FiveHourMarathon's profile

FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 16m ago · Edited 12m ago

I always found that focusing on principles more than technique helped me link things together better. The move of the day stuff sometimes lines up with what you need, but not often.

I absolutely agree, but that's how they teach at the school that's five minutes from my house. Even if the one ten miles from my house taught more in line with my pedagogical preferences, I'd value getting into the gym more often, which given my tight schedule I can do so much more often with the short travel.

What I want to start doing is focusing on, during open mat periods, doing more limited rolls with guys. Start in half guard and play "Pass/sweep" for a whole round. I should probably start studying outside of class, but I never end up having the time.

My own progress really took off when I started to focus on staying in and advancing the control position...Once you understand how to progress the position, submissions sort of fall out of the process. About a third of my subs now are unintentional, before I start chasing anything.

I'm definitely similar, I'm very much a station-to-station or move-the-chains kind player, depending which sports metaphor you prefer. If I'm in bottom mount I'm trying to get to bottom half, from bottom half I'm trying to sweep to get to closed guard, from closed guard I'm mostly trying to sweep but I'll grab a sub if it's offered, then I'm only trying to finish a sub if it's on offer when I'm in mount or side. Hell, depending who I'm rolling with I spend most of my time in mount or side control rapidly transitioning positions trying to stay on top. I just try and stay calm and stay in my game. If I don't lose too quickly in the takedown phase, I can normally get to half guard top or bottom and work from there.

Of course, part of this is just a matter of depth of experience, and just the luck of who shows up. Some days it's still just nothing but guys who kill me, because I'm not very good.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 36m ago

When Aristotle talks about "natural slaves" he's not really talking about some American nightmare-vision of an antebellum plantation*. The ancient Greek system of slavery he was familiar with was closer to "employee who can't quit" than it was to "living under absolute constant terror." In some sense "slave" is a mistranslation, because the context is so different.

If you say "should it be legal to enslave people" everyone says no; but if you asked the same people "Should it be legal for certain people to be employed in jobs they can't quit" many would say yes.

There's no question that a great number of people need a structured job created for them, where they are directed. Traditionally, bosses took a large hand in the personal lives of their workers; today that is frowned upon.

*It should be noted that actual plantation life wasn't like that either. There were black slaves better off than some poor white people.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 51m ago

This was what I suspected would result from your prior post on recomp. Losing weight first is definitely the right call, dropping the fat and then starting with a clean slate will be great for you. 3kg in a month is quite a bit, if I dropped 6kg I'd probably be at my ideal fighting weight.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 17hr ago

"Jesus wasn't a Jew" is at least more likely than the "St George and Santa Claus were Turks" gag I see from SJWs.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 18hr ago

Galaxy brain: the Israelis are indigenous to Palestine, because they never left for Europe and then left Europe to escape antisemitism, because there was no antisemitism to escape. The diaspora is a myth, Jews are just native to Israel and new York.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 19hr ago

Reading this I was thinking to myself, well if you're Jewish whether the Holocaust happened or not, of course your ancestral memories will be of the oppression of Jews, it's pretty much their entire history other than the reigns of like three or four guys in the Old Testament. Which made me imagine a guy who isn't just a Holocaust Denier but an Antisemitism denier: the Pogroms never happened, the Blood Libel never happened, the expulsion from Spain never happened, the Second Temple never existed so it was never destroyed, etc.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 19hr ago

Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is),

I pretty much reject the idea of Holocaust Denial without Antisemitism, because a faked Holocaust is pretty much a concrete open-and-shut case for a world Jewish conspiracy. It requires not only that Jews have had the power to force the story on everyone, to force schools in the United States to make me read five novels about the holocaust in the course of my public education and force half of Europe to throw you in jail if you don't believe in the holocaust; but also that every individual Jew who attests that they lost a family member is a liar. It pretty much positions Jews as a uniquely powerful and evil group. If you don't hate the Jews after confirming that they faked the Holocaust hard enough to sell 30 million copies of Anne Frank's diary, then you're a little looney tunes yourself.

That said, having personal experience as the center of Holocaust proof is rapidly running out of runway:

I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.

In 2000, there were close to 6,000,000 WWII veterans alive in the United States; in 2024 there were around 66,000. And worse, in 2000 when I was a kid there were still WWII veterans who were active scoutmasters or deacons or worked actively, I interacted with them as vigorous active guys; in 2024 they are mostly just pushed around senior living centers in wheelchairs. The family stories I pass down to my kids about WWII will be no more meaningful or inherently accurate to them than stories about the Civil War were to me.

