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
9hr ago
Just finished the Odyssey. This read, I thought a lot about connections to other epics, like Milton or the Ramayana. What do the differences tell us about the cultures that produced them?
I picked up Gaiman's Sandman series. I'm on to volume 4 now. It might be that I'm not used to horror or comics or horror comics, but the first two volumes (A Doll's House and the process of getting the tools back) struck me as witchy and atmospheric, but pretty uninteresting plot wise. On the other hand, the self-contained stories in Dream Country like The Dream of One Thousand Cats were great. Though, given recent news, having the author in Dream Country repeatedly rape his imprisoned muse for story ideas is a liiiitle...well...you know...
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Total disasterpiece for the Lions last night. The motor city kitties never felt like the favorites, they were pressing all game. Washington played fast and loose, and won the game comfortably. Which annoyed me personally, because I was rooting for the Lions, and because I was very tired and planning to go to bed as soon as the Lions put the game away...which they never did. The Lions will hopefully be back next year with better health and better luck, but this was the best Detroit Lions season in 40 years, and sometimes the moment passes. It's elegaic. The sadness for me is muted by the fact that this is the outcome that was best for my Eagles.
Jayden Daniels is going to get the opportunity to be the first rookie QB to ever lead his team to the Super Bowl, playing away against the winner of Eagles-Rams today. My Philadelphia Eagles are touchdown favorites, but we saw how much that meant last night. They're calling for 8 inches of snow during the game, which should favor the Eagles and their road-grading offensive line and strong run game over a precision Matthew Stafford passing attack and speed rushing line from the Rams; but it also makes for unpredictable outcomes which the underdog prefers. The stakes for this game just went up: rather than a chance-at-a-chance-at-a-chance, the winner will be strong favorites against Washington at home. Hoping the Eagles don't get caught looking ahead, and play a disciplined football game today. There's no reason the Rams should beat the Eagles unless you think Nakobe Dean (who to be fair was having a breakout season) was the key to the entire Eagles D. But the Eagles have always been capable of beating themselves.
Elsewhere, the Chiefs handled the Texans fairly comfortably, in a game marred by unfortunate officiating. I wouldn't expect that the game would have gone any differently without a few 15 yard penalties here or there, but it sucks that this is the conversation after that game. I'd like to see the RTP calls become reviewable. The talmudic quality of NFL rules fascinates me, and it's not going anywhere any time soon.
Bills-Ravens was always going to be the main event of the weekend, and there's no way I'm missing it. Rooting for the Bills, as all right thinking people outside Maryland should.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It's an interesting field this year. Good chance that the only real game is in Buffalo, the others being pretty low stakes by playoff standards and likely to be less competitive. In my mind the tiers of teams in terms of pressure are:
Playing With House Money: Washington, Texans, Chiefs, Rams. All four teams here are, for different reasons, already satisfied with their team outcomes and have nothing to prove. Washington has made it far behind a OROY QB in Daniels, and will have the opportunity to add talent and beat out a cursed Eagles team (no consecutive NFCE winners since Andy Reid) and a suddenly in transition Cowboys squad (Deion Sanders taking over the Cowboys would be hilarious and I've no doubt it would end horribly) for the division. The Texans faced a lot of skill-player injuries, but their win over the Chargers was proof of concept for their defense and offense. Both teams figure to be better next year. The Chiefs, meanwhile, have nothing to show to anyone, they're under no pressure here. Kelce may move on after this year, but the team has weathered so many skill player losses already that it's hard not to think they'll handle this one. Win or lose, they'll be back next year. The Rams are the opposite: they were supposed to be in the wilderness with an aging core after selling out for the Super Bowl win a few years back, and it looks like the band had one more show in them. It's understood that Stafford is moving on, but it's amazing he's still here, nobody's job or legacy is on the line this weekend.
Perpetual Bridesmaids: Ravens, Bills, Eagles. All these teams have their QBs signed (one of these things is not like the others!), have made the playoffs with most of the same cast and crew in prior years, and will have most of the same core again next year and possibly the year after that. But none have won the Super Bowl with the current core, and only the Eagles have made it, getting filleted by Patty Mahomes in the big game instead of cockblocked from getting there at all. All three teams will see some sniping about ability to get all the way if they don't hoist a Lombardi, but all three had good seasons and will return most of the same team next year. They face a lot more pressure than the last tier, but not nearly as much as the one team saying
This is Our Year: the Detroit Lions. The Motor City Kitties of Football have more urgency than any other team on this list. The Lions are coming off decades of futility, and their team is going to change drastically next year, with one or both of their coordinators likely to take head coaching jobs elsewhere, and the roster set for turnover. They might never get another chance like this, with the one seed and a tight knit team ready to run through a wall to win.
