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
11hr ago
I believe the Hitler Youth attended several international scouting events at the time.
But obviously, we should be bringing back Reagan Youth.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13hr ago
Can anyone explain the appeal of the book/play/film Wicked to me? I really, really don't get it. At all. What's the appeal of this plotline? Everything people say it is about, I don't see. I feel like there's zero work put into explaining why characters do what they do, or why I'm supposed to care about them. I don't identify at all with any of the characters.
I'm not inherently opposed to revisionist versions of stories, or to musicals. I can get caught up in either or both. But I just don't get Wicked. Can anyone help me out here?
((Also, Ariana Grande should not be allowed on screen. That might not be helping.))
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13hr ago
-- Golf. I haven't technically "quit" golf, I still have the clubs and if an opportunity comes up to play I take it, but I've pretty much stopped practicing or thinking I'm going to get much better at it. It's not a bad way to spend a few hours, but I just can't seem to get any good at it. I'm a consistently inconsistent 100.
-- Stand up paddleboarding. I bought a nice inflatable, and it is nice that I can drive it somewhere and go out on the water better than trying to haul a hard sided kayak, but I only use it like once a year. It seemed neat, but ultimately it's kind of a janky way to get around, and only works well in perfect conditions.
-- Realistically, guns. I have a bunch of them, I don't shoot as much as I should. I have a nice target pistol, I have a nice bull barrel .22, both gifts from a champion target shooter friend. I'm embarrassed of my skill level relative to my equipment. And the worst part is, I can shoot in my parents backyard.
-- Every two years or so, I think that I need to actually learn spanish or french. I'm an indictment of the American language education: I took foreign languages in school from ages 10-22, and never learned more than the rudiments of anything. And every few years, I decide I need to fix that. I never make it. Books, duolingo, video courses. Just never happens for me.
-- Outdoor Rock climbing. I got into climbing in the gym, and I bought all the outdoor stuff because that's the cool version. Turns out, I hate spending all damn day fucking around to do two climbs and fail on a third. I'm a gym bunny. I'll probably end up with the same feeling about BJJ tournaments if I ever actually enter one.
-- Video games. Everyone talks about how much they enjoy video games, but I haven't really played one since WoW WotLK. Periodically I will download a well reviewed game, but they never stick, I just can't get stuck in on anything for years now. It's weird because all the autists I hang out with tell me how they all love these things, and I just can't seem to figure them out. At least I haven't been dumb enough to buy a console.
-- It's not exactly something I've started and quit, so much as something I look into every year and then don't start, but every season I look up local Autocross races and what I need to do to enter. Never do it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
Which is why I'm saying that it would behoove BSA to create a harder core program within the umbrella.
When I came out of cub scouts, I could have joined any of about four or five equidistant troops in my area. We actually visited them all as part of our Arrow of Light process. The BSA could have a specific program or designation for troops that are less inclusive and more intensive. I don't think it will help the boy scouts program in general to try to become more exclusive, but I think there's room within the program to have a more aggressive program under their aegis.
Don't make it a knockoff, make it a program within the same org. Join troop 80 over at the Lutheran Church and you have the current Boy Scouts experience with one meeting per week and one camping trip or 8-10 mile hike every month; join troop 88 over at the Unitarian Church and you get one meeting per week, one physical training session per week, and a 15-20 mile backpacking trip every month, but you have to pass a fitness test to join. That kind of thing. Similar to how local baseball leagues have both the regular anybody who wants to join league, and the tryout travel league.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
There seems to be a lot of conflation of cub scouts with boy scouts in this thread. The appropriate leadership and activities for six year olds and for seventeen year olds is an unbridgeable gap.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
One of the ideas that I had in mind, that I never got the opportunity to do because orienteering wasn't on the curriculum until Webelos was to bury caches of water balloons and water guns in our main wooded park, and then divide the scouts into teams. Give each team a map, and then let them loose to secure weapons and munitions and then wage war against each other.
I remember, I must have been seventeen or so because all the young Indian kids had joined our troop already, we did a civil war reenactment weekend. Every troop was assigned "randomly" to either the Union or the Confederacy with appropriately colored T shirts (someone had the brains to make sure the majority black troops were mostly like us in the Confederacy), and the end of the day was a water balloon fight between the two sides. As I recall, we won the battle by giving everyone only two water balloons and holding the rest in reserve along with a couple troops, so we were able to draw them in and then finish them off, while the Union wasted all their ammo early driving off our initial attack. Our final charge yelling "FOR SLAVERY" was a ton of fun.
I wonder if they still do things like that.
The Chinese finger trap of post-modernity: when rebellion is the teaching of the mainstream authorities, submission is the radical act of rebellion. But submission to whom?
The obvious answer is religion and a more ethereal concept of the Nation.
Though England isn't exactly doing all that hot these days anyway, I see the wisdom in the philosophical conceit of Hart
The ideal king would rather be like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the most important piece.
