Points — most of them seemed to genuinely love the opportunity to get better at creating beautiful music.
I don't think a part time summer job excludes hobbies and interests outside of work. Spending part of your day stacking boxes, or mowing grass, or hanging drywall doesn't exclude going home and playing the violin for an hour. The tiny, hyper-talented fringe minority of 14 year olds who have the kind of talent that has been identified for nurture by that time, sure, give them a scholarship to some music program. But that's maybe a few dozen kids across the country that we're talking about, they're completely irrelevant to the question of "should kids get summer jobs?"
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind.
So I guess my question is, how large should that class be? Because it seems intuitively obvious that it should max out at the 2-5% of the population easily identified by standardized testing regimes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Are you really comparing becoming president to getting a job as a cop, teacher, or forklift operator?
It absolutely matters for people to have decent lives, but I'm not sure what that has to do with who gets access to the best million women in the country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I mean the difference is that the standard you were looking to reach (impress girls at parties, maybe play in a rock band) is very different from the standard of virtuosity that is required to play violin at a level that an ivy league school cares about. The former can be self-taught as a teenager, the latter pretty much requires that one begin formal instruction as a child. The average concert violinist begins instruction between four and six years of age, and by 14 the wheat has been thoroughly separated from the chaff in terms of those with the talent to take it anywhere interesting.
Tiger Moms aren't pressuring their teenage success-daughters to learn guitar so they can found a local version of the Linda Lindas. Though, maybe they should.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I don't care if all men can do it, I care if any man can do it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I'm thinking in terms of various camps, fake "research opportunities" to pretend your kid is doing science and shit, expensive non credit non graded college summer programs that pretend to be classes at a school, travel programs abroad that masquerade as charity work programs with no deliverables to help you write a college essay. That's more the kind of stuff gunner kids do in high school rather than get a job.
I don't think the time when Asian kids are made to learn violin overlaps much, if at all, with the time kids get summer jobs in high school. If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.
And for that matter, while I agree that music is a good thing to do with one's time, I genuinely think having a job is a better more enriching experience. I think a warehouse job will teach a kid more than a summer biology program at Brown will.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
By 30 one can absolutely be a teacher, forklift operator, or cop. In fact I think in most places you can't become a cop much after 30. 18-30, which I guess is what you mean by under 30?, captures a huge number of men (about 16%) who are in college, and effectively earn nothing.
Yes these men are single for any number of reasons. Do we ask the same question about your million good women? ((I should note that my age range for the men was under 40, as it seems like more of a match))
If a lot of these men were gay, it would just make my point even better, there would be even fewer straight men competing for those good women. I don't think women care about past divorces in a man.
None of your objections answers the questions raised: what part of this do you think is either not a thing your hypothetical good woman would look for, or not a thing under the control of the men? Sure most men don't meet these standards, THAT'S THE POINT. And you can do it easily!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Where's the insanity in trying to marry young? That seems like a normal predilection.
As for partner count, I think those statistics are mostly useless anyway.
But regardless, everyone is welcome to have their preferences. Just be prepared to put in the work to get what you want. If you want one of the top million women, be one of the top million men at least.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million women who met the criteria he considered marriagable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.
The question of how you get into the ivy league is entirely determined by what admissions officers decide gets you into the ivy league. Given that most of the elite colleges have shown themselves vulnerable to political bullying, it would be fairly easy for the government to order them to favor candidates who had part-time or summer jobs over candidates who didn't. This would benefit everyone.
Summer jobs are good for kids. They build independence. They put them into hierarchies that are different from the ones they are used to at home or in school. They get them out of the house and help them meet people. They are capital-G Good.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
This is true, and it's also important to remember that this is happening on the margins, not to everyone. It's not that NO ONE is getting laid. It's that a few percentage fewer people are. But in the same way that an economy with 5% unemployment is radically different than one with 15% unemployment even if the majority of people have a job under either condition, a world where 25% of people are unwilling virgins at 30 is vastly stuff from one with 5%.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
This may be due to my lack of familiarity with gaming, my last real experience with anything close to high end gaming was WoW circa 2010. My impression was always that a player who bought equipment but didn't have the talent would be shown out fairly quickly, similar to a player with a great racket but no skill, difference between the games I guess.
But ultimately I find this to be pretty standard rich dude behavior. Like buying a race car: you can hack it in some SCCA local stuff but not in the pros. And ultimately, by pretending to be a top gamer, Elon reifies the idea that being a top gamer is something to be aspired to, in the same way that rich people climbing mount everest reifies alpinism as something to aspire to.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
See in my mind, I think the Ackman thing is great. (Note that I hate Ackman's cultural presence in general and find him an utterly despicable person politically and culture war wise)
<1% of the people complaining about this on the internet were aware of the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, RI; fewer still were otherwise aware there was a tennis tournament in Newport last weekend; fewer still regularly follow the minor leagues of professional tennis. Ackman, in faking his way into a wild card spot and getting murdered, affirmed just how good the pros are, even on the minor league circuit, and just how cool it is to be professional tennis player, even on the minor league circuit. Ackman, in buying the status of a minor league tennis pro, affirmed that being a minor league tennis pro is high status.
When tech billionaires get into rock climbing or BJJ, it raises the status of pro rock climbers and BJJ instructors. They're richer, they're cooler, they're more respected.
Now there comes a point at which you've sold too much, where the status becomes worthless when everyone can buy it. A lot of fashion items that were once rare and hard to acquire and required one to travel to certain places, be "in the know" or connected, or were simply expensive, are now no longer the same signal of status.
So, in some ways, gamers should be flattered that Elon wanted to pretend to be them. The important thing is that he ultimately be forced to prove it, like Ackman, out on the court.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
So you believe that the differential in reproduction is entirely attributable to genetics, rather than to cultural programming?
That seems unlikely, given that all those gay atheists came from long lines of heterosexual religious parents. Pew in 2019 found that among Evangelicals, only 65% of kids raised evangelical continued to identify as evangelical as adults. The cultural pull of secular society is still going to keep those numbers down.
Now you can assume that over time the forces of selection will optimize those genetics, until those numbers are pushed up further. But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. Particularly, it's likely that young people will be getting a better deal from the "worldly" once they are rare enough to be worth bribing. This can balance out the genetic drift over time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I'm going to see a performance of Hamlet next week. What are the best essays or YouTube lectures to help me understand the play or take an alternate view of it?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Query: do you think current atheists were born of atheist ancestors?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
It depends if you think the typical consumer consider it positive or negative value that lives are ruined by the production of pornography.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Out of curiosity, what was your opinion on similarly extremely online and extremely vain billionaire Bill Ackman buying his way into a tennis tournament, playing doubles with a guy he hired against real pros.
He got murdered and people were upset about it.
I thought it was great. The tennis tour get money, the guys playing got attention, and nobody got hurt.
Buying your way into being cool, whether by playing the impressario to a sports team or arts scene, or you build a submarine or a rocket ship to make yourself into an explorer; sometimes you win tournaments by paying everyone to pretend you're good at things.
Hell, in BJJ we have goofy-ass categories in tournaments, where they have such narrow weightclasses and belt levels and age ranges where guys get "medals" because there are only 3 people competing. (Anthony Bourdain won "silver" in a BJJ tournament, which sounds really cool if you don't realize this)
This is just a new version of that, isn't it?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Great work! I've included some real lightweight shit in there this year so it's been easy.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/believing-youre-a-winner-gives-men-a-testosterone-boost-and-promiscuous-disposition
It seems intuitive that such an effect could also increase sperm production in the short term.
As for edging, study compliance is probably an issue.
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