So as a result, looking at the three predicted blowouts, I think the most likely upset is the Commies over the Lions. The Commies are playing loose and easy, and they've shown no fear in deep water with multiple huge comeback wins. The Lions meanwhile have the pressure hanging over them that if they don't win this game the season is a failure. Jayden Daniels leading a comeback drive to win the game against this battered Lions offense will be a threat unless the Lions put the Commies away. I"m still betting on, and rooting for, the Lions, but I think they're the most likely to fall. The Chiefs just don't seem likely to lose to a team they just beat, while there is no analytical reason beyond variance and losing Nakobe Dean that the Rams will beat the Eagles.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I've always felt like our George was the kind of guy who genuinely looks good in a hat.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I bask in your praise, but I'm probably just the guy who uses this place as an accountability journal. I'm not sure anyone reads my workout posts, making them helps me stay on track for goals I've claimed I'm going to meet.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Why doesn't it apply to doing the task for which he was hired? Certainly, in a wage dispute, Alice's ability to hold out longer is equally if not moreso present.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Sure, assume that sex is the worst thing in the world that any employer will ask you to do, and forbid any employee to consent to it for various moral reasons. I get all that. It doesn't change the factual question of consent and agency. "You're not allowed to consent to that" is different from "you didn't consent to that."
A good comparison would be minors. We traditionally don't allow minors to consent to sex, or to sign contracts to which they will be bound, outside of certain exceptions. We feel that minors don't have the power to consent to those things. I'm trying to get a proper explanation of women's power of consent in an employment context.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I've been attending BJJ for about a month now, with a gap around the holidays for of in-laws followed by a gap for illness. I attend between three and four classes a week. I'd like to push closer to five, but work obligations get in the way, along with injury avoidance. When I do back to back days especially a night class followed by a morning class from Friday to Saturday, I tend to back off on rolling after a couple of rounds. My buddy who I started with has already had to skip two or three separate weeks with different injuries he picked up, though I think it's worse for him because he did enough martial arts back in high school to have some idea what he's doing, so his mind is telling his body to do things his body isn't ready for.
Fitness wise, it's been a tremendously good decision for me. The workout I get out of rolling is so completely different than what I was doing before, that I really see the value. Some of that is probably just a matter of new movement patterns and angles, but it's also cardio in a way I've historically been bad at forcing myself to do. Hopefully, it will also provide the motivation to do more cardio at home, because I clearly need to improve my conditioning to survive rolling longer, especially as I'm relying on strength to escape, pretty constantly. The coordination and proprioception aspects are also weaknesses of mine, and I hope to see improvement over time.
The relationship of strength to technique in BJJ has been interesting. The lore of BJJ has always been that strength doesn't matter, size doesn't matter, with enough technique experience and intelligence will always win out. This is often true, I've been choked out by guys I outweighed by a lot. But, the value of strength is also immediately apparent to me. While obviously I do suck, I would suck a lot worse if I were weak on top of everything else, I watch other newbies suffer even getting through the warmups, I'm grateful to my past self for spending so much time lifting/climbing/rowing. My belief has been reinforced that strength is the master category, and will improve your experience in any activity.
My biggest concerns to progress at this point beyond conditioning and injury avoidance are related to metrics and tracking. I miss the feedback of the weightroom, numbers go up good. I've always tended towards something like the Bulgarian Lite system, and it has kept me motivated over the years. In BJJ at this point, it's hard to figure out what a good day looks like for me, because I'm getting my ass handed to me over and over. My coaches, who are great guys but perhaps not the most introspective, would with certainty reply to this question with something like "Just keep coming you'll get better." Which is probably true, and the fact that this is a mental problem for me at all is probably the reason I never made it as an athlete, I know I'm the one who is wrong here. At one point a couple weeks back, when I was getting a little down about just getting worked in every roll, I wrote in my notebook the goal of landing one submission by the end of January, and that I would wait until then to reassess. Funnily enough, the next day I went to class and managed to surprise a guy by hitting a throw, taking his back, and sinking the RNC. With that hurdle overcome (my k/d isn't zero!), looking forward I need to figure out what's next. After yesterday's class, I wrote down in my lifting notebook a quick count of submissions I hit cleanly, clean sweeps, and successful guard passes. The fact that I could write that down more or less from memory after ten rounds should tell you a lot about how I was doing, I was mostly in survival mode trying to get to half guard from side control or mount. I'll see if this is a practical way to track progress, or if it at least salves my feelings of inadequacy long enough to get to a point where I'm making real progress.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I mean I'm on great terms with most exes, but few of them would hold up under motivated cross examination by a reporter trying to get a story and loaded for bear.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I don't think there exists a human being who will come out clean in a motivated hit piece by an ex lover. We have no evidence except the word of aggrieved ex lovers that any of this happened.