Powell said specifically that a Scout was loyal to his King. This captures the concept of submission and nationalism, without making explicit religious or political commitments to actual controversies. A Scout isn't a Tory or a Whig or a Liberal, necessarily, a Scout is Loyal to his King and Country, a more ephemeral concept of the nation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
Sure, his being a nut found expression through shooting the National Guard, but the difference is that because he's brown it's assumed to be a trait of his racial identity and/or part of an organized plot.
Compare the Cybertruck bombing, which was similar in involving a US Special Forces soldier who served overseas who drove a long distance to launch a nutty but (in that case explicitly) politically motivated protest attack, involved a white guy so nobody said "THIS IS A NATIONAL CRISIS WE NEED TO INVESTIGATE EVERY SPECIAL FORCES VETERAN." There's some mumbling about overheated political rhetoric and stochastic terrorism, which nobody really takes seriously. Or, for that matter, much speculation about intelligence connections.
An Afghan is assumed to be some mix of congenitally terroristic, part of some organized group, both necessarily related to his origin.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
Yeah I think if worrying about being earnest and lame is a problem, Scouts (or the military for that matter) are just not going to be for you. It predates boomer cringe by multiple generation, it's Boer War cringe.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
Alternatively: he's a traumatized nutcase and because he's brown the killing is or becomes or must be political.
If he were white we'd just shrug and ultimately say he was nuts.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Fascinating things are going to happen with near dead languages in the age of generative AI. I'm fairly certain I could already choose to have an AI translate the wall street journal every morning into Pennsylvania Dutch. Or AI create music and videos in Pennsylvania Dutch. Once such a choice becomes cost effective, language in media becomes an aesthetic choice.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
How have the martial arts faired over the progressive era in terms of participation and seriousness of effort?
The UFC happened, and all heritage martial arts have either converged on the same core set of practices, or they've retreated completely into dance-moves or esoteric but untested claims of "real" effectiveness. No other trend is even remotely relevant in comparison.
Twenty to thirty years ago, in the average American small city there was a karate gym that taught karate and a taekwondo gym that taught tkd and a judo gym that taught judo and maybe a Kung Fu gym that taught kungfu. Now, if they still think of themselves as fighters, they've all converged on standup built around boxing, and all of them spend effort to teach grappling techniques largely derived from wrestling and BJJ. Or they've gone the other route, removed all pretense of fighting, and converged towards taichi. A lot of the distinctiveness of different arts has been lost to optimization.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I wonder to what extent there is room for RETVRN scouts in the world. There appears to be a mostly moribund Baden-Powell Traditional Scouts thing independent of the BSA. But why not integrate it into the BSA organization as an alternative?
Scouting has long had sub-programs alongside the flagship Boy Scouts. Venture Crews and Sea Scouts have long operated under different rulesets. My mother was in the Venture program in the 1970s.
If there is demand for a return to Scouting's frankly paramilitary roots, then Scouting could develop a troop concept built around a more intensive and classically masculine program. One with real requirements rather than a focus on inclusivity. In areas with numerous troops, like mine, it wouldn't hamstring the mainline Boy Scouts troop to have a Hard Scouts program fifteen minutes away.
Boy scouts have long varied with the troop anyway. Why not formalize it?
What would such a program look like in your mind?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I really would go out of my way to get the chance to roll with a female blackbelt at some point, just so that I could offer first hand experience on this instead of this theoretical opinion situation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Sorry but what in tarnation are you talking about? What point are you trying to make here? I'm totally lost.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
The paradox of BJJ is that it is effective self defense because you can practice it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power, but once you are practicing it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power you are practicing increasingly esoteric techniques and positions to defeat other BJJ practitioners practicing at full speed and competitively.
Sure, you don't want to roll around on concrete, but if you're training grappling you are in all likelihood going to be the one making that choice for your opponent.
The aspects of BJJ that are effective for self defense against an untrained opponent are going to be the wrestling aspects with a couple super basic easy submissions thrown in. Throw a guy who doesn't train in grappling in there and he's going to be drowning. But those aspects aren't really trained as much in class, because in class we're mostly trying to beat up each other. My BJJ game if I had to fight someone untrained would be to look for throws or standing armlocks, or more likely just fall back on straight counterpunches. But in competitive BJJ, my A-game is built around bottom half guard, which I would essentially never find myself in during a fight at the Linc.
Sometimes our coach wants to talk about the "self defense" implications of how to pass somebody's De La Riva guard in a streetfight, and I joke that if I get into a bar fight and some guy tries to throw a De La Riva guard on me, I'm going to stop and say "Whoa, no way, I do jiu jitsu too, where do you train bro? Do you know Dan? Because Dan is like my best friend! Oh shit no way let's get a drink, why are we fighting anyway?"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Black pill on metoo:
Dershowitz faced an extended lawsuit from an Epstein girl supported by his rival Boies.
Boies in turn worked for Weinstein hiring ex mossad to stalk Ronan farrow.