Given these facts, it seems unwise to hinge an entire societal worldview on the Holocaust's exact details, or occurrence at all.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 20hr ago

BJJ Thoughts

— I’m coming to the unfortunate conclusion that I have a punchable face. I keep getting bruises. Sunday I had a good roll, but after I got home my wife looks at me and tells me I have a black eye. I think I caught either an elbow or an ankle to the face when passing someone’s guard, but whatever it was I barely noticed it in the moment so I’m not sure when it happened exactly. But this is the second time I’ve gotten a visible facial injury, and everyone was roasting me about it. I must just have one of those faces, I do kind of look like the bad guy in a romantic comedy who the female lead inevitably leaves for a local townie lumberjack with a heart of gold or something. I feel vaguely ridiculous walking around day to day with a shiner, though I’m glad I got into the gym again so I could show it off.

— The week before the 4th of July I was really down on my BJJ practice. A new guy showed up, L, a big strong black kid. We drilled together and he really didn’t seem to know anything about BJJ technique, so I went into the open mat portion of the class to roll with him feeling pretty good about it. Which meant I was quite surprised when he immediately fired off a beautiful, explosive single leg and slammed me, drove a shoulder into my jaw, and tried a series of clumsy guard passes and subs. I was able to get back to guard, and ultimately take his back as time ran out, but I was getting beat on pretty good most of the round before that, my jaw hurt eating after. And I got kind of down about it, feeling like, man it’s been seven months, and I’m still not really beating anyone who either knows a little and is bigger than me or anyone who knows more than me, I’m not making any progress, maybe it’s time to wind this experiment down, maybe jiu jitsu just isn’t for me. I wasn’t thinking of rage quitting, but maybe stepping back, fading out of it, prioritizing other things…then we had an open mat the morning of July 4th, and it went the complete opposite way. It was around two hours straight of rolling, and I got stomped by the upper belts as usual, but I finally got exactly what I was looking for. I rolled with a guy who had been going for a lot longer than I have, and who had typically beat up on me, and I got the takedown, landed in half guard and started working on a knee slice, he shoved his knee in to block me, and without thinking about it I wrapped his leg dropped back into a straight ankle lock and tapped him. One of the few times I’ve hit a leg lock successfully (more below). We restarted the round and I passed his guard and stayed in mount until the bell. Then I rolled with L again, and this time I was ready for him, he hit a single leg immediately and while he got me to the ground I caught him in half guard which I knew he wouldn’t penetrate easily, I hipped out and got him into closed guard, got him into a shoulder crunch sweep, and popped right to mount, it was the best sweep I’ve ever hit, his strength wasn’t as useful once I was in mount. Suddenly, I’m feeling good about BJJ, I’m excited to go into practice every day, I’m thinking about how to fill the holes in my game to keep progressing. I tell these anecdotes just because it’s amazing to me how I can swing so far in my assessment of my abilities in the course of just a few days. One loss and I'm sure I suck so bad I should think about quitting, one success over expectations and I'm loving it. So much has to do with the expectations: when I think I'm gonna lose I don't mind too much, but when I think I should win losing hurts. I should probably work on moving past that.

— In terms of moving forward with BJJ, I do feel like I’m finally approaching something like a style. When I first started, my strategy was nonexistent, entirely reactive, trying to survive what my opponent was trying to do, stalling and hoping he made a mistake, I got submissions or sweeps when I got lucky, and frequently I found myself in positions for which I had no answers at all and either flailed aimlessly or just tried to lose slowly. Now, I don’t necessarily win a lot, but in the vast majority of positions I do know what to work on, and have a move or two to attempt to hit. Which means I’m no longer just passively trying to survive and avoid my opponent’s efforts, I’m at least forcing them to react and defend, I’m not totally surrendering initiative. I have a few moves from open guard, from closed guard, from half guard, from side control, from mount. I still badly need to improve my game from back control in either direction, and work harder on sealing submissions up. But I think the biggest thing I need to work on now is seizing control of my own training and education. I am, by nature, a teacher’s pet and a rule follower. So I come into each class and I pay attention to each move that each coach teaches and try my best to follow instructions. Typically each coach tries to teach 2-3 moves around a theme or a position, and pretty often (depending on the day and the coach) there’s one or more moves that I look at and immediately go “I’m never gonna do that.” Either because the move involves too many too intricate dance steps, which I know I’m not going to execute; because it involves things I can’t do (front rolls into kimuras and chokes never work for me) or won’t do (throat posting/rape chokes, which I don't do because I have to think too hard about modulating pressure on my opponent to not hurt him during sparring, and that means I can't execute it live because I never practice it right); or because I already have a move I like better there. So if we’re working on three or four moves in a day, it’s often that I like one and two, but three and four I know right away don’t fit me. I think I need to work on being more willing to give up on moves that don’t fit how I roll quickly, and instead talk to my partner and use that time to drill the simpler moves that I might actually use day to day.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 1d ago