Not that I have any opinion whether it did or didn't, but no one else does either.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
If you're not willing to bite that bullet, you're not really in favor of traditional marriage.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
That's a different question than, is such a deal consensual.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
A common Western one is that because husband and wife are "one flesh," and one cannot commit an offense against oneself, many interpersonal crimes are impossible between man and wife.
Sure, and we also have a long tradition in Western culture of mocking and denigrating wife beaters. Even where it was not legally prosecuted, it was understood as a bad thing to do (too much of).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
De gustibus non est dispuntandum. I'm sure I could find some people who would sooner have kinky sex with me than help me put up my Christmas lights. Actually, I live with one. b'dum'tish.
But the perceived or actual unpleasantness of any given task isn't for you or I to opine on. It is for people making the deal to decide whether they want to accept the deal or reject it. Consent is the question of whether they validly agreed to the deal or not, not whether it was a good deal or a bad deal, or even whether they should be legally allowed to make such a deal. My question is and remains: why is sex the one part of the deal for which women/employees apparently lose all ability to utilize their agency and make logical cost-benefit analyses? If it isn't the only part of the deal for which women/employees lose all agency, than which contracts are and aren't they allowed to sign and forced to abide by?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
"What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible.
Vanishingly few cultures genuinely held that husbands had unlimited physical dominion over their spouse, with no concept of consent possible. Some saw no place for the law in such a situation, but most (hedging here: for which we have sufficient written evidence to have some idea what people thought about that kind of thing) still recognized some social opprobrium against wife beaters. If it's wrong to beat your wife too violently, then it follows that there is at least a concept of it being wrong to rapeit is wrong to rape your wife, as the path from "no" to "rape" runs through "physical violence."
Most places at most times have figured that a man's wife owed him sex. Fewer would have considered it acceptable for him to beat the shit out of her until she agreed.
Of course, the level of agency expected of women at the time was far higher than modern standards. Women were expected to actually experience violence, not merely the threat of it, before rape could be charged.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Differences come back around at very close distances within urban areas. Around me ten miles is practically a neighbor. The fifteen miles from Brooklyn to Yankees Stadium is a trek, no matter how you do it.
A big part of this data is captured by "more people live in cities than is popularly imagined by middle class Americans."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Speak for yourself.
But for that matter, I think the impact of steroids is often overstated. Bezos undoubtedly had to go into the gym to build that muscle. Was it easier than it would have been without steroids? Sure. But he did put in work to get a body like that. Probably more work than half the people bitching about his steroid use have put in.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Probably "hours of travel" to one's mother is a better metric, as the functional difference between living in LA and living in Chicago for me would be an extra two hours spent on the plane, whereas the difference between Trenton and Montauk is larger than the mileage would indicate. Like, the difference between Philly and Richmond is pretty linear to distance, but the difference between Richmond and Chicago and LA are unmoored from it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Does this apply to all aspects of employment contracts, or only to sexual favors? Is Bob bound by anything in his employment contract, or can he break it as he sees fit because he is being held hostage by reality?
Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing.
I feel like this is a very urban-corporate-PMC attitude towards employment, where many small business owners take more of an attitude of "I'm paying you for eight hours of your time, during that time you do what I tell you to do." If that means helping with putting up Christmas lights at the owner's house, that's your job description today. Obviously in a corporate setting a middle manager having personal tasks done by his underlings is bad, because he is embezzling. But there's no law against a restaurant owner asking some of his waiters to help him move his mother in law to a new apartment on the clock. But there's that word again, ask. This isn't ancient Rome, an employee can always exercise agency by saying no, and if his employer no longer wishes to employ him he can be fired, and if the employer operates his business in such a way that employees don't stick around then he'll have to close his business or reassess his ruleset.