It's all powerful men targeting their rivals all the way down.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I feel like we've worked through several technical explanations for why a recession is due since 2021 and each has come and gone, and what it comes down to is that it's due and everyone knows it. The biblical theory of economics that there are seven fat years and seven lean years is in most cases as good as any. The identity of Mrs O Leary's cow or the Austrian crown prince that sets it off is ultimately unimportant, the line can't go up forever without going down.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
That's a really good way to frame the debate. It's a good scissor statement because the answer seems obvious to me.
That's where I disagree, I don't think the people who come here and then lash out are agentic. I think they are slaves to their own passions, incapable of agency because they can't operate within the rules. What amazes me about this place is the people who get banned and come back and get banned again. They clearly want to be here, but the moment a rule offends their delicate sensibilities they lash out and ruin it for themselves. Over and over.
I don't look at such a person and see a wild stallion who can't be tamed, an electric centaur with the true spirit of freedom in their breast. To me such a person is a slave, lacking in agency, they can't do the things they want to do because they are too chained to their own feelings.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I don't think it's unemployment; unemployment in the late '90s was low, in the early '90s it was high and people were no less cynical. In fact, Office Space was a bit unrealistic when it came out (as I recall noting at the time) because of that; it was a boom time and if you could spell computer (or at least get close) you could get a programming job; nobody at Initech would need to worry about being laid off.
Agreed. Something odd is going on as well, where under Trump financial analysts are talking about "rising unemployment" when unemployment is lower than it literally ever was under Obama. Unemployment has only very rarely been lower than it currently is.
Both Office Space and Dilbert were about tech, and speaking specifically about tech, I think what changed is the rise of the profession. In the early to mid '90s, software was just another white collar job. Then came first the dot-com boom, when people realized you could get stupid rich in software. Then following the dot-com crash, the rise of Google, stock options and much higher salaries in established companies, and a new wave of startups getting people rich. Now software was a prestige job, up there with doctor or lawyer or at least stockbroker. Not the kind of thing associated with the grind. Google, earlier on, made some attempt not to feel like Dilbert's company.
I think this is a big part of this dynamic, and also the dynamic of the American Left as a whole from the Clinton third way era to today. 1990s Gen X anti-establishment thinking was built around rejecting boring mainstream corporate jobs and the evil corporate bosses they served. Enter Google, with its "Don't be Evil" corporate catch phrase, and a thousand start-ups followed the same logic. Infinite PTO, beer carts on Friday, ping pong tables and nap rooms! The tech companies were just as against the soul-sucking corporate bullshit of Halliburton or GE as you were! Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, et al were understood as left-wing Obama-voting humanistic champions against the traditional corporate world.
The development of those tech companies into new kinds of corporate villains, and the failure of the Obama administration to deliver on much of anything beyond reasonably competent middle-of-the-road governance, lead significant portions of the young to turn a lot more radical. Whether it's pseudo-marxist anti corporatism or hard-right tradcath fascist anti-capitalism, the common factor is the disillusionment of realizing that new hip tech companies weren't going to fix everything. No capitalist corporation is going to fix everything.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Qanon was very real in my area. Local town square had weird little protests for a few months with people waving qanon slogans.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.
And it's indicative of something that while law firms bent the knee and universities got on their knees earlier in the year when the accusations were around anti-semitism, we're still seeing issues here.
This is important data about the Vibe Shift. Is the belief that MAGA or MAGA-adjacent leaders will have enough power to punish in the future weaker than expected? Is there an expectation that Dems will be back in office and will punish MAGA prosecutors?
Something I'm curious about is the dynamic within state level governments relative to federal for employees. Historically, AUSA is way better than local ADA or state AG's office. But right now, I'm aware of a lot of good federal lawyers looking for state level work because the federal government is unstable.
The very randomness of the Trump approach is the most effective way to rebalance the government away from the feds and towards the states.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
In our parish adult converts get first communion at Easter, education program starts in fall but you're smarter than the average bear so if you get in touch now you could probably Speedrun it by March.
You'll feel much more connected when you receive the sacraments.
The fitness test is more or less the point here. In current rules you can't exclude anyone, which is pretty much the whole point of this hypothetical. Ordinary boy scout troops have to admit weak, fat, uninterested, special needs kids. This obviously limits the outer boundaries of what can be done.
Absolutely, I'm musing here to push the conversation in a new direction, is it something that would be practical to create or not? And if it won't work, then why are we complaining about the direction the boy scouts have gone in?
Alternatively, the more intense scouting path could be a badge track within the boy scouts. If Eagle has been Goodhart'd, the Department of War could collaborate on designing a new set of qualifications that would deliver those results for the military?
I'll note in the way of reminiscence that I'm not entirely speaking out of turn here, I wanted my scout troop to do more outdoor events, so I started going on hikes and camping trips with the other troops my friends were in. There were other scouts who similarly wanted more activities, and the paths for achieving that goal within the scouts were limited. So I do think there exists some subset of boys who are interested in more activities. And the world is full of men who want to mentor younger boys in physically intense activity! Guys love to coach baseball and basketball and jiu jitsu etc.
So I'm questioning if part of the problem is the lack of exclusion. Without exclusionary principles, there's no real urge to progression.
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