I'm not sure in this context one is allowed to just say "thing is really bad" and not expect a conversation to ensue about deeper consequences of the policy decisions favored by such attitudes.

Certainly if you said stuff like "Not saying anything about BLM but wasn't (current year death of black person) terrible?" Or "Isn't what's happening to children in Gaza/Ukraine/Africa bad?" Or "It must be really sad being trans" in a post it would meet with much harsher critique.

I get your point, but "admit easily and feel empathy to all the supporting pathos arguments THEN argue about the policy after you've admitted it" is a bad strategy.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 1d ago

Those daycares exist all over the place. They're called Scout camps, of which there are hundreds; rock climbing gyms of which there are nearly one thousand and martial arts gyms of which there are over 40,000 most of which run various kids programs and make their money that way; more than one million kids play tackle football, mostly boys, while more than a million girls compete in horseback riding.

Everyone knows there are risks in those activities, yet place their kids in them anyway. Everyone who participated in them knows someone maimed or killed. But they're wildly popular.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2d ago

Sure, I think of myself as a fairly honest person. But in my life I have shoplifted, perhaps three or four times, by accident or out of pure cussedness. Certainly if the owners of the store maintain a policy to trust people similarly situated to me, they will suffer additional losses over time compared to what they would if they sought a "zero shoplifting" policy. But they will probably lose more business than it's worth.

We aren't arguing that shoplifting isn't bad. We're arguing that some risk of shoplifting is better than no risk of shoplifting, because in order to achieve zero shoplifting, the convenience store must undermine it's own raison d'etre: convenience. Hence the optimal amount of shoplifting for a convenience store isn't zero. More shoplifting isn't better than less shoplifting, but as the amount asymptotically approaches zero there's a point where the security procedures become too much, where the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

We see this all around us. Self checkout leads to massively increased losses, but not enough to balance avoiding paying a cashier. EZ Pass and toll by plate on highways leads to significant lost revenue compared to toll booths, but reduced costs and increased traffic flow make it worth it. If I put on a pink polo shirt and a white baseball cap with a finance logo on it and throw my golf clubs in my truck and drive to a nice country club and walk out and start hitting balls on the range, no one will stop me, because staff can't constantly be harassing members and it's not worth the risk.

The optimal point isn't zero.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

"We need scammers to get vigorous economic development" is such a weirdly cargo cult reading of that story.

I frequently stop at a local convenience store, and buy an Arizona diet iced green tea, which costs $1. The store is tiny, normally there is only the owner or his wife present, and when I walk in they're frequently making a sandwich at the counter, stocking something, etc. When they're somewhere else I wave the tea at them and the dollar bill, tell them I'll leave it by the register, and leave.

Now I could definitely steal the tea once, maybe twice. I could probably steal a candy bar or something a few times.

But I would definitely go there less if buying the tea took me three minutes longer.

Which would probably also reduce my purchase of higher profit items like Zyns and hoagies and ice cream at the store.

The way you get a high trust society is because when people trust each other, there's so little friction in economic transactions that you become so rich that the odd scam can be ignored, societally, without serious consequences.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3d ago

Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.

Ok, cool, but what policy do we implement to fix it? Because there are very much people out there trying to use this tragedy to implement a variety of policies. It's amazing how many anti-gubmint conservatives turn into nanny state liberals when a natural disaster occurs. Which is why it's important not to get too caught up in tragedies, it quickly becomes a con designed to get you to buy into an agenda.