Where I agree it would be genuinely bad would be a bait and switch, where the employee accepts the employment on the promise of the opportunity to do certain work and develop certain skills and is instead given low level work. The magazine intern who gets stuck getting coffee and is never given the opportunity to work on articles, etc.
In all these cases, I expect the employee to advocate for themselves. If they don't want to do something, it is incumbent on the employee to say no to it, and to threaten to quit if forced. If that makes me an AnCap then so be it.
I don't particularly think that fucking your employees is good, but I do think that trying to make it into a consent violation is confusing and dumb. It's not a consent violation, otherwise women are incapable of consent and agency which is obviously a repugnant conclusion to most people making the argument against Gaiman in the New Yorker, it's a different category of thing.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I appreciate the in depth response, and confess that I have little to add to a conversation about bona fide prostitution, I have no experience with it, to the point where it's something I honestly have trouble grokking that it exists.
But I'm going to persist: if a woman lacks agency to say no to sex with her boss because saying no might cost her the job, how does she have agency to say no to being asked to walk his dog, or to taking a cut in pay, on threat of losing her job? They haven't had sex yet, oxytocin hasn't come into play. The intimacy of sex isn't implicated yet.
Now if you wanted to argue at a more granular level that such and such acts can't be done because of the oxytocin and the pressure, that would make sense.
Or if we're talking about high leverage deals and job opportunities, common in show business. That I can see the logic.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
What deals with her employer is she allowed to consent to, in your view? Or, why is sex special? Why can she consent to any terms of employment at all?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
It’s either an unconditional capitulation followed by military occupation to prevent rearming
I don't even think that offer is on the table.
Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.
This is such an odd meme online. The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth. I recall seeing a nice little chart passed around from a study "Proving" that liberal whites are unique compared to other ethnic groups in America...without even trying to break down those ethnic groups by politics.
Moore is just another Charlie Manson type racist, who assumes that he is different from everyone else and special and will be spared in Helter Skelter. He can't defeat the Republicans he hates himself, but he can enlist the blacks and the women to do it for him, and at the end of the process the grateful blacks and women will turn to Moore for leadership.
Well, that was some football. Turns out, both theories of snow-game football were correct: the snow made the passing game difficult, and the snow increased variance; the benefit going to running teams and underdogs.
In Philadelphia, heavy snow that we're still digging out of this morning, and we saw the Eagles run for close to 300 yards and three long explosive touchdowns. Unfortunately, for drops and slips and sacks, the passing game never got going, with Jalen Hurts passing for 128 yards but losing 66 to sacks. An apparent knee sprain hobbled him for parts of the game, and when I've had back or knee stability injuries I know that slipping on snow/ice makes your whole body go haywire so I can't imagine being out there playing agile football; but he gutted it out, and most importantly avoided turning the ball over once. If the Rams had just managed to get a safety to stop those 40+ yard touchdown runs after 30 yards, the Rams win this game. But then if the Eagles had made two snow-slipping PATs, they win the game comfortably and there's not much to talk about. Both teams had drops and screwups that, if you reverse them, change the oucome of the game, it was a sloppy snowgame. So, six of one, half a dozen of the other. The Rams played well, with Jared Verse backing up his trash talk about Eagles fans, but ultimately a couple lost fumbles probably makes the difference in the game. This might be the Rams' swan song with Stafford, and if so it's a damn good run and they should be proud of it.
In Buffalo, Josh Allen won with a very similar formula to Jalen Hurts: throw for about 120 yards, run well, don't turn the ball over, score 28 points at home and count on your defense to get a last minute stop to win the game. The sacks are the difference between Jalen Hurts being criticized as a backup-tier QB, and Josh Allen being praised as a clutch winner who got it done. Which, hey, the sacks happened, including a real bad safety that could have cost the game. But I don't remember ever seeing the term "Net Passing Yards" used a lot by football writers over "Passing Yards" until writers discovered it could be used as a way to criticize Jalen Hurts, and I think a lot of readers don't notice the sleight of hand. Allen is going to get the opportunity to duel Mahomes. Over/Under on the number of plays that end in star QBs lobbying the refs?
Lamar Jackson probably won his third MVP this year, but this loss will define his season, despite it ultimately coming down to drops in single degree weather away in Buffalo. Brutal sport. There's no reason the Ravens shouldn't just run the team back as much as they can, they probably win if Flowers is healthy.
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