I'm sure the crash was awful for your daughter and you both, but I'm having trouble parsing how you told the story. Are you taking an excessive parental responsibility when you say that you "forgot" to teach her about the brakes? Because it's just hard for me to imagine not going over the brakes before you even get on the bike in a "parts of the bike" kind of way, or a curious kid just asking what x does. I'm kind of assuming you did tell her about the brakes, but didn't drill using them enough that she remembered how to use the brakes quickly under pressure.

But regardless, what policy could prevent such a bike accident? Kids can't ride bikes! Parents can't teach their kids to ride bikes, they have to be enrolled in a Licensed Bicycle School! Kids can only ride bikes with complex and expensive Automatic Emergency Braking systems! The latter two are of course equivalent to "poor/disinterested kids can't ride bikes."

So sure, hug your kid. But keep your priorities straight.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3d ago

Cheap bike is fine for rolling around the neighborhood. Like I said l, I do think there is a pace for them. The short version is good metallurgy is expensive. The sub $500 "mountain" bikes from Walmart come with a warning not to ride them on unpaved surfaces. Making a mountain bike where it's light enough to be rideable but tough enough where you don't taco a wheel is surprisingly difficult. On the road you'll feel every Watt a cheap bikes cheap bearings rob from you, but for "city" rather than "road" riding it matters less.

Yeah, we'll see. I don't think it's exactly to my taste anyway, someone just gave it to me, so I guess if I find I enjoy the activity I'll start looking around for something better. Like a lot of people, I really try to avoid spending any money on hobbies until I'm pretty sure I'm committed. I wore secondhand climbing shoes through 5.10a, and I'm steadfastly holding out on buying rashguards for BJJ. I don't want to buy a bike and have it sit in my garage taking up space.

Because cycling is only semi-weight bearing and has no or little exentric you generate less strain per unit power/cardio zone. Stimulus to fatigue is still good, but raw stimulus is lower. So for arobic fitness you might need to put in 50% more time than running for the same cardio benefit. For example, for the same VO2 max increase from x hours of preceved zone 2 work. If you have a good bike fit it will still be easier on the knees though.

That makes sense. I guess I never thought about because the novelty of the stimulus balanced it out for me whenever I cycle, and I when I see cyclists they are extremely fit, so I never thought about it being "easier" relatively speaking on a per minute basis.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 6d ago

In what way was Hamas' action incompetent or harmful for Iran?

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 6d ago

Iran would never give the Arabs they sponsor that kind of independent power.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 6d ago

White people used to rule the world with an iron fist, we roamed the seas and dominated everything we saw. Then our culture changed over time, and despite our very similar genetics to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, we have... the problems we have now.

Some white people roamed the seas and conquered, but most stayed home. Part of culture/context/circumstance isn't how talent is developed, it's also what talents are brought to the surface and become visible.

Consider a toy example: Puerto Rican baseball players

Until 1989, Puerto Rico was treated as a Latin American nation by Major League Baseball, teams signed players at 16 for cash (and typically they had under the table agreements with trainers before the players came of age). Young prospects in Latin American countries can start earning money at a young age, often getting support from trainers before turning 16 if they showed promise. This has lead to Caribbean countries producing disproportionate talent relative to their population, because kids are incentivized to focus on baseball from a young age.

By contrast, in the United States, players can't be signed for cash, they can only be drafted after graduating high school (or attending college) at 18. Players in the draft (historically) got less money than international players, and they got it at a later age.

After the change, Puerto Rico produced fewer MLB players, and according to some reports a lot of athletic poor kids switched to soccer, where they could be signed at a younger age.

Let's take this as a toy model. Assume that 100%, or near enough, kids will pursue the dominant sport. Soccer and Baseball are different enough that there's probably almost no crossover between athletes who could do either at a professional level, genetically they're going to be two distinct groups. Assume for our toy model that 2% of Puerto Rican kids have the freakish foot-dexterity and cardio to play Soccer professionally; and a separate 5% of Puerto Rican kids have the tremendous eyesight and hand-eye coordination to play Major League Baseball.

Under one MLB regime, Puerto Rico will produce MLB stars. Under a different regime, it will produce soccer stars. The 2% that are genetically built for soccer will be merely good athletes if they pursue baseball, and the 5% that are genetically suited for baseball will be merely good athletes if they pursue soccer. Puerto Rico's overall athleticism hasn't changed, the genetics haven't changed, but what aspects are highlighted have changed.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 6d ago

Video game ass logic